כריס ברדן
КРИС БЕРДЕН

Porsche with Meteorite

source: atarara
“Porsche With Meteorite”は1974 のポルシェと隕石が鉄筋の両端にぶら下げられて
テコの原理でバランスをとっています。
ちなみにこの隕石は”eBay”で見つけたそうです。それまでもeBayから小さな隕石
を買っていたそうですが、ある日それまでに見た事がない大きな物が出ていて、お
まけに送料無料だったのでとにかく買って、その後で作品のアイディアが湧いてき
たそうです。
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source: galleristny

One day the artist Chris Burden was poking around eBay, looking at meteorites. “I was buying little ones and stuff, and all of a sudden I see this one, the biggest meteorite I had ever seen for sale,” he told me earlier this month at the New Museum, the day after a retrospective of more than 40 years of his art opened there. “And there was free shipping, you know?” He paused. “What, a 400-pound meteorite? Free shipping? I’ve never seen one that big. So I bought the meteorite with no idea what I was going to do with it whatsoever, and then I started thinking.”

Mr. Burden, who is perhaps still best known for Shoot, an art performance he did in 1971 in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm, has reached 67 with a stocky, vigorous build. His close-cropped hair and neatly buttoned shirt give him the air of a former boxer who became a physics professor but still hits the gym now and then. He speaks at a rapid-fire pace. “One day, I woke up,” he continued, about the meteorite, “and hmm…”

The sculpture he made with that space rock is now on the fourth floor of the museum. The meteorite hangs on one end of a long steel balance. On the other end is a working yellow 1974 Porsche 914. For years, the car was parked with the rest of his cars at his home and studio out in Southern California’s rural Topanga Canyon. Now it’s sculpture.

Why that pairing? “There’s just something—you know that Germans have been known for metallurgy since the Huns,” Mr. Burden said. “There was some sort of weird relation between the nickel iron in the meteorite and the Porsche. You know what I mean?” He continued, scrunching up his face and turning his voice into that of an old-timey storyteller, “A really good German craftsman, with a good hammer, could make a really great Porsche out of that meteorite. Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink.” He pretended to hammer away. “It’s a silly fantasy,” he laughed.

Perhaps, but it’s also a rich one. One could think of that sculpture, and others he has made over the past 35 or so years out of similarly dramatic materials, as precisely calibrated equations, each designed to produce in the viewer certain uncanny feelings.

The show also has Tower of Power (1985), which is a pyramid of 100 1-kilo gold bricks surrounded by matchstick men, The Big Wheel (1979), a 3-ton, 8-foot-tall, cast-iron flywheel that a motorcyclist whips up to 200 rpm by revving a 1968 Benelli, and a new work, two reproductions of mortars made in the U.K. in 1692 that weigh in at no less than 24,000 pounds, including cradles and cannonballs. “I saw those in the Tower of London,” he said. “I went, ‘Holy cow, that is a chunk of bronze.’”

Those twin cannons took more than seven years to make. It was tricky to find a fabricator capable of doing a 9,000-pound pour of bronze. (One ripped him off.) Eventually, he found a factory in England that does it the old way, using things like horse manure and peat moss. The cannons are identical to the originals except that they don’t have firing holes. “We didn’t want to get in trouble at customs,” Mr. Burden said, imagining the response of an official. “‘You are not allowed to import weapons of mass destruction!’” They imported them as urns.

These are awe-inspiring objects, and they have rarely been shown in the United States. (This show, organized by the New Museum Director Lisa Phillips, Associate Director Massimiliano Gioni, former Associate Curator Jenny Moore and Assistant Curator Margot Norton, is his first American survey in 25 years.) However, it remains a task to square them with the 54 trailblazing, often-harrowing performances by which Mr. Burden made his name in the 1970s.

Installation view with ‘Pair of Namur Mortars,’ 2013. (Photo by Benoit Pailley/New Museum)
Installation view with ‘Pair of Namur Mortars,’ 2013. (Photo by Benoit Pailley/New Museum)
There are superficial connections to be made in terms of materials. The Porsche harkens back to the Volkswagen he was nailed to, through his hands, in Trans-Fixed (1974), and the burly cannons are of course outsize versions of the handgun he fired at an airplane in 747 (1973) and his ex-girlfriend’s .22-caliber rifle that a friend wielded in Shoot. “It was very clean in its execution,” Mr. Burden has said of that piece, explaining why he still considers it a favorite, because he produced “a major work of art in such a small amount of time.”

His gargantuan sculptures take far longer to produce, but they share that clean, economical elegance, an aesthetic ethos that Mr. Burden says he picked up at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied with Robert Irwin, a leader in Southern California’s Light and Space movement, who was gradually making his art increasingly ethereal. “My education was right on the cusp of when Minimalism started to be at its zenith, so that’s what I was trained as, and that’s how I got into performance art, really,” Mr. Burden said. “It was a reductive attitude, to get down to the essence, to boil away the excess, the superfluous.”

During his education, he grappled with the differences between two- and three-dimensional art. “Sculpture you have to walk around. That’s a big difference, right? So you start to think, well, maybe the essence of sculpture is movement. Maybe that’s where the art is—in the movement, not in the object. That’s how I got to do performances, really. This reductive kind of thing.”

Mr. Burden’s exhibition extends to the New Museum’s exterior. He has mounted two tall aluminum skyscrapers on the roof and a 30-foot-long sailboat called Ghost Ship (2005) on the facade. They’re remnants of his initial plan for the show: to build a version of a city he calls Xanadu on top of and around the museum using his art, including model skyscrapers, lines of lampposts and other projects. The interior was to remain empty. Engineers produced preliminary studies, and he said, “I was pleasantly surprised that the building could physically take that.” The problem was the financing. “I realized, wait a minute, this is a $6-to-$10 million project at the very least, and I thought, you know, bottom line, I don’t think Mr. Gagosian”—his dealer—“is going to pay for that. Right?”

But the sixareen fishing boat that survived that shift in plan is no simple cast-off artwork. It’s an operation vessel, self-guided by GPS, and made an unmanned 400-mile journey in the North Sea a few years back. “It’s still symbolically some sort of escape vehicle,” he said.

Mr. Burden has sailed his entire life. He picked it up as a child in Boston. (“I think I was always fascinated by sailboats as a kid, because my dad said, you know, that it’s possible to sail upwind.”) In a 1973 performance B.C. Mexico, he piloted a kayak to an island south of the border, where he remained in sweltering heat for 11 days. This new boat, commissioned from expert ship builders, is part of a long-running quest.

“It’s always been my dream to be able to make a sailboat that you could dial in the latitude and longitude, push it off the dock, and it would sail there automatically,” he said. Ghost Ship still requires its sails be handled by remote control, which is a tricky business; it’s not quite completely self-sufficient.

His ideal boat would require no diesel fuel and have no labor costs. It’s a marvelous thought: one of man’s earliest inventions piloting itself. “I think it’s theoretically possible,” Mr. Burden said confidently, mentioning articles he has been reading about 3-D-printed catamarans. “It’ll happen someday.”
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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.
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source: wsimagazine

1 tonnellata d’Arte… O di acciaio? Un’opera architettonica lunga 8 metri e mezzo… O un ponte senza viti, né elementi fissanti? Una luccicante piramide d’oro… O un’i- e a-llusione al potere del denaro?

Chris Burden arriva al New Museum di New York con i piedi di piombo. Extreme Measures è la sua prima grande mostra personale negli Stati Uniti e presenta una selezione di opere, dove i limiti fisici e morali sono messi in discussione offrendo una straordinaria opportunità di esaminare i modi con cui Burden ha continuamente indagato il punto di rottura dei materiali, delle istituzioni, e anche se stesso.

A salutare i visitatori già dalla strada è Ghost Ship (2005), una barca lunga 9 metri, appesa alla parete esterna del museo, progettata originariamente per navigare senza pilota quattrocento miglia lungo la costa della Scozia. La sfida con la gravità continua al piano terra dove è stato installato un grande camion che sorregge con la sola forza dell’equilibrio un cubo di acciaio del peso di 1 tonnellata. Il gioco con il peso e le misure continua poi su tutti i cinque piani del museo, dove sono esposte le opere degli ultimi quattro decenni.

Dai primi lavori degli anni ’70, come Big Wheel (1979), un’enorme ruota d’acciaio alimentata da una Benelli del 1968, fino ad ambiziose sculture di crescente dimensione e complessità come Three Arch Dry Stock Bridge, 1/4 scale (2013), un ponte costruito senza l’utilizzo di alcun mezzo fissante, sorretto soltanto da un intelligente incastro e la forza della gravità. Meraviglie dell’ingegneria che incantano e indagano i rapporti di politica e potere degli Stati Uniti. Emblematico in questo senso L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993). La serie di uniformi in lana per “giganti”, è stata realizzata in risposta alle rivolte di Los Angeles che hanno seguito il pestaggio di Rodney King e parlano di impegno critico di Burden verso le figure autoritarie, la presenza militare nel paese, e altre figure di potere. Gli stessi temi vengono esplorati in un’affascinante installazione di 625 sottomarini in miniatura, appesi da invisibili fili dal soffitto: All the Submarines of the United States of America (1987). Nel suo anno di creazione il titolo dell’opera era perfettamente autoreferenziale, appunto “Tutti i sottomarini degli Stati Uniti d’America.”

La bellezza e complessità delle opere seducono non solo per la loro monumentalità, ma anche per l’impiego di materiali e tecniche d’installazione che sono al limite del possibile. Insieme alla presentazione delle prime performance, opere video e un’ampia documentazione cartacea, questa mostra sfida le nostre convenzioni e opinioni circa il mondo dell’arte contemporanea e una società basata, appunto, sulla misura.
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source: fortunegreece

Ο Chris Burden είναι γνωστός στους καλλιτεχνικούς κύκλους εδώ και 40 χρόνια. Από τα εμβληματικότερα έργα του είναι ένας γερανός που κρατά υψωμένο ένα βάρος ενός τόνου από χυτοσίδηρο (Ton Crane Truck, 2009), δύο κανόνια με τις μπάλες τους (Pair of Namur Mortars, 2013) και μια πυραμίδα από ράβδους χρυσού αξίας 4 εκατ. δολαρίων (Tower of Power, 1985).

Όμως το έκθεμα που τραβά περισσότερο τα βλέμματα στην έκθεση που γίνεται αυτές τις μέρες στο New Museum of Contemporary Art στη Νέα Υόρκη, είναι μια μεταλλική κατασκευή που ισορροπεί από τη μία πλευρά μια κίτρινη Porshe 914 του 1974 και από την άλλη έναν αυθεντικό μετεωρίτη βάρους 165 κιλών, φτιάχνοντας μια τραμπάλα δύο εξωτικών δημιουργημάτων.

Λίγο πιο πέρα, μια μοτοσικλέτα Benelli του 1968 μαρσάρει και με τη ρόδα της κινεί έναν τεράστιο τροχό βάρους τριών τόνων και διαμέτρου 2,5 μέτρων (The Big Wheel, 1979).

Η έκθεση Extreme Measures, όπως μας πληροφορεί το μουσείο, επικεντρώνεται σε μέτρα και σταθμά, σύνορα και δεσμά, εκεί όπου τα φυσικά και ηθικά όρια αμφισβητούνται