Chris Burden | Two World War I Tanks

Chris Burden 

Two World War I Tanks

Pasadena, USA: Frostig Center, 2010

11.4 x 24.1 x 19.1 cm.

Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies [+ 20 AP]

The Frostig Center was founded in 1951 as a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children with diverse learning needs such as Asperger's and autism.

This edition was produced by Chris Burden to benefit the organization. It consists of two cast steel tanks (each 5.7 x 10.2 x 3.2 cm.) housed in a handmade wooden box. The box is signed and numbered and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Frostig Center. The tanks are also both signed. 

 

Laurie Anderson | It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole

Laurie Anderson

It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole

New York City, USA: Holly Solomon Gallery, 1977

7” vinyl record

Edition size unknown

“I will be shot with a rifle at 7:45 p.m.,” performance artist Chris Burden wrote to the editors of Avalanche magazine, “I hope to have some good photos.”

On November 19th, 1971, he made good on his promise. At the  F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California, he stood fifteen feet away from a friend armed with a .22-caliber rifle and took a bullet to the left arm. The work, named Shoot, has been described as Burden's "most infamous”. 

In It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You - It’s The Hole Laurie Anderson recalls the piece as a kind of cautionary tale. The 45 rpm single was originally created as part of jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, for an exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Peter Gordon appears on saxophone, Scott Johnson on bass guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums.

Copies of the 7” single on Discogs have sold for as low as low as a hundred dollars, and as high as two thousand. 

It’s an uptempo hillbilly avant-garde song about bullet holes, black holes, dark holes, dug holes, holes in the soles of shoes, and giving credit where it’s due. I recall a similar observation Anderson once made about shampoo commercials and their grandiose claims about cleanliness, when it's the water that does most of the work.

Jackson Arn in the New Yorker describes Burden’s practice with another hole analogy: "I hear the chuckle of a shrewd entrepreneur filling a hole in the market."

I used to use myself as a target

I used myself as a goal

I was digging myself so much

I was digging me so much

I dug myself right into a hole

Now, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills you

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

It's not the bullet it's the hole

Like a ventriloquist I can throw my voice

Long distance is the story of my life

and in the words of the artist Joseph Beuys

"If you get cut, you better bandage the knife"

Cause, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills, you know

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

Like a hole, like a black hole in space

You disappeared and there's nothing to take your place

Now I'm sweating, I'm freezin, in this Jamaican sea breeze

I remember you in my knees

I really feel like fallin’

It's not gravity that's getting me down

It's giving me those down and out lowdown blues

It's not the rain that's getting me wet

It's the holes, it’s  the holes in my shoes!

It's not the bullet, It's the hole

Cause, in a hole it's so dark

You can't see a thing

It's easy to lose sight of your goals

It's not the bullet, not the bullet that kills, you know

It's the hole, it's the hole, it's the hole...

It's not the bullet...

It's the hole...

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

Merry Christmas from Chris Burden

 

"When you consider the range and number of these social transformations, it seems only natural that yet another persona would take its place on Burden’s list of selves—that of a plutocrat spreading the wealth. This is the form taken by Merry Christmas from Chris Burden, 1976, which traded anonymity for an assertive personhood and made an erstwhile misanthrope into a budding Maecenas. The transformation happened when the artist simply tucked a bank-crisp ten-dollar bill into each of one hundred envelopes printed specially for the occasion, complete with his return address. A separate insert offered Christmas greetings to the hundred artist-recipients of Burden’s largesse. Thirty-five years ago, was this a big gesture or a small one? The answer, like so much in economic relations, depends on where you stand, your place in the economic landscape and how it shapes your point of view. And it also depends on the perceptions of those around you. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, money talks only when someone hears what it says. It is easy to imagine Burden’s offering being quite carefully parsed by its beneficiaries, though whether gratefully or skeptically is harder to decide."

- Anne M. Wagner, Artforum, 2011

"The season's cheeriest Christmas card was undoubtedly that sent by Chris Burden, the West Coast conceptualperformance artist, to 100 selected art worldlings, ranging from Vito Acconci to Diana Slotnick. Its dignified message, in script print on an elegant white folded card, read “Merry Christmas from Chris Burden.” Inside was a crisp new $10 bill.

“Of course it's an art piece,” said Mr. Burden from his home in Venice, Calif. “It's just a funny way of treating money, like a joke on the old Christmas thing where your grandmother sends you cash. To me, the money was simply raw material, like wood, metal or anything else an artist uses.”

Mr. Burden says he sent half of the $10's to friends and half to people he'd done business with. “I took note of the serial numbers,” he said, “and I'll include it in my list of pieces.” This one is relatively sedate. Mr. Burden's other “art pieces” include having a friend shoot him in the ann with a 22 rifle, staying in a locker for five days and firing match rockets at his wife.

The artist says the greenback idea has not produced a lot of feedback, although “some people did some funny things. About four or five sent the money back—they were mostly businesspeople with guilt about accepting it. One artist, Ilene Segalove, made it into a bowtie and returned it. Some people I sent it to owed me money or had given me a rough time in business dealings; they seemed to think it was a put‐down. On the other hand, a few just went out and spent it right away.”"

- The New York Times, 1976

Chris Burden died five years ago today

 

Chris Burden

Chris Burden died three years ago today, at the age of 69.

Chris Burden | Full Financial Disclosure

Chris Burden
Full Financial Disclosure
Los Angeles, USA: Jan Baum \ Iris Silverman Gallery, 1977.
unpaginated, 19.8 h x 8.8 w cm., staple bound
Edition size unknown

Like the previous post, this work is also from 1977 and feels strangely topical at the moment - given that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is now seeking financial documents from the first presidential candidate not to release his tax returns in forty years.

Designed to resemble the artist's checkbook, Burden's bookwork opens with the preamble "In keeping with the Bicentennial spirit, the post-Watergate mood and the new atmosphere on Capitol Hill, Chris Burden wishes to be the first artist to publicly make a full financial disclosure".

The book details his expenditures for the year and concludes that his net income for 1976 was $1,054.  His earnings include sales and lecture fees ($12, 210) and grants ($5,000). His 'business expenses' included art materials ($3,416), travel ($4,309), studio expenses ($2,325) and television advertising ($6,106).

The latter, the highest expenditure by far, was a result of Burden producing Full Financial Disclosure, and three other works, as thirty-second television spots as "a way to break the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television had." Burden purchased late night airtime from local Los Angeles television stations.

The videos can be viewed, along with commentary by the artist, here.


"In September 1977, I became the first artist to make a full public financial disclosure. At the Baum-Silverman Gallery I displayed all my cancelled checks for the year 1976. A drawing was made of each month of cancelled checks by mounting them on boards in vertical columns and framing them.  Next to each check was a small type set explanation. My bank statements and my 1976 Income Tax forms were also displayed as drawings.

In addition on Los Angeles television Channels 2, 4, and 7, I ran a 30 second commercial which showed me sitting behind a large desk in the manner of a sincere politician running for office.  During this "commercial" [...] the television screen displayed a series of graphics showing my 1976 gross income, a detailed list of my 1976 business expenses, and finally my net income for 1976. This commercial was aired 30 times during a two week period."

- Chris Burden