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Roger Ebert says he enjoys a good Chris Burden performance.

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It seems that, as a young reporter, Ebert attended Burden’s 1975 performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, in which the artist lay under a piece of glass that was leaned against a wall for more than 42 hours. The event made the critic an ardent fan of Burden. Ebert recounts the details of the harrowing MCA piece, titled Doomed, in his article.

Ebert also provides a thorough accounting of some of the artist’s other major works, which involved confining himself in school locker for five days to earn his M.F.A. (Larry Gagosian later purchased the locks), being shot in the arm, and living on a lofted platform in a New York gallery for three weeks, subsisting only on celery juice.

Read more at Roger Ebert’s Journal.