Chris Burden
For this week's artist research we were to choose from the performance artist list. Like I normally do, I browsed many of the different artists work to find one that really stood out to me. What I realized when browsing a lot of these artists was that I was pretty unfamiliar with the performance art world and that a lot of it was purely to draw negative emotions out of the viewer. None of the artists that I looked at really impressed me with the beauty of their work, but some definitely stood out due to the ideas behind them. Chris Burden is a prime example. He is most famous for his 1971 piece, titled
Shoot, which involved an assistant shooting his left arm from a distance of about five meters.
Most of his well known performances come from a series where he focused on personal danger as being the artists form of expression. Trans-Fixed was another gruesome performance where he basically was wheeled out of a garage on the front of a Volkswagen Beetle. He had both of his hands nailed to the surface of the car much like a crucifixion. The performance involved him on top of this car while the engine reved for two minutes before being wheeled back inside the garage.
Another very famous and dangerous performance he performed was entitled
Doomed and took place in 1975. The idea behind this work was that he would lay motionless underneath a slate of glass in the middle of a Chicago art gallery. There was also a clock next to him marking the time he lay under the glass. His intention was to lay there without moving until someone interrupted him and the piece. It eventually ended over forty-five minutes later when a museum employee brought him a pitcher of water and placed it within reach. This prompted Burden to smash the glass and the clock, ending the performance.
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