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Крис Берден

Bateau de Guerre

source: gagosian

Chris Burden was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946. He moved to the California in 1965 and obtained a B.F.A at Pomona College, Claremont, California in 1969 and later a M.F.A at the University of California in 1971. During the early seventies, Burden’s first mature works were characterized by the idea that the truly important, viable art of the future would not be with objects; the things that you could simply sell and hang on your wall. Instead art would be ephemeral and address political, social, environmental and technological change. Burden, with his shockingly simple, unforgettable, “here and now” performances shook the conventional art world and took this new art form to its extreme. The images of Burden that continue to resonate in public mind are of a young man who had himself shot (Shoot, 1971), locked up (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971), electrocuted, (Doorway to Heaven, 1973), cut (Through the Night Softly, 1973), crucified (Trans-fixed, 1974), and advertised on television (4 TV Ads, 1937–77).

His work has subsequently shifted, focusing now on monumental sculptures and large scale installations, such as B-Car, 1975, The Big Wheel, 1979, A Tale of Two Cities, 1981, Beam Drop, 1984, Samson, 1985, Medusa’s Head, 1990, L.A.P.D. Uniforms, 1993, Urban Light, 2008 and Metropolis II, 2010. These works often reflect the social environments, make observations about cultural institutions, and examine the boundaries of science and technology.

Chris Burden works and lives in California and has been represented by Gagosian Gallery since 1991. He has had major retrospectives at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California (1988) and the MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1996). In 1999 Burden exhibited at the 48th Venice Biennale and the Tate Gallery in London. And in the summer of 2008, Burden’s 65 foot tall skyscraper made of one million Erecter set parts, titled What My Dad Gave Me, stood in front of Rockefeller Center, New York City. Burden’s installations and sculptures, which have been exhibited all over the world, have continually challenged viewers’ beliefs and attitudes about art and the contemporary world.
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source: arteseanpblogspot

Chris Burden (1946-) Nasceu em Boston, Massachusetts. Graduou-se na Pomona College in Claremont, California. Cursou o Mestrado na University of California, Irvine. Começou com peformances, nas quais colocava sua própria vida em risco. Mais adiante, construiu enormes instalações. Individuais: South London Gallery, Londres; Baltic Center of Contemporary Art; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig , Viena; Tate Gallery, Londres; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach Instalação permanente, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Obras em diferentes museus: LACMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York;Tate Gallery, London; Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium; Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporanea, Brazil; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. É professor da Universidade da Califórnia entre 1978 e 2005, quando se demitiu. É casado com a artista Nancy Rubins. Participou das Bienais do Whitney e de Veneza. Atualmente retrospectiva no New Museum, Nova York.Vive e trabalha em Topanga, California. É representado pela Gagosian Gallery.Permitem-lhe também introduzir em seu trabalho, temáticas ligadas a questões políticas e sociais como, por exemplo, a Guerra Fria e a ecologia. Nos anos 90, o artista revelou preferência pela realização de instalações.
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source: sarahalexmarinaenterteimentblogspot

La reputación de Burden como artista comenzó a crecer a principios de los años 70 después de que hiciera una serie de controvertidas performances en las que la idea del peligro personal como expresión artística fue central. Su obra más conocida de esa época fue quizás Shoot («Disparo») —realizada en 1971 en el F Space de Santa Ana (California)— en que una ayudante le disparó en su brazo izquierdo a una distancia de unos cinco metros. Otras performances de los años 70 fueron Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1978) y Honest Labor (1979), obras en las que Burden se ha crucificado sobre un Volkswagen, gateado sobre vidrios rotos o se ha metido en un saco bajo un coche en medio de la calle. A partir de 1975 hizo pocas performances y comenzó un período en el que creó instalaciones y objetos que se oponen a la ciencia y la política.
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source: rolandwegererwordpress

Chris Burden (* 1946 in Boston) ist ein US-amerikanischer Künstler, der in den frühen 70er Jahren stark zur Begründung der Body-Art beitrug.

Burdens Werk umfasst verschiedene Kunstgattungen, und bezieht oft extreme oder offen schockierende Ideen und Vorgänge ein. Seine frühen Arbeiten führten dabei bis hin zu Verletzungen des Künstlers selbst, wie in der Arbeit Shoot (1971), in der sich Burden durch einen Freund in einer Galerie mit einem Gewehr in den Arm schießen ließ.1975 legte Burden sich für die Arbeit Doomed (1975) im MCA unter eine Glasplatte, wobei er auf einer – den Veranstaltern nicht bekannten – Notiz im Vorfeld festgelegt hatte, so lange in dieser Position zu verharren, bis er durch das Museumspersonal darin unterbrochen werden würde – was erst nach über 45 Stunden geschah. In einem später geführten Interview äußerte Burden Verwunderung darüber, dass das Personal trotz seiner zunehmenden körperlichen Bedrängnis nichts unternommen hatte.

Burden wandte sich darauf zunehmend von der Performance- und Body-Art ab; in späteren Arbeiten ist die provokative Haltung vielmehr ins Ironische übertragen. In der auf der documenta 6 gezeigten Videoarbeit Promo (1976) wird Chris Burdens Name in einer Reihe mit berühmten Künstlern von Leonardo da Vinci bis Pablo Picasso genannt; nach zweifacher Wiederholung erscheint schließlich die Angabe „paid by Chris Burden – artist“. In Arbeiten wie Flying Steamroller (1996) – einer karussellartig gehängten, rotierenden, zwölf Tonnen schweren Dampfwalze – oder Ghost Ship (2005) – einer sich mittels GPS selbst navigierenden Yacht – verlagert Burden das riskante Experiment der frühen Arbeiten in die Technik.

Im Mai 2009 realisierte Burden im Middelheim-Skulpturenpark von Antwerpen seine dritte Beam Drop-Installation: Aus 50 Metern Höhe ließ ein Kran etwa 100 Stahlträger in ein 12 mal 12 Meter großes Becken mit Flüssigbeton fallen, „sodass die Stahlträger wie überdimensionale Mikado-Stäbe im Boden stecken blieben und mit Hilfe von Zufall und Schwerkraft“ eine abstrakte Skulptur entstand.
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source: dailyserving
Chris Burden is one of the legendary giants of performance art. In his seminal body pieces from the early 1970s, he orchestrated a series of daredevil brutalities and tests of the body’s resilience. Burden has had a more prolonged career, however, as a large-scale installation artist who masterminds feats of engineering that seem divorced from the body: scaled-down replicas of major bridges, a giant scale that weighs Burden’s own Porsche against a meteorite, replicated cop uniforms too large to fit a human body. Both of these styles of work are currently on view in the New Museum’s Burden retrospective, Extreme Measures. The show tracks Burden’s transition from performance to installation—from a focus on the body’s resilience in the tension of an extreme moment, toward static objects severed from the experience of lived reality.
There has always been a strong element of science present in Burden’s work. His performance pieces test the limits of technology against the body. Burden’s installation work, on the other hand, is a series of projects in physics and engineering that test a man’s ability to re-create technology. I use the word “technology” to refer specifically to those 19th-century analog tools dominated by a socially masculine energy: concrete, electricity, fire, gunpowder. Burden’s work progresses from a measurement of the man-made against the man, toward a measurement of the social conscription of the masculine (that is, our idea of the “man”) against that which is man-made. Maleness, in Burden’s installations, is a questionable subject, fraught and fragile despite its posturing.
His sculptures read as socially masculine, explicitly dealing in that stereotypical boyhood fascination with construction, transportation, war, and violence. Burden makes adult-size children’s toys for man-sized boys. Benign replicas take on an air of menace as Burden renders toys of war and constructions of physics life-size. Everything in the museum takes on a terrifying quality, too big for the space to contain it. On the second floor, Burden has constructed a giant cast-iron flywheel that spins at a staggeringly high RPM as someone revs the engine of a motorcycle in gear, suspended several feet from the ground (The Big Wheel, 1979). My friend told me a story about the first time the piece was exhibited. In the hangar-sized gallery where it was shown, there was no system in place to dispel the exhaust from the running motorcycle. The gallery became a carbon monoxide trap and guests practically asphyxiated. The Big Wheel at the New Museum is outfitted with a ventilation pipe connected to a small window, and instead of a brutal death trap, the wheel is now simply a terrifying display of kinetic energy.
All these hinted threats are characteristic of an overt obsession with oversized masculinity, and are striking in light of Burden’s performance work. I never used to read it as hyper-gendered. His early performance stunts indeed take for granted his able-bodied, white maleness as a kind of neutral position, and arguably rely on the resources he is afforded by this position. But for me, the work seemed to be about a kind of extremity and mental illness that read as so human, especially in contrast with a career’s worth of installations that have become the art world’s Universal Studios.
What I initially found productive about Burden’s work was his willingness to push to its furthest point the limits of sanity as experienced through the body. Burden’s work now seems to be about enlargement, engorgement—another kind of “extreme” feat, as the exhibition’s title betrays. But there is a difference between a feat that is challenging and one that is subversive. Burden blows up maleness—he blows up what is already blown up, what is already too big.
Many of the acts Burden commits in his video reel are about pushing beyond the durational experience of the body; they are attempts to reach a kind of transcendence. These actions (instructing his friend to shoot him in the arm at close range, nailing himself to a Volkswagen Beetle, crawling through broken glass on national television, setting fire to two glass shelves soaked in gasoline attached to his shoulders) are read as “crazy.” Burden’s work upon his own body is about reaching a far-off point, about approaching extremes. Burden went so far that other artists have been unsuccessfully trying to overtake him for years. He relates in an audio interview on the museum’s top floor the well-known story of his student at UCLA coming to class on critique day with a loaded revolver, intent on playing Russian roulette. The incident caused Burden to resign from his position at the university.
All this must be juxtaposed with where Burden now seeks to direct the sterile order of his engineered re-creations. Perhaps one reaches a point in this practice where subversion becomes too dangerous—not for oneself, but for others. This is Burden’s real kind of limit. The daredevil actions of Burden’s performances existed in a vacuum, the major threat being his own potential for self-harm. But when applied as pedagogy, the Burden brand of madness spreads like wildfire, goes out of control, becomes destructive. Burden’s installations make games latent with cultural violence, but they are only games now. They are cartoonish, oversized, non-threatening even in their potential for danger—a good show for kids to take their dads to.
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source: casavogueglobo
Um tema recorrente na obra de Burden é o espírito de masculinidade e destruição por trás das criações da engenharia, a exemplo de máquinas usadas para fins bélicos. Assim, diversos instrumentos mecânicos de variados tamanhos estão expostos de forma interativa. Em contraste, boa parte da arte criada por Burden a partir da década de 1980 usou como matéria-prima itens em miniatura, geralmente associados com o universo infantil. O artista usa as peças para dar vida a sua visão crítica. Um exemplo é a obra A Tale of Two Cities, de 1981, que retrata duas cidades guerreando entre si, valendo-se de 5 mil miniaturas.