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Ode to Santos Dumont

source: lacmaorg

The first museum presentation of the late Chris Burden’s recently completed monumental performance sculpture, Chris Burden: Ode to Santos Dumont pays homage to ingenuity, optimism, and the persistence of experimentation, failure, and innovation. Inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, widely considered the father of aviation in France, the kinetic airship sculpture was recently completed after a decade of research and work by Burden.

The highly balanced and refined mechanism—modeled after Santos-Dumont’s 1901 dirigible that flew around the Eiffel Tower—achieves indoor flight in 15-minute intervals throughout the day. An examination of weight and gravity, the work is powered by a quarter-scale version of a 1903 De Dion gasoline motor handcrafted by machinist and inventor John Biggs. Ode to Santos Dumont offers a palpable and emotional expression of the density of air, gravity, and energy required to move about in our earthly environment.
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source: shootngowordpress

“The performing sculpture, Ode to Santos Dumont, pays homage to ingenuity, optimism, and the persistence of experimentation, failure, and innovation. Inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, widely considered the father of aviation in France and Brazil, the kinetic airship sculpture was recently completed after a decade of research and work by Burden.” The work is powered by a quarter-scale version of a 1903 De Dion gasoline motor handcrafted by machinist and inventor John Biggs.”
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source: lacmaorg

Late Chris Burden’s monumental performance sculpture, Chris Burden: Ode to Santos Dumont pays homage to ingenuity, optimism, and the persistence of experimentation, failure, and innovation. Inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, widely considered the father of aviation in France, the kinetic airship sculpture was completed in 2015 after a decade of research and work by Burden.
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source: eaiorg

Chris Burden first gained international attention in the 1970s as an influential and often controversial figure in the West Coast body art, performance and Conceptual Art movements. Once ironically termed the “Evel Knieval of contemporary art,” Conceptual Art, Burden allowed himself to be shot, crucified, almost drowned and electrocuted.
In 1974, he began working with video, using it as an integral component of his performances, as well as for the documentation of his works and in the production of conceptual TV “commercials.”
In the late 1970s, Burden began producing sculptural objects, installations and technological or mechanical inventions, including the monumental BCar and The Big Wheel. In these extensions of his conceptual works, Burden addresses the artist’s relationship to an industrialized and technological society.
Burden was born in 1946. He received a B.A. from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. The first New York survey of his work, “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” opened in the Fall of 2013 at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York. A major retrospective of his work, “Chris Burden: A Twenty Year Survey,” was organized in 1988 by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California. He has performed and exhibited his work internationally, at institutions including MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; de Appel, Amsterdam; The Tate Museum, London; The Baltic Centre, Newcastle, England; The 48th Venice Biennale, Venice; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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source: newyorker

An efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great. Burden is the guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California, produced a classic, or an atrocity (both, to my mind), of conceptual art by getting shot. “Shoot” survives in desultory black-and-white photographs with this description: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” Why do such things? “I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist,” Burden explained, when I visited him recently at his studio in a brushy glen of Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy Rubins. “The models were Picasso and Duchamp. I was most interested in Duchamp.” Burden is a solidly fleshy, amicable man, given to arduous enthusiasms. Arrayed in ranks outside the vast, tidy studio building were more than a hundred and forty handsomely restored antique lampposts, units of an ongoing sculptural project. (Many are intended for the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when its present expansion is completed, in 2008.) Reinstallations of two major Burdens are now on view in Southern California: “A Tale of Two Cities” (1981), a room-filling fantasy tableau of miniature metropolises at war, incorporating about five thousand toys, at the Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach; and, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, “Hell Gate” (1998), a twenty-eight-foot-long scale model, in Erector and Meccano pieces and wood, of the dramatic steel-and-concrete railroad bridge that crosses the Hell Gate segment of the East River, between Queens and Wards Island. Like most things by Burden, they are powerful works that deal ingeniously with aesthetics and ethics of power. You needn’t like them to be impressed.

“Shoot” was one of a number of perfectly repellent performance pieces of the early nineteen-seventies in which Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the institutional taboo against touching art works. (Such, at any rate, was my analysis of the distinctive nausea that I felt in thinking of those things, which I avoided witnessing in person.) He spent five days in a small locker, with a bottle of water above and a bottle for urine below; slithered, nearly naked and with his hands held behind him, across fifty feet of broken glass in a parking lot; had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen; was kicked down a flight of stairs; and, on different occasions, incurred apparent risks of burning, drowning, and electrocution.

Usually performed for small audiences, these events became word-of-mouth sensations on a radically minded grapevine in art schools, new contemporary museums, and grant-funded alternative spaces—an emerging academy of the far out. Anti-commercial sentiments held sway in those circles, although not altogether heroically, given the concurrent slump in the art market and the flow of patronage from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts. (Between 1974 and 1983, Burden received four N.E.A. grants.) Earthworks, executed in remote locations, were the conceptual art that came closest to being popular. They had in common with Burden’s performances the fact that almost nobody saw them, except by way of documentation. The avant-gardism of the time wasn’t only reliant on publicity; it was effectively about the mediums of information—specialized magazines, insider gossip—through which it became known. Burden strummed the network like a lyre.

Burden was born in Boston in 1946, to an engineer father and a mother who had a master’s degree in biology, and he grew up in France and Italy. At the age of twelve, on the island of Elba, he was badly hurt in a motor-scooter accident, and underwent an emergency operation on his left foot, without anesthesia. It was a formative experience, he said, as was a passion for photography, which he acquired during his long recuperation. He completed high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Pomona College, in Claremont, California, he declared an architecture major and studied physics, but gravitated toward art, with a special interest in Dadaism. Burden’s master’s thesis, at the University of California, Irvine, in 1971—where his teachers included the doyen of space-and-light installations, Robert Irwin—was the five-day locker stint.

He was immediately taken very seriously, as the most extreme and enigmatic of provocateurs in a subculture that, in highly educated ways, reflected the political disarray of the nation during the seemingly eternal Vietnam War, and prefigured the swing-barrelled rage of punk. By 1977, he had created performance pieces in two dozen American and European cities. They constituted a theatre of passive-aggressive cruelty. For one, in 1972, in Newport Beach, he sat immobile in a chair, wearing dark glasses, facing two cushions and an inviting box of marijuana cigarettes. Visitors naturally assumed that he was watching them, but the insides of his glasses were painted black, and he refused to speak. He reported, in his record of the work, “Many people tried to talk to me, one assaulted me and one left sobbing hysterically.” Plainly, Burden was not in sympathy with his supposed community.

Burden’s most trenchantly significant work was “Doomed,” performed in April, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight, and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went. Burden didn’t move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. (“It was awful,” he recalled.) Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis O’Shea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden’s reach. The artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a public action that imperilled himself. It wouldn’t have made sense. “Doomed” unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O’Shea’s case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there until he died? “Probably not,” he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenberg’s famous intention “to act in the gap between” art and life. There isn’t any gap. Art is notional. There is always only life and death.
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source: artigostolprobr

Chris Burden wurde 1946 als Sohn eines Ingenieurs und einer Biologin in Boston geboren. Nach einer Kindheit in Frankreich und Italien schloss er zuerst die High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts ab und schrieb sich anschließend in Claremont für Architektur, Physik und schließlich Kunst ein. 1971 beendete er sein Studium an der University of California in Irvine; für seine Abschlussarbeit Five-Day Locker Piece schloss er sich fünf Tage lang in einem Spind ein, in dem lediglich eine Flasche mit Trinkwasser und eine weitere für Urin angebracht waren.Peter Schjeldahl:
„Performance – Chris Burden and the limits of art“, in: The New Yorker, 14. Mai 2007 (Englisch) Im Laufe der 1970er Jahre stieg Burden zu einem der wichtigsten amerikanischen Vertreter der Body-Art auf, wandte sich aber auch anderen Kunstformen wie der Konzeptkunst und der Installation zu. 1978 wurde er an der UCLA zum Professor berufen und Leiter des Bereichs „Neue Medien“. 2004 legten er und seine ebenfalls an der UCLA lehrende Ehefrau Nancy Rubins aus Protest ihre Hochschulämter ab, nachdem die Hochschulleitung sich gegen die Exmatrikulation eines Studenten ausgesprochen hatte, der während eines Seminars mit einer Pistolenattrappe einen Suizid vorgetäuscht hatte.Jenny Hontz:
„Gunplay, as Art, Sets Off a Debate“, in: New York Times, 5. Februar 2005 (Englisch) Chris Burden lebt und arbeitet derzeit in Topanga.

Werk
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.
Dokumentation mehrerer Arbeiten von Chris Burden von 1971-1974 bei UbuWeb 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.Colleen Mastony:
„Fearless, ’Doomed’ artist to reappear“, in: Chicago Tribune, 4. Dezember 2007 (English)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“.
Information zur Arbeit Promo bei MedienKunstNetz 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.Kerstin Schweighöfer:
Künstler gehen nicht in Rente art-magazin.de, Chris Burden Interview, 4. Juni 2009Ein weiterer Beam-Drop-Schauplatz ist eine Zementgrube in der Nähe von Brumadinho im Bundesstaat Minas Gerais in Brasilien. Hier ließ Chris Burden in Beam Drop Inhotim (siehe: Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim) 71 Eisenträger aus 45 Meter Höhe vertikal in eine Zementgrube fallen.Der Eindruck eines gewollten Unfalls ist gelungen.
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source: ficheslexpressfr

Chris Burden, né en 1946 à Boston, Massachusetts, est un artiste américain. Chris Burden a étudié les arts visuels, la physique et l’ architecture à l’université de Pomona et à l’ Université de Californie à Irvine, de 1969 à 1971. En 1978, il devient professeur à l’Université de Californie à Los Angeles. Il démissionne en 2005 suite à une polémique relative aux allégations de l’université: l’exécution d’une performance, qui faisait écho à une des oeuvres de Burden par un étudiant, aurait mis en danger plusieurs membres du corps enseignant, dont Burden (aucun de ceux qui étaient présents à l’évènement). La performance utilisait un pistolet chargé, ce que les autorités ne pouvaient pas justifier. La réputation de Burden comme artiste de performance a commencé à se développer au début des années 1970 après une série de performances controversées dans lesquelles l’idée du danger personnel en tant qu’expression artistique était centrale. Son action la plus connue à cette époque est peut-être la performance Shoot qui a été faite à Santa Ana, en Californie en 1971, où il s’est fait tirer une balle dans le bras gauche par un aide à une distance d’environ cinq mètres. Autres performances des années 1970: Five Day Locker Pièce (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1978) et Honest Labor (1979).
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source: teterinru

Перформанс как искусство — в исполнении как мужском, так и женском — по самой природе своей обеспечил в 70-е дальнейшие примеры того, как феминистки и прочие радикальные элементы могут воплощать себя в альтернативных художественных формах. Отпочковавшись, на некоторой дистанции, от дадаистов и хэппенинга 60-х, искусство перформанса не позволяло третировать себя как предмет потребления (его ведь ни купить, ни продать), заменив обычные художественные материалы на нечто лишь чуть большее, чем действия собственного тела художника. В течение двух десятилетий, в 60-е и 70-е годы, искусство перформанса привлекало к себе небольшую, но влиятельную художественную аудиторию, однако сейчас оно живо звучит, резонируя в памяти, фотодокументах, письменных свидетельствах очевидцев. Оглядываясь назад, понимаешь, что некоторые проекты — значимые также и с точки зрения сравнения между Америкой и Европой — выступают как показательные.
Сразу же стало очевидно — Люси Липпард, к примеру, — что европейский перформанс по характеристикам своим отличается от американского. На ее взгляд, европейская практика выглядела более резкой, колкой, физически вызывающей, опасно ориентированной на боль, раны, насилие и болезни, чем относительно более мирная ее североамериканская разновидность. При сравнении высвечиваются различия в общественной и философской традициях, присущих двум континентам, а также специфика переживаемого в те годы каждым из них кризиса…

В Америке калифорниец Крис Верден особняком стоит среди тех мужчин-художников, в искусстве которых ранимое, уязвимое тело играло первую, а порой даже главную роль. Опусы Вердена, безусловно, отличались шальной беспечностью типа «оторви-голова». В своей так называемой «Стрельбе» (1971) Бёрден обратил жестокость культуры на себя самого и свою аудиторию: он попросил своего друга с определенной дистанции выстрелить в себя так, чтобы слегка задеть руку, — ив атмосфере сгущенного драматизма проверить тем самым связь междууспехом и поражением. Тот факт, что Бёрдена серьезно ранило пулей (то бишь поражение приняло самую болезненную форму), послужил лишь тому, чтобы подчеркнуть дилемму, в решение которой аудитория так и так, что называется, влипла: дилемму между «дистанцией», необходимой для традиционной драмы, и обязательством разделять ответственность за события, которые перед тобой происходят. Большая часть ранних перформансов Бёрдена состояла именно в том, что его обнаженное тело подвергалось физическому риску. Порой эти действия, особенно если не удавалось привлечь к ним внимания публики, снимались на 16-миллиметровую пленку. Другие сохранились только благодаря скупым записям Бёрдена, похожим на что-то вроде рецепта, руководства или формулы. Вот, например, рецепт перформанса «Тихо сквозь ночь»: «Мэйн-стрит, Лос-Анджелес, 12 сентября 1973 г. Держа руки за спиной, я медленно, струдом продвигаюсь по битому стеклу. Зрителей совсем мало, большинство просто прохожие». Пули, керосин, битое стекло, электрический провод под напряжением — вот что в ранние годы своего творчества Бёрден избирал инструментом причинения вреда себе самому, хотя он, подобно прочим концептуалистам, отлично знал, что события увековечиваются не в людской памяти, а в фотографиях и документах. К примеру, в отчете о перформансе Бёрдена «Kunst Kick» во время Базельской ярмарки искусств 1974 г. читаем: «На публичном открытии [ярмарки]… в двенадцать дня я улегся наверху двухпролетной лестницы в Мустермессе. Чарльз Хилл пинал мое тело, и я скатывался на две-три ступеньки кряду». Отсюда видно, что художник свел себя к объекту, подвергающемуся давлению или насилию, снова и снова провоцируя в своей небольшой, но все-таки порочно вуайеристской аудитории напряженность между виной и высвобождением от условностей. Кроме того, бесстрастный слог Бёрдена наводит на мысль то ли об иронии, то ли о псевдонаучном™, и этой бесстрастностью достигается пародийный эффект, намекающий, что высокотехнологичное общество умаляет личность.