Chris Burden--A Daredevil’s New Expressions : Realism Makes His Works Tick . . .

The evening of Nov. 12, 1972, was slightly dank. By 8 o’clock a small crowd had gathered at the Riko Mizuno Gallery at 669 N. La Cienega Blvd. Unlike the usual opening with its dumb plastic wine glasses and bright chatter, this gathering was subdued, a bit tense. Gallery walls were bare and spectators joked uneasily.

They expected something unusual without knowing exactly what that would be. At the moment it appeared to be nothing, because the subject of the event had not appeared. It was Chris Burden, who had already gained a reputation for strange art performance pieces such as sealing himself in a school locker for five days, lying in bed on public display in a gallery for 22 days and--most ominously--having himself shot in the arm.

It began to seem the theme of this evening would simply be “The Time Burden Didn’t Show Up.” Then one spectator remembered seeing something odd on the street as he entered the gallery, something lumpy under a tarp half hidden by a parked car and flanked by a couple of guttering traffic flares. If that lump was a person, he was in a dangerous place, lying near traffic that whizzed by on the boulevard.

Curious guests meandered outside and, sure enough, the lump was somebody. As the assembled aesthetes commented on the plastic values of the lump a police car pulled up and a cop rousted Burden--for indeed it was he--from under his canvas cover.

Burden was stocky and baby-faced in those days, but on this night he appeared pale, puffy and dazed. The police wanted to know what the hell he was up to, but Burden was not much help, only muttering, “I was just doing my piece, officer.”

It began to appear that he was about to be hauled off to the slammer. A spectator, meaning to be helpful, identified himself as an art critic and explained to the officer that Burden saw himself as an artist. The policeman brightened up.

“I get it. The paintings are inside and this was a stunt to attract attention.”

“Not exactly, sir. I think he means it to be understood that what he is doing here is the art.”

The officer glanced around like someone who has just realized he has bumbled into a gang of loonies and escorted Burden into the patrol car. Someone remembered later that the cop mumbled, “This guy isn’t playing with a full deck.”

Burden was later tried in Beverly Hills for causing a false emergency to be reported. Charges were dismissed when a jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Now, nearly 17 years later, Burden is 43, an associate professor at UCLA and the subject of a 20-year survey at Newport Harbor Art Museum (to June 12), organized by curator Paul Schimmel and accompanied by a not-quite-ready catalogue. The locale is symbolically appropriate, because Burden perpetrated his first performances in Orange County.

In form the work has changed quite a lot. Burden does fewer performances and makes more projects with physical substance. A centerpiece of the survey is “A Tale of Two Cities,” a miniature environment of toys built on a huge pile of earth and rocks that depicts two cities bristling with enough armaments to blow each other to kingdom come every day for a month. There is a scale model of our solar system that starts with a hanging plastic ball for the sun and meanders a couple of miles outside the museum. There are collages and mechanical science projects such as a plastic “sled” that floats on rails of forced air, a handmade automobile and a flying kayak. Relics of performance pieces--such as nails that were driven through his palms--stand enshrined with all the charm of a display of Napoleon’s false teeth.

The formal variation in the work does little to clarify its substance. It is work that seems to go out of its way to proclaim it is not art while insisting that it be taken as art.

Early performances allowed for no aesthetic distance. When somebody is fooling around having himself shot, crucified on a Volkswagen, flirting with high-tension wires and threatening to slit somebody’s throat as a video piece, nobody with an ounce of humanity has time to worry about formal values or social commentary.

Burden came in for a lot of negative criticism in the wake of these pieces. Some were concerned and sympathetic, more were derisive, styling him as art’s Evel Knievel. Burden has made collages incorporating some of the articles. One writer accused him of simply following the fashion for performance and conceptual art then being broadcast in avant-garde art magazines. In a written comeback Burden brags that, on the contrary, he tells the magazines what to do, not vice versa. Another writer speculated that there was a masochistic streak in the performances. Burden notes that masochism involves the intent to hurt oneself and that is not his intent, but he doesn’t say what is.

Very often artists don’t know their precise intent as they work. They accept the idea that work is going to include expressive vectors put there unconsciously as part of a creative catharsis. They learn how they come across through reactions to their work as we all do from friends, counselors and the world at large. We learn to modify our behavior to come into line with our truer selves and also to resign ourselves to interpretation and misinterpretation.

It is hard to imagine that Burden or anybody else would purposely set out to expose the repellant degree of megalomania that oozes from this work.

The early use of his own body reeks of self-involution and the quality perpetuates itself in the enshrinement of his “relics” and writings.

Burden’s expression seems to want everything both ways and entirely on its own terms. The terms, however, are never quite defined and when they are, they change. The experience of the work is like a nightmare of being hijacked by a capricious 8-year-old terrorist who alternately insists he is Ghengis Khan and Jesus Christ. You wind up feeling the only real point here is to hold our attention no matter what.

The greatest strength and most puling weakness of this work lies in its realism. It provokes actual gut emotions. Burden shows up photographed in a ski mask and you feel real icy fear. He frames a scrawled note that seems to be from his wife, begging off nailing him to a car and you feel real compassion for her and real worry about the state of his sanity. More than one collage incites the weird dread of knowing there is a skinhead, racist neo-Nazi lurking around the corner. The ability to create such vivid and specific reactions is remarkable, but it leaves no room to sublimate the experience, so you just wind up aggravated at the artist. He may indeed have intended to evoke a more generalized response, but the work is so self-centered you always leap back to the imaginary person of the maker jerking your feelings around in a way that appears sadistic. It may be that at some point it dawned on Burden that this appearance of narcissism was getting in the way of what he was trying to say because the work did change.

One of Burden’s most consistent themes is a fascination with power, sheer, raw elemental physical power. Works such as “A Tale of Two Cities,” “All the Submarines in the United States Navy” and “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb” can be seen as protests against the arms race, but they are expressively neutral, even perverse in the playful way they use toys and models to conjure the monstrous apparatus of modern annihilation. They can as easily be seen as expressions of amoral childish fascination with destruction as vehicles of ethical protest. Turn two 10-year-olds loose in the toy superpower cities and it wouldn’t be long until they were having a fine time playing at blowing each other to smithereens. Well, at least these days Burden leaves us the option of seeing that as a mordant commentary on the maturity of leaders who have the nuclear hot line within--so to speak--arms’ reach.

There are clues to an obsessive preoccupation with power throughout the large but curiously thin show. The thinness may be accounted for by dogged heavy-handedness of execution that numbs the mind as it convinces of primitive intensity. The power-paranoia comes across in works preoccupied with the self and with money. Its purest and most aesthetically gratifying expression comes in works like 1979’s “The Big Wheel,” both as a fact and as a colloquial pun. It is a 3-ton cast-iron flywheel set in motion by a fixed motorcycle, and its whirling is as awesome as an Assyrian god.

No visitor will miss “Samson.” Almost blocking the entrance to the museum, it consists of two huge timbers held in horizontal tension by an oversize jack attached to a big red worm gear. It, in turn, is hooked to a turnstile that visitors crank through to enter the show. Every crank tightens the timbers against the museum walls. In theory you might be the modern Samson who brings down the temple of culture. (Curator Schimmel assures us, somewhat nervously, that it cannot really happen.)

For Burden, it is almost lighthearted.

Remember “The Eve of Destruction?” The song seems almost quaint today, but we’re back to worrying about the theme.

Most of us worry. There are some unnerving souls out there who rather hope we’re on the edge.