Chris Burden

Photo by Stuart Ramson, courtesy Public Art Fund, Gagosian Gallery, and Tishman Speyer

Chris Burden, "What My Dad Gave Me" (2008) at Rockefeller Center

Photo by Stuart Ramson, courtesy Public Art Fund, Gagosian Gallery, and Tishman Speyer

Chris Burden with "What My Dad Gave Me" (2008)

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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.

But they were finely crafted out of stainless steel and aluminum, so people would see these apparatuses and think that they were the art. When I had to do my MFA show in the student art gallery, I was going to build a box and get into it, but then I saw these lockers off to the side and thought, “That’s the solution! Use a pre-existing box that is clearly not the art.” That was another kind of eureka moment: “I can just do something and it can be art. I don’t have to make something.”

You said a few moments ago that your father was interested in “the real world.” It strikes me that your performances were about testing yourself against reality.

Yes, and in that sense they weren’t theatrical. They weren’t about multiple performances. There’s only a first time. You’re only a virgin once!

Marina Abramovic did a show at the Guggenheim where she restaged performances, and she asked me for permission to restage the piece on the Volkswagen. I told her, “If you’re asking me, I’m going to say ‘no,’ but actually you don’t need my permission. You can go and do it.” And that became a big issue for her, the fact that I had denied her permission.

I think that performance is still very problematic for institutions, because how do you collect it? You can collect the documentation or the residues, but you can’t own a time-based event.

How do you feel about clips of your work showing up on YouTube?

Weird. I don’t know what to do about it. There was a fake MySpace page, too: A guy was impersonating me, and we actually shut him down. At first it seems flattering, but then you think, “What if he starts saying all kinds of weird things about me, and somebody reads them and thinks they’re true?”

This takes us on to the whole question of the morality of art, which I know is very important to you. I’m thinking of the position you took over that student with the gun.

Yes, that was shocking, actually. Not what he did — students do all kinds of crazy things, that’s in the nature of being young. It was mostly the reaction of my colleagues at the university as a whole. They blamed me for it, despite the fact that I was in Amsterdam at the time.

What did you think of the student’s behavior?

There are very clear rules about decorum and etiquette in the university setting: You’re not allowed to swear, there are all kinds of things you can’t say. In an undergraduate class I always used to tell students, “You can’t do a performance where you lay on the railroad tracks, because you have a responsibility beyond yourself, because you’re part of the school. I just can’t allow you to do something that will cause the art department to ban this kind of teaching.”

At the graduate level, I only met this man a couple of times, and I thought he was manipulative. He said, “I want to do something edgy, edgy, edgy.” I think there’s this need for fame that’s overwhelming. But you can’t bring guns on campus, you can’t threaten suicide, you can’t threaten others. In my mind, it was a no-brainer. I’m not saying, “Arrest him!” He just can’t be part of our club. He broke the rules.

A lot of people found your position difficult to understand because you’d made Shoot all those years ago.