Chris Burden

It's official: MOCA gets it first. Los Angeles artist Chris Burden's "Hell Gate," a 28-foot-long, 7 1/2 -foot-high model of New York City's Hell Gate Bridge fashioned of metal toy construction parts, will be installed Monday and Tuesday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. in preparation for a show of recent acquisitions by L.A.-based artists that will open April 1.

"HELL Gate," Chris Burden's 28-foot-long, 7 1/2 -foot-high model of New York City's Hell Gate Bridge, was delivered from storage to the Museum of Contemporary Art on Monday, launching a two-day installation process for the massive artwork, made of thousands of metal toy construction parts.

What to make of an artist who established himself with punishing performances -- including having himself shot in the arm -- then veered off into building miniature cities, fuel-efficient vehicles, crewless ships and scale models of bridges? That would be Chris Burden, an internationally renowned, Los Angeles-based artist who baffles most pigeon-holers.

Bifocals resting on his nose, Chris Burden mounted the scrawny Benelli motorcycle and kicked the machine to life. Revving the motor in first gear to make sure the 41-year-old beast would stay awake, he upshifted to second, then third, forcing the rear wheel of the tiny bike to spin faster and faster against the big wheel with which it was making contact. With the motorcycle revved to 50 miles per hour, Burden's graying hair fluttered from the wind generated by the enormous metal flywheel.

In the early 1990s, when Paul Sietsema was figuring out what sort of artist he might be, he picked up crushed cigarette packs and other castoffs on the sidewalks of San Francisco, made meticulous facsimiles of them and put his creations where he found the originals. "I liked having a show along a sidewalk with something that I had invested in, but that nobody would notice," he says, leaning out of a chair that occupies one of the few uncovered spots on the floor of his cluttered studio in a commercial district of Silver Lake.

Leaving for New York today from the artist's Topanga studio is Chris Burden's sculpture "What My Dad Gave Me," a 65-foot, 16,000-pound skyscraper made of approximately 1 million replica toy construction parts. The work, to be presented by Public Art Fund and hosted by Tishman Speyer, co-owners of Rockefeller Center, will be displayed at Rockefeller Center June 10-July 19. Burden's assistant, Katy Lucas, said Wednesday that the artwork, a tribute to Burden's father, who worked at Rockefeller Center, would travel in three pieces via oversized truck for about a week.

By day, he's a mild-mannered information technologist for a downtown law firm; by night, Doug Hein, 41, is the amateur photographer who took the winning shot for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Urban Light Project, an online "open call" to the public to create the most memorable image of Chris Burden's public art installation "Urban Light." The Urban Light Project commemorates the first anniversary of Burden's artwork, a signature fixture on the LACMA plaza since last February.

Somehow, some way, Chris Burden and the Beverly Hills Gagosian Gallery aim to acquire 100 gold bars, combined value about $3.3 million, in the very near future. What's in question is whether they'll cop that bling -- needed for Burden's latest piece, "One Ton, One Kilo" -- in time for its scheduled Saturday opening at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. The gold bars originally purchased for the exhibit have been frozen under an order by federal authorities. Reuters reported last week that Gagosian bought the gold in January from a company owned by R. Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire accused of perpetrating an $8 billion financial fraud.

Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills said that Saturday's opening of a new work by Chris Burden, "One Ton, One Kilo," has been postponed indefinitely while the search continues for 220 pounds -- or about $3.3 million worth -- of gold bars needed to assemble the piece. The stash that Gagosian and Burden had secured for the exhibition got caught up in a civil action that federal authorities have brought against R. Allen Stanford, accused of running a Ponzi scheme. His assets, including Stanford Coins and Bullion, the company that sold Gagosian the required gold, have been frozen by court order.

Chris Burden: An article in Wednesday's Calendar about artist Chris Burden identified his installation of vintage street lights at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as "Divine Light." The name of the work is "Urban Light."