‘I Just Want to Make Good Art’

Up a tortuous dirt road, artist Chris Burden’s studio is a gray, industrial warehouse tucked deep into the rolling hills of Topanga Canyon. It’s filled with shelves, boxes and half-constructed art projects. Spread on his worktable is a blueprint of the Tyne River Bridge in Newcastle, England--he’s building a model of it with Erector sets.

Outside the studio, dozens of antique lampposts are strewn in rows with decorative light fixtures neatly piled alongside. He plans to restore the lampposts for use in sculptures.

It’s been decades since Burden blasted his way onto the arts scene and into Orange County art history. In 1971, in a Santa Ana gallery, he had a friend stand 15 feet away and shoot him with a .22-caliber rifle.

He was a graduate art student at UC Irvine when he did “Shoot,” simply because he wanted to experience a gunshot wound. In the next four years, a series of outrageous, and often shocking, pieces followed: Burden was electro-shocked, he lived out of a locker, he was crucified atop a Volkswagen Beetle.

Ultimately, he became one of a few Southern California artists to achieve international acclaim. His scars have healed, and he hasn’t done any performance art in more than 20 years.

“I just try to pursue my interests. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cutting-edge art. I am cutting-edge. It’s a historical fact that I am cutting-edge,” said Burden, 55. “I just want to make good art. I don’t really think about art in terms of whether it’s cutting-edge or not. What is cutting-edge anyway?”

Bronze and brawny, with muscular calves as evidence of his routine hiking, Burden looks rugged in his ranger’s hat, hiking shoes and black shades. He’s a landowner with 65 acres. And he’s an artist who has always viewed his performance pieces as a form of sculpture, he says. These days, he’s only concerned with the quality of his work and not whether it’s avant-garde.

“Being cutting-edge isn’t an issue for me anymore. I just don’t really care about that anymore. Art just has to be good or bad.”