Early performance art Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work,
Five Day Locker Piece (1971), was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, 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. His best-known work from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece
Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about with a .22 rifle. 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),
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;
Honest Labor (1979), in which he dug a large ditch;
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, and
TV Hijack (1972) wherein, during a live television interview to which he had brought his own camera crew, he held interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans at knifepoint and threatened 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, he demanded to be given the station's recording of the incident, which he then destroyed. 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 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 turned instead to vast engineered sculptural installations. 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. Burden was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 1978. In 1978, he became a professor at
University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this. 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. 1988's
Samson was a 100-ton
hydraulic jack which was connected to a turnstile such that, with each guest who entered the Newport Harbor Art Museum, timbers were rammed into the museum's supporting walls, meaning that "if enough people entered the museum, it would collapse". The exhibit was forcibly disassembled by the local fire department after a complaint that it was blocking a
fire exit. In 2008, Burden reported having subsequently sold
Samson to "a collector in Brazil".
Later work '' (2011) kinetic art project by Chris Burden. At LACMA, filmed March 16, 2013. Many of Burden's later sculptures are intricate installations and structures consisting of many small parts. The gallery-sized installation
All the Submarines of the United States of America (1987) consists of 625 identical, small, handmade, painted-cardboard models that represent the entire
United States submarine fleet dating from the late 1890s, when submarines entered the navy's arsenal, to the late 1980s. He suspended the cardboard models on monofilaments from the ceiling, placing them at various heights so that as a group they appear to be a school of fish swimming through the ocean of the gallery space. It consisted of a sealed kitchen-sized metal box with hundreds of metal halide lamps burning inside. It required an industrial air conditioner to cool the room.
Hell Gate (1998), is a scale model, in Erector and Meccano pieces and wood, of the dramatic steel-and-concrete railroad bridge that crosses the
Hell Gate segment of the East River, between Queens and Wards Island. the machine launched it to fly up and circle around the gallery. Unfortunately, the machine was non-functional for at least two months of the installation, leading
World Sculpture News to question the intent of the piece and remark that "the work illustrated that robots, in fact, don't rule everything, and for the time being, are still subjected to individual and groups shortcomings". First presented at the
Istanbul Biennial in 2001,
Nomadic Folly (2001) consists of a large wooden deck made of Turkish cypress and four huge umbrellas. Visitors can relax and linger in this tent-like structure, replete with opulent handmade carpets, braided ropes, hanging glass and metal lamps, and wedding fabrics embroidered with sparkling threads and traditional patterns. In 2005, Burden released
Ghost Ship, his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 28 July after a 5-day trip from
Fair Isle, near Shetland. The project was commissioned by the company Locus+ at a cost of £150,000, and was funded with a significant grant from
Arts Council England, being designed and constructed with the help of the Marine Engineering Department of the
University of Southampton. It is said to be controlled via onboard computers and a GPS system; however, in case of emergency the ship is 'shadowed' by an accompanying support boat. In 2008, Burden created
Urban Light, a sculptural work consisting of 202 found antique street lights that had once stood around Los Angeles. He bought the lights from the contractor who installed Urban Light, Anna Justice. The work is on view outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the solar-powered lights are illuminated at dusk. which took four years to build. It was installed at
LACMA in Fall 2011. "Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast-paced, frenetic modern city." Suspended from opposite ends of a telescoping
balance beam of velvety rusted steel are a restored bright yellow 1974
Porsche sports car and a small meteorite.
Porsche With Meteorite (2013) balances perfectly, with the heavier car much closer to the vertical support. The sculpture consists of three rows of 24
Victorian lamp posts which point away from the museum's entrance. and later installed as a tribute at
LACMA. Also, the
New Museum decided to have
Twin Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers (2013), two 36-foot-tall towers created for the museum's retrospective on Burden, remain on the institution's roof for several months in tribute. == Exhibitions ==