Beehive Bunker, 2006
Good morning art reads:
I dedicate this Beyond Click Bait Monday to Chris Burden, who died yesterday at the age of 69 in his Topanga Canyon home.
Burden was one of the first major artists I ever met, and from the moment I saw him, it was hard for me to reconcile the humble, quiet man before me (who switched off between two pairs of glasses depending on what he needed to see) and the history of radical art performances that had made his name. I wondered what the scar must look like from Shoot, 1971. Was this the man who crawled through glass? Was this the man who locked himself in a locker? Was this the man that sailed the length of Baja in a boat carrying only water or bicycled across death valley?
Chris Burden, though known for these performances, was a sculptor through and through, among the best in Los Angeles which means among the best in the world (New York has absolutely nothing on L.A. in terms of sculpture). The performances, from the beginning, seemed a type of sculpture, a way of charging a 3-D space (sometimes, literally, as when Burden filled a gallery with water and into it sent an electric charge). One of my favorites occurred in White Light/White Heat in 1975, where Burden lived in Ronald Feldman gallery out of view for 22 days without saying a word or making his presence known in anyway. How about that? The mere rumor of someone's unseen presence becoming a sculpture.
Burden was fond of saying that he chose to be an artist, though the clear path for him out of childhood would have been to follow his father into science and engineering. What we now know for certain is that even though Burden made the choice to be an artist, he eventually became an engineer as well. As the years went on, Burden tested the limits of engineering and, I would say, made a clear argument for why the gap between art and science is not ever severe but more a matter of perspective. Burden's work often showed the imagination and the dreams of youth playing a large role in the triumphs and horrors of adults. His best works walked the line between menace and wonder, as the best engineering does. That feeling of smallness and overwhelming immensity we feel at the Golden Gate Bridge, under the dome of the Vatican, or on the edge of the Hoover Dam was Burden's bread and butter.
Three of Burden's best engineering works reside in Inhotim, Brazil, in a large sculpture park owned by Bernardo Paz. SAMSON, 1985 is installed in one of the buildings, a large jack attached to a turnstile that visitors expand slightly as they enter the gallery. The two arms of the jack stretch across through the room from wall to wall and you get the eerie, though exhilarating, feeling that you are contributing to the slow demise of the gallery. Also at Inhotim is Beam Drop, 2008, which is exactly what it sounds like: Burden drops massive iron beams from a height into waiting wet concrete. What is a feat of engineering is also a feat of reckless abandon and randomness.
However, one of my favorite Burden pieces is shown at the top of this page, Beehive Bunker, 2006. When I think of Burden's departure and what is no doubt happening right now, his preparation for burial, it is this piece that comes to the fore. The piece feels ancient, like a sort of temple or mausoleum, but it is made of bags of unmixed concrete. The weather both hardens and destroys the piece. While aspects of the bags will become rock, the pre-set clumsiness of the effort guarantees that the sculpture will eventually collapse. For Burden, danger is always the flip side of wonder. The potential for ruin in a way allows the potential for glory. For some reason, I see that perfectly in Beehive Bunker.
Christopher Knight's memorial can be found here:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-chris-burden-dies-20150510-story.html#page=2
Video of the Week:
One of Chris Burden's more extreme marriages of performance and sculpture was his Flying Steamroller, 2006. In the piece, Burden counterweights a massive steamroller and gaining enough speed, Burden is able to send the steamroller into the air. It is an engineering feat mixed with pure magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9K69zHLIeY
Poem of the Week:
What poem would apply to Burden? Is there a text where muscle and pressure meets grace? Is there a text where wonder and ruin are closely bound? I typically try to not be obvious in my poem selections, to try to give my readers something unexpected each week. This time, however, there is only one poem to work here, and that is the famous Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sailing-byzantium
One click deeper:
I watched the documentary on Roger Ebert yesterday, Life Itself, which I would recommend to anyone. Full of candor and spirit, the documentary shows Ebert's last days, which were full of optimism and love though also battered by immense difficulty. Turns out, Ebert wrote of Chris Burden, which I was happy to see. The essay is found here:
http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/chris-burden-my-god-are-they-going-to-leave-me-here-to-die
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