Chris Burden stands one misty spring morning on a dirt road above his 65 acres of rugged land in the hills of Topanga Canyon. He's been hiking and answering endless questions about his life, land and art. Suddenly, with a sigh, he throws out that impossible question that all artists have to answer for themselves. "What is art?" he says, as if trying, finally, to finish an old argument.
It's not a surprising line of inquiry from someone famous for stretching the definition of the word. After all, he is best known for an art performance, now three-plus decades old, during which he had a friend shoot him in the arm. He once spent 22 days sleeping in an art gallery as viewers came and went. He had a museum dig nine feet down into its flooring to expose the building's structural foundation, and, a few years ago, he created an elaborate balancing apparatus to make a 12-ton steamroller "fly." Recently he has been building a 35-foot long bridge from replica Erector Set parts made of stainless steel--his latest in a series of sculptures made from toys.
UCLA resignations -- An article in the Jan. 22 California section about the resignations of artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins from UCLA professorships, as well as some previous articles about Burden that have appeared in The Times since 1997, said he was a graduate student when he created "Shoot." In fact, the 1971 performance piece was done several months after Burden had earned his master of fine arts degree at UC Irvine.
"It's about trying to frame something," he says, adopting the most traditional notion of art-making as his hands try to make an imaginary frame around his face. "And draw attention to it and say, 'Here's the beauty in this. I'm going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.'
"That's what artists do," he says with passion. "It's really a pointing activity."
At this moment he is not really talking about a painting in a frame, but rather about his intention to build a rudimentary suspension bridge between two mountains on his property, which since the mid-1980s has been the home and workplace he shares with his wife, sculptor Nancy Rubins. He's also talking about a model bridge he built for an exhibition from vintage Erector Set parts about five years ago, a 15-foot-long structure that stands 9 feet high and includes 35,000 parts. Called the "Mexican Bridge," it is based on a never-built serpentine cast-iron structure designed by a British engineer in the 1860s to span a gorge in Mexico.
"I'd look at the illustration in the book, and I'd say, 'Isn't it sad that that was never made?' It sounds super cornball to say, 'It's about beauty,' but to me that thing was structurally a beautiful thing."
- Fine-Art Videos at Standard Hotel Feb 18, 2000
- Chris Burden Retrospective at U. of Washington Canceled Dec 22, 1996
- GALLERY - Shooting convention and himself Aug 19, 2007
