Interview with Chris Burden
Conducted by Tiffany Barber
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The close reading most North American students do in English classes comes largely from an interpretive tradition known by lit nerds as New Criticism, a close-reading approach to poetry that posits the text’s (rather than the writer’s) primacy, and examines textual features instead of such externalities as author biography, or historical context. This approach makes the text an autonomous entity, only as good as its parts are discernible, cohesive, and therefore finally effective. In other words? It isn’t necessary to know who wrote the thing, where it was penned, or even why it was written in the first place – “Study the poem itself; state what it’s made of, and how it’s used, and why it all works, all together.”

If this sounds horribly impersonal, that’s precisely the point: close reading is meant to be empirical. Nevertheless, it is not cold. In fact, if performed conscientiously, this kind of analysis applied not only to the verbal but also the visual/concrete arts reveals the talent and tools craftsmen avail themselves of to create their works, whether in space or on the page. This seems true especially of today’s Chris Burden – renowned artist of various media and resident of Topanga, CA, northwest of Los Angeles proper – and his pieces.

During EM contributor Tiffany Barber’s interview with him, Burden described his most recent large-scale work, What My Dad Gave Me (2008), as a “poetic model”; elsewhere, he called it a “poetic interpretation of the Rockefeller Center” (NYT, 08/06/08). He also characterized his Beam Drop (1985; soon to be recreated in Brazil) as “large abstract expressionist painting”, a piece whose execution is filmically documented beginning to end. The recurrence, then, of the poetic epithet, along with the visual text of Burden’s physical constructions and their recordings, invites a New Critical reading that necessarily hinges upon examination of Art-piece sans help from Maker: as it happens, Chris Burden was affable but staunch in his pre-interview resolve to revisit nothing of his storied professional past.

This proscription, expressly precluding questions about the live Body Art endurance performance pieces that launched his career and established his reputation through/on/with his literal person, naturally placed limits on EM’s conversation with him. The interview text below is therefore distinctly terse, conspicuously lacking reference to either 1971’s Shoot (perpetuated, albeit inaccurately, in urban legend as “he had someone shoot him with a .22 rifle for art, but was accidentally shot for dead”) or 1974’s Trans-fixed (featuring Burden nailed through the hands, crucifixion-style, to the rear of a Volkswagen Bug), two definitive works that made his name synonymous with audacious iconoclasm.

What Burden actually did offer was efficient, pointed in detail and sparing in anecdote. And owing to these qualities, when considered alternatively and more expansively, Burden’s deliberate reticence about the kind of professional resume others might exploit – taken together with composed statements about more recently completed works like Urban Light (2000-2007) – may ultimately reveal more about this American artist’s continued commitment to challenging artistic convention than any self-exposing disclosure could. Chris Burden’s contemporary body of work is indeed poetic and model, in both the descriptive and the nominative… it is an oeuvre unique in demonstration of the peculiar ferocity of art and its practice.

Evil Monito: Can you talk about your recent Public Art Fund Commission, What My Dad Gave Me? And your forthcoming project in Brazil?

Chris Burden: When building Hell Gate (1998), I needed a part that was a part of the first set of Erector Set parts produced between 1913 and 1923. Since then, I[‘d] always wanted to make a skyscraper out of the reproduced Erector Set parts. What My Dad Gave Me is a poetic model. It references both the confidence and support I gained from my father as a youth as well as a certain optimism at the turn of the century before World War I.

For my next project, Beam Drop: Brazil, I’m recreating a piece I originally constructed in 1985. The piece is meant to be both a large abstract expressionist painting and a steel sculpture… constructed by filling in a 10-foot deep pit with loose dirt and wet concrete and dropping 100 vertically-raised steel I-beams into the pit. The process and end result are filmed.

Beam Drop is a significant work because the I-beam is the building block of corporate architecture. The capricious way in which the piece is enacted – the serious, rigid, precise process and using the material, steel, in a light-hearted way – is anti-architecture and anti-corporate architecture. Not many artists have used steel. Everyone is very careful because the material has so much potential for danger.

EM: Recently you’ve completed a number of public projects. How does Urban Light (2000-2007), in particular, fit within your larger practice?

Urban Light was a specific commission for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the LACMA in which I reproduced 202 cast-iron lampposts that I found at the Rose Bowl swap meet. It has become a kind of temple, an architectural form with a roof of light. The lampposts are sort of nostalgic, ornate, and both a tribute to an early form of public art and Los Angeles’ history… there used to be 40,000 of these lampposts in Los Angeles; now there are only 1,000. Ultimately, Urban Light symbolizes the effects of modernization in terms of cities. Street lamps now light up freeways rather than neighborhoods. In that way, Urban Light really fits within my curiosities concerning technology and engineering. As an artist, you follow your line of curiosity.

I think a lot of the sculptures I have done are performative. For instance, the lights [of Urban Light] light up the dark in addition to creating a physical, architectural space. The skyscraper [What My Father Gave Me] stands erect and defies gravity. [My] bridges connect A to B. In that sense, they are performative but my sculptures also push the limits and express radical ideas.

Published on 18 November 2008 | 3 |