Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American contemporary artist working in performance art, sculpture, and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks, and sculptures before his death in 2015.
Chris Burden was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946 to Robert Burden, an engineer, and Rhoda Burden, a biologist. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, France and Italy.
At the age of 12, Burden had emergency surgery, performed without anesthesia, on his left foot after he was severely injured in a motor-scooter crash on the island of Elba. During the long convalescence that followed, he became deeply interested in visual art, particularly photography.
He studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College in 1965–1969 and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine—where his teachers included Robert Irwin—from 1969 to 1971.
Chris Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances to directly confront the violent realities of the Vietnam War and American culture. By pushing himself to physical extremes—enduring pain, confinement, and danger—he forced audiences to viscerally experience the raw, brutal truth of events they otherwise observed with detachment. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece (1971), was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, where he locked himself in a school locker for five days.
Other performances from the 1970s included Deadman (1972), in which Burden lay on the ground covered with a canvas sheet and a set of road flares until bystanders assumed he was dead and called emergency services (leading to his arrest); Match Piece (1972) (also known as Match), in which Burden launched lit matches at a naked woman lying between him and a set of two televisions in a room covered with butcher paper. Dos Equis (1977), Burden installed two upright Xs, each constructed from 16-foot beams, which blocked both lanes of Laguna Canyon Road. The timbers had been soaked in gasoline for several days prior to the event. Burden ignited the structures, leaving them burning. B.C. Mexico (1973), in which he kayaked to a desolate beach in Baja Mexico where he lived for 11 days with no food and only water; Fire Roll (1973), in which he set a pair of pants on fire and then rolled on them to extinguish them; Prelude to 220, or 110, in which he had himself bolted to a concrete floor by copper bands, next to two buckets of water that also contained live 110-volt wires. As visitors to the gallery were trusted not to spill any of the water, Burden would’ve been electrocuted and died. In Honest Labor (1979), Burden was invited to lecture about his work at Emily Carr College of Art and Simon Fraser University and decided to show the students by example, and dug a large ditch. Velvet Water (1974), in which Burden spent five minutes attempting to breathe water. As he explained to the live audience watching; "Today I'm going to breath [sic] water, which is the exact opposite of drowning because when you breath [sic] water you believe the water to be a thicker richer oxygen capable of sustaining life". Do You Believe in Television (1976), in which he sent an audience to the third floor of a building — where television monitors showed them the ground floor — and then lit a fire on the ground floor (sources differ as to whether the monitors showed the fire, forcing the audience to realize that the screens represented reality, or showed an intact ground floor, forcing them to realize that the screens did not represent reality).
In TV Hijack (1972), Burden brought his own camera crew to cover a televised interview with Phyllis Lutjeans, an art critic and curator who hosted the live TV show. When Burden was asked to discuss any new ideas he was working on, he offered to demonstrate TV Hijack and got up from his chair holding a knife to Lutjeans's neck, threatening to kill her if the station stopped live transmission. When asked about the incident in 2015, Lutjeans stated that Burden was a 'gentle soul', that she knew it was an art piece, and that the incident did not damage their pre-existing friendship. To conclude the piece, Burden demanded that the station hand over the recording of the incident, which he then destroyed.
Perhaps his best-known work from that time is the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about sixteen feet (5 m) with a .22 rifle. As Burden explained his motives behind the piece, “I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie. We see people being shot on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it’s like. So I did it”.
His 1973 work 747 involved the artist firing several pistol shots directly at a Boeing 747 passenger jet plane while it took off from Los Angeles International Airport. The piece had a single witness, photographer Terry McDonnell, who filmed the act.
Doorway to Heaven (1973). Burden stood in the doorway of his Venice studio as a few spectators watched him push two live electrical wires together into his chest. As the wires met, they exploded, burning the artist and shorting out, preventing him from being electrocuted.
One of Burden's most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place on April 23, 1974, at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.
Later that year, Burden performed his piece White Light/White Heat at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City. For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a triangular platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either. According to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time.
Several of Burden's other performance pieces were considered controversial at the time: another "danger piece" was Doomed (1975), in which Burden lay motionless in a gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago under a 5 ft × 8 ft (1.5 m × 2.4 m) slanted sheet of glass near a running wall clock. Burden planned to remain in that position until a museum employee prioritized his well-being over the artistic integrity of the piece. After 40 hours, the museum staff consulted physicians. 5 hours and 10 minutes after that, museum employee Dennis O'Shea placed a pitcher of water within Burden's reach, at which point Burden rose, smashed the glass, and took a hammer to the clock, thus ending the piece.
By the end of the 1970s, Burden had turned to vast engineered sculptural installations. In 1975, he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon" (160 km/h and 43 km/L). Some of his other works from that period are DIECIMILA (1977), a facsimile of an Italian 10,000 Lira note, possibly the first fine art print that (like paper money) is printed on both sides of the paper; The Speed of Light Machine (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light; and the installation C.B.T.V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television.
In 1979, Burden first exhibited his notable Big Wheel exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. It was later exhibited in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 1980, he produced The Atomic Alphabet – a giant, poster-sized hand-colored lithograph – and performed the text dressed in leather and punctuating each letter with an angry stomp. Twenty editions of the work were produced and are largely in the possession of museums, including SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.