Chris Burden

NEW YORK—Few artists occupy so legendary a position in the annals of recent art history as Chris Burden. Beginning with his 1971 MFA show, Five Day Locker Piece, in which he confined himself in a tiny student locker for five days solid, Burden spent his early career staging performances that explored a potentially fatal bringing together of art and life. He nailed himself to the roof of a Volkswagen Bug in Trans-fixed (1974), lay under a tarp on La Cienega Boulevard for Deadman (1972), and most infamous of all, had himself shot with a rifle for Shoot (1971). To generations of younger performance artists, these events established a ne plus ultra of art and risk. To their detractors, they seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with avant-garde art practice.

The Chris Burden of later years seems an utterly different artist, fascinated by engineering, scientific logic, and toys. He has made devices like Samson (1985), a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and turnstile, which, if enough people passed through the turnstile, would theoretically expand enough to demolish the gallery in which it was displayed; flown a toy airplane inside a Concorde aircraft flying over the Atlantic, so that the toy achieved a speed just beyond Mach 2; and designed and launched Ghost Ship (2005), a crewless, self-navigating sea vessel.

Even beyond his art, Burden consistently challenges and perplexes spectators. In 2005, a student in one of his classes at UCLA, which was being led by Ron Athey in his absence, allegedly produced a revolver and staged a Russian roulette–style suicide attempt. Despite Burden’s infamy as the patron saint of risk, he insisted that the student be disciplined, and he and his wife, artist Nancy Rubins, resigned their teaching positions when the student was not.

Most recently, his sculpture What My Dad Gave Me — a 65-foot-high model of a skyscraper constructed from a million facsimile Erector Set parts — was assembled at New York’s Rockefeller Center, where it will remain until July 19. After the June 11 unveiling, Burden spoke to ARTINFO over a Starbucks sandwich, and together we tried to draw connections between the various extremes of his artistic practice.

Chris, if we were to trace an arc between that student in the locker in 1971 and the older artist who created this skyscraper, what would be the connection?

Testing the limits. And proving that things you didn’t think were possible can be.

You use toys a lot in your work these days. What is their significance?

I think toys are the tools by which children are inculcated into the adult word. They’re really important, but they’re given short shrift.

Does that explain the title of the skyscraper work, What My Dad Gave Me?

My father worked for the Rockefeller Foundation — he was in world health — and I used to go up to his office on the 49th floor or whatever it was. But really the piece is a metaphor for the fact that my father believed in education. He was interested in the real world. He spent a lot of hard-earned money sending me to good private schools and a private college. It’s a reference to the fact that he gave me the confidence to think that I could do something like this.  

This work seems like a return to your roots in some way. You originally studied architecture, didn’t you?

Yes, I went to Pomona College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles. I was studying to be an architect, but they didn’t have an architectural program, so I took art courses and physics and advanced calculus. I was competing with the brainy physics and calculus kids, and they would get excited about spending 40 hours on one single calculus problem, and I didn’t find that interesting.

Art was more interesting?

I liked doing sculpture, which was just shifting over to minimalism at the time. I was one of the only kids who would go to the sculpture shop after class, and there was a eureka moment when I realized, “Oh my God! All these materials, and nobody else comes in. That stack of plywood, it’s really mine!”

So at some point I decided I would become a sculptor. I remember when I went to the chairman of my art department and told him. He said, “It’s bad enough being a painter. Being a sculptor is just suicide!”

How did you shift from sculpture to performance art?

Well, when I went to UC Irvine, I was trained as a minimalist, and I had some pretty good professors. We kept examining the essence of sculpture — how it was different from two-dimensional work. One of the things that I noticed is that it forces the viewer to move: In order to see a piece of sculpture, you have to walk around it. I thought, “Well, it’s really about body movement. It’s about physical activity.” I did a whole series of works in graduate school where I made apparatuses that you had to use — using them was the art. The apparatus was not the art; it was a tool to make you do the art.