“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” is the artist’s first major exhibition in 25 years and his first survey in New York City, spanning the 1970s to the present. The New Museum has dedicated all of its exhibition spaces to Burden, as well as some outdoor appurtenances that extend the exhibition to its roof and external façade. The exhibition reassesses the parameters and weight of his practice literally and metaphorically—re-calibrating his more recent efforts in relation to his early work and, inevitably, the notorious Shoot (1971), a performance in which he famously had himself shot in the left arm.
Shoot ultimately secured Burden’s reputation as one of America’s most committed and risk-taking artists. Only 12 people were present for that performance on November 19, 1971, and it received little attention for two years until it was retrospectively picked up by the media. In a BBC interview, Burden explains he had intended for the shot to simply graze his skin, posing the metaphysical question, what constitutes being shot? The extant eight-second clip of black and white film does little to convey the experience of the performance—and it was not intended to. Burden contended that documentation was no substitute for the actual performance (prefiguring the position of more recent performance artists like Tino Sehgal, who has also refused documentation). In the clip presented at the museum as part of a filmic survey of his early 1970s performances, we see Burden lurch forward after the bullet pierces his flesh, shot by his friend with a .22-calibre rifle—and we hear the shell casing hit the ground. The smoking hole going through Burden’s arm sickened him and put him into shock. He explains that he was rushed to the hospital and fabricated a hunting story for the police, who did not pursue it further as he was the victim and not pressing charges.
Burden was born in 1946 and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine, in 1971. He quickly established himself through a series of performances that explored the limits of his body and what constituted the limits of art. A good way to begin the exhibition is on the top floor of the museum with film documentation of these early works. Burden introduces each performance on the video by setting up the context, giving some background to each piece. Most or all of these works operate as a kind of visual or performative statement that can be summarized as an idea or proposition in a sentence or two, which belies their complexity.
Particularly notable here is Bed Piece (1972), in which Burden laid in bed in a gallery for 22 days, enacting a kind of Bartelby-the-Scrivener-like passive resistance to either leave or engage with the world outside of the work itself. The remarkable strangeness of this piece is every bit as potent as Shoot, even in its diametrically opposed—but equally committed and extreme—exploration of physical endurance and human interaction. Shoot and Bed Piece, like bookends, might be thought of as poetic inscriptions of the extremities of American society’s ethical dilemmas. Outside the gallery, debate raged on about the war in Vietnam and civil rights, as well as the means by which to address such issues—from civil disobedience to armed resistance.
Also notable here is TV Ad: Through The Night Softly (1973), a segment created for a 10-second spot of air time that Burden bought on commercial television. In it, he crawls through broken glass, puncturing the status quo of the medium without contextualization, operating as a free-floating thought-action in thousands of viewers’ homes. (This prefigures later attempts to resuscitate network television to artistic ends, for example, Stan Douglas’s Television Spots (1987–88).)
Burden’s work could easily be divided into two principal bodies—the early performance works, and the later sculptural and installation works that explore the spatial relationships of (often) large-scale objects to dramatic effect. Bringing these works together provides an opportunity to discover an arc of concerns, ideas and insights that cohere in an ongoing inquiry into violence, power and the limits of the physical world. These works have both a substantial metaphorical and physical weight; in fact, the wall labels several times indicated the actual weight of the work. Burden’s discourse encompasses the physical extremities of the body and the resilient yet vulnerable grip—at times a mere breath—that distinguishes the liminal space between life and death. In directly related investigations, he reveals through outsized physical contrivances the sometimes invisible forces (gravity, for example) that push and pull at nature’s boundaries. Consequently, he circumscribes the parameters of the physical world and our experiences in it. Taken together, these broad and distinctive swaths of Burden’s practice collude to form a composite of the artist as metaphysician-technician-sociologist who thinks through experience with matter and physical presence.
Whether Burden is balancing an automobile and a meteorite on a fulcrum (as he does in Porsche with Meteorite (2013), featuring a 390-pound meteorite and 5,025-pound steel frame), crawling through broken glass (as in TV Ad: Through The Night Softly), fabricating a wooden sailing ship, then sailing it by remote control through the North Sea and ultimately affixing it to the façade of the museum (as with Ghost Ship (2005))—or shooting himself with a rifle—Burden’s work subscribes to a poetic-scientific method; these works encompass hypotheses, methods and conclusions.
Included among these works is A Tale of Two Cities (1981), a sprawling miniature diorama of two cities at war constructed with 53,000 pounds of sand and countless diminutive toys and models. Binoculars are provided at viewing stations so that we may examine discrete scenes and details of the work. Given the extreme physical dimension of the work, and the contrasting diminished scale of its components, the viewer is invited to consider the parameters of lived experience from the macro to the micro. A number of other works play with notions of scale through the rubric of model-making, including All the Submarines of the United States of America (1987) and a series of model bridges that fill much of one floor of the museum (including Triple 21 Foot Truss Bridge (2013) and Tyne Bridge Kit (2004)).
Burden’s most powerful deployment of scale, material and implied action is also the one which demonstrates the most restraint. L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993) presents 10 police uniforms hung in a row against the wall. (Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991; their trial extended into 1993.) Fashioned with the support of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, the uniforms are approximately seven feet tall, just slightly larger than average, but they are otherwise faithful replicas including service Berettas. L.A.P.D. Uniforms combines all the primary elements of Burden’s practice in one work: materiality, scale and (the implication of) performance. There is a modest reconfiguration of scale here, a less dramatic juxtaposition of material elements, and no one is actually shot—yet Burden achieves the most compelling and affective work in the exhibition. Here, with the lightest touch, Burden incorporates the entire range of his ambitious preoccupations: power, violence, structure, action, scale and materiality.
