Chris Burden

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Chris Burden (born April 11, 1946 in Boston , Massachusetts , † May 10, 2015 in Topanga , California ) was an American artist who contributed greatly to the establishment of body art in the early 1970s .

Life

Chris Burden was born in Boston in 1946, the son of an engineer and a biologist. After childhood in France and Italy, he first graduated from high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts , and then enrolled in Claremont for architecture, physics and eventually arts. In 1971 he graduated from the University of California at Irvine ; For his thesis, Five-Day Locker Piece , he locked himself in a locker for five days, in which only one bottle with drinking water and another one for urine were attached. During the 1970s Burden rose to become one of the most important American exponents of body art, but also turned to other art forms such as conceptual art and installation . In 1978 he was appointed professor at UCLA and head of the "New Media" division. In 2004, he and his wife, Nancy Rubins, who also teaches at UCLA, resigned from university in protest after the university administration spoke out against the de-registration of a student who faked suicide with a dummy pistol during a seminar. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Chris Burden most recently lived and worked in Topanga, California, where he died on May 10, 2015 at the age of 69 from complications of skin cancer.

Urban Light (2008)

plant

Burden's work encompasses various genres of art and often involves extreme or openly shocking ideas and processes. His early work resulted in injuries to the artist himself, as in the work Shoot (1971), in which Burden had a friend in a gallery shoot him in the arm with a rifle. In 1975 Burden lay down under a glass plate for the work Doomed (1975) at the MCA , whereby he had stipulated in advance on a note - unknown to the organizers - to remain in this position until he was interrupted by the museum staff - which only happened after 45 hours. In a later interview, Burden expressed surprise that the staff had done nothing despite their increasing physical distress.

Burden then increasingly turned away from performance and body art; in later works the provocative attitude is rather ironic. In the video work Promo (1976) shown at documenta 6 , Chris Burden's name is mentioned in a series with famous artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso ; after it has been repeated twice, the statement “paid by Chris Burden - artist” appears. In works like Flying Steamroller (1996) - a carousel-like, rotating, twelve-tonne steam roller - or Ghost Ship (2005) - a yacht that navigates itself using GPS - Burden shifted the risky experiment of the early work into technology.

In May 2009 Burden realized his third Beam Drop installation in the Middelheim Sculpture Park in Antwerp : From a height of 50 meters, a crane dropped around 100 steel girders into a 12 by 12 meter pool with liquid concrete, "so that the steel girders look like oversized Mikado bars Soil got stuck and with the help of chance and gravity “an abstract sculpture was created.

Another beam-drop location is a cement mine near Brumadinho in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil . Here Chris Burden dropped 71 iron girders from a height of 45 meters vertically into a cement pit in Beam Drop Inhotim in the Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim .

Web links

Commons : Chris Burden  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Schjeldahl: Performance - Chris Burden and the limits of art . In: The New Yorker , May 14, 2007 (English).
  2. ↑ Jenny Hontz: Gunplay, as Art, Sets Off a Debate . In: The New York Times , February 5, 2005.
  3. ^ Margalit Fox: Chris Burden, a Conceptualist With Scars, Dies at 69. In: The New York Times, May 11, 2015 (accessed May 12, 2015).
  4. ↑ Christopher Knight : Chris Burden dies at 69: Artist's light sculpture at LACMA is symbol of LA In: Los Angeles Times of May 10, 2015 (English, accessed May 12, 2015).
  5. ↑ Documentation of several works by Chris Burden from 1971-1974 at UbuWeb.
  6. ↑ Colleen Mastony: Fearless, 'Doomed' artist to reappear . In: Chicago Tribune , December 4, 2007.
  7. ↑ Information on work promo at MedienKunstNetz.
  8. ↑ Kerstin Schweighöfer: Artists do not retire . In: art - Das Kunstmagazin , Chris Burden Interview, June 4, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Burden, Chris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American visual artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 2015
Place of death Topanga , California