Chris Burden, born in 1946 in Boston, studied at Ponoma College then at the University of California. At that time, he was interested in art and architecture, but also in physics – a term that could be used to describe his work in several of its aspects: physical education, nuclear physics, and applied physics.

Physical Education.

In the early 1970s, Chris Burden effectively became known as an artist through a series of performances that put his own body to the test. Chris Burden crawled nude on a surface covered with crushed glass (Through the Night Softly, 1973), crucified himself on a Volkswagen Beetle (Trans-fixed, 1974) or got shot in the arm – the famous performance Shoot from 1971, which Chris Burden’s work is sometimes reduced to.

Often criticised for sensationalism, this first period of Chris Burden’s work found its justification in a relatively simple phenomenological approach: based on the observation that we are only rarely confronted by extreme situations that nonetheless eventually saturated our imagination via television and cinema, Chris Burden suggests actually experiencing these situations [1]. While often only the most spectacularly violent of Chris Burden’s performances are remembered, we mustn’t forget that he has also tested the limits of his body in performances of endurance: he remained hidden in the false ceiling of a gallery throughout the period of exhibition (White Light / White Head
, 1975), shut himself for several days in a locker (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971) or had himself taped to the wall of a museum during its opening hours (Oh Dracula, 1974). 

Nuclear Physics.

Far from limiting itself to a form of phenomenological introspection, Chris Burden’s work gradually assumed a more openly political angle. From the late 1970s, the question of atomic dissuasion thus became one of his recurrent subjects. In 1979, Chris Burden dealt with this issue head on, in his Atomic Alphabet – an absurd alphabet providing a word evoking the idea of nuclear war for each letter – as well as in the installation The Reason for the Neutron Bomb – representing the number of tanks in the Soviet army using fifty thousand five cent coins mounted onto as many matchsticks. The 1987 work All the Submarines of the United States of America repeated this inventory logic, presenting the six hundred and twenty-five submarines in the American fleet using hanging models.

These themes also find an echo in two works from 1992 evoking the question of foreign deaths caused by US military interventions: one of the five dioramas that make up America’s Darker Moments thus represent the bombing of Hiroshima, while The Other Vietnam Memorial reworks the layout of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial in Washington, while presenting a list of names of Vietnamese who died owing to the US intervention.  

Applied Physics.

In 1975, Chris Burden created the work B-Car, an automobile that was entirely designed and built by the artist. Here, Chris Burden showed himself to be part engineer part designer: producing replicas in Meccano of steel bridges that have marked the history of architecture, causing a steamroller to fly through a system with a pivoting arm and a counterweight (Flying Steamroller¸ 1996), or suggesting an improvement of the Eiffel Tower by suspending two replicas of the Titanic off it (Another World, 1992). Between scientific rigour, curiosity for experimentation and future imaginings of the likes of Jules Verne, Chris Burden seems to approach engineering like a child that’s been given the means to realise its daydreams: his improbable electric train circuits testify to this (Moo5, 1994), or the giant circuit of small cars that animate the installation Metropolis (2004).

An inventor or mechanic artist thus gradually replaced the “shock” artist. In 1985, Chris Burden produced a work that seemed to connect these two aspects of his personality: entitled Samson, it consists of a huge piston that pierces through a room, against one of the supporting walls of the exhibition space. This mechanism, which actually pushes against the wall of the room, could, if it was working at full capacity, destroy this wall and the museum it supports. While Chris Burden the engineer thus seems to have recovered the Chris Burden of his early scandals, the artist denies any iconoclastic intent:

“It is not a matter of bringing down the museum. I want things to be clear: I wasn’t the artist who shot himself, and I am not the artist that pushes museums down.” [2]

The performance Shoot, which Chris Burden’s career has too often been reduced to, thus clearly appears as a burden, a memory so cumbersome that it would even threaten to eclipse the present: Chris Burden’s resignation from his teaching position at UCLA, after one of his students produced a performance during which he simulated a game of Russian roulette in a very credible manner [3], can perhaps also be explained by the weight of Burden’s own past.

Philippe Bettinelli