Chris Burden
| Chris Burden | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 11, 1946 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | May 10, 2015 (aged 69) Topanga Canyon, California |
| Education |
Pomona College University of California, Irvine |
| Known for | Performance artist |
| Spouse(s) | Nancy Rubins |
Christopher Lee "Chris" Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art.
Christopher Lee Burden, the son of Robert Burden, an engineer, and Rhoda Burden, a biologist, was born in Boston in 1946 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, France and Italy. When he was 12, he endured emergency surgery — performed without anesthesia — on his left foot after having been severely injured in a motor-scooter crash on Elba; during the long convalescence that followed, he became deeply interested in visual art, particularly in photography.
Burden studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine – where his teachers included Robert Irwin – from 1969 to 1971.
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 most well-known act 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 16 feet (5 m) with a .22 rifle. Other performances from the 1970s were Match Piece (1972),Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972),Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979).
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.
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