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The class was about performance art, the blast was from a planted firecracker and the gun was a replica carefully crafted of wood, according to Joseph Deutch, the student, who spoke with Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times in his first interview since the incident.

Deutch "wanted to test whether, in this seen-it-all age, an audience still could have an indelibly shocking experience and be left wondering whether what it had witnessed was make-believe or real," Boehm writes.

But the staged suicide hit a raw nerve at UCLA, he explains. It led the university to investigate whether the first-year master's student had violated school rules that prohibit firearms or had posed a threat to students and caused a disruption. (The county district attorney dropped its probe in January on account of insufficient evidence.)

In May, a three-person faculty panel ruled 2-1 that Deutch had not violated the gun-ban. Some questioned his claim the gun was a replica he made of a .357 Magnum that he had purchased at a local gun shop, but unanimously cleared him of the other charges, Boehm notes.

But the controversy did not die with the ruling.

"I figured [beforehand] that I would have to explain the nature of the piece" to administrators, investigators and perhaps a campus disciplinary tribunal, Deutch told Boehm. "The thing I hadn't counted on was Chris and Nancy freaking out to the extent they did."

By "Chris and Nancy" he means Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, two high-profile UCLA professors and artists who resigned one month after the performance partially in protest of the university's handling of the incident. They likened his stunt to "domestic terrorism" and urged Deutch be expelled.

Boehm reminds us that Burden made his name for his own gun-toting performance having an assistant shoot him in the arm with a rifle in 1971 and for once holding a TV presenter hostage at knifepoint.

On the performance art scene, irony seems never far behind.

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The Los Angeles Times: "The 'Shot' Heard 'Round UCLA"