Chris Burden | Deluxe Photo Book 71-73

Chris Burden

Deluxe Photo Book 71-73

Los Angeles, USA: Self-published, 1974

29.2 x 28.6 x 9.5 cm.

Edition of 50 [+ 10 AP] signed and numbered copies

Valued between twenty-five and thirty-thousand dollars, this self-published, hand-painted catalogue of twenty three early performances was produced in an edition of fifty copies. The loose-leaf three-ring binder includes forty-four gelatin silver prints, nine chromogenic prints, and typewritten texts by the artist. 

Included are Burden’s first-hand descriptions and documentation for some of his best-known and most influential performances, such as Shoot (1971) and TV Hijack (1972). Other works include Five Day Locker Piece (1971), TV Ad (1973), and Through the Night Softly (1973). The title features images by Alfred Lutjeans, Gary Beydler and various other photographers coupled with short paragraphs describing the works. 

It is one of the few comprehensive catalogues self-published by a performance artist. 

"Deluxe Photo Book was released in the wake of a series of sensationalist articles about Burden’s performances, including the notorious 1973 the New York Times article “He Got Shot—For His Art.” Despite Burden’s repudiations of these readings of his work, as articulated in various interviews from this period onward, the media focused on the extremity of Burden’s actions in which he was often subjected to pain and suffering on his body. As Burden himself explained: “those first articles in Esquire, Newsweek, the LA Times, and the interview on Channel 9 in LA. […] It pisses me off when they only take the first slice, the first level. ‘Chris Burden, man who walks through glass…’ I mean, come on! It’s true I’ve done some of those things, but I’m not doing them as a circus act.” Deluxe Photo Book serves as a counter argument to such claims, prominently including documentation of other aspects of his work that reformulate perceptions regarding the artist’s intentions and conceptual approaches. For example, one could contend that Burden’s inclusion of grayscale photographs deflected attention from the intensity of violence that was sometimes involved in the principal action, given his remarks in a 1975 interview regarding his work Through the Night Softly that he “shot the film in black-and-white because I knew that people would get off on [blood] and that’s not what it was about.” Moreover, Burden often included multiple images as documentation for a single performance, as can be seen in the accompanying photographs of the audience helping the artist after he was accidentally injured more severely than expected during Shoot. Burden’s addition of these images is critical as it lends support to his claim that “the violence part really wasn’t that important, it was just a crux to make all the mental stuff happen… the anticipation, how you dealt with the anticipation. Physically it was no big deal.”

- Gagosian Quarterly