Conservative Chris Burden?

Chris Burden is one of the most famous performance artists around. Although he hasn't been in the news for a while, a single 1971 performance gave him nearly instant and certainly lasting fame. It was called Shoot. In it, a friend of Burden shot him in the arm.


This picture is included in nearly every important book about the history of peformance art.
Now, this could have been a scandal at the time, but Chris Burden has since become a "serious person", or rather, a professor at the prestigious UCLA. The story would normally end there, but here is what I found (quoted from the L.A. Times, found in volokh's blog):

Internationally known artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have retired abruptly from their longtime professorships at UCLA in part because the university refused to suspend a graduate student who used a gun during a classroom performance art piece, a spokeswoman for the artists said Friday.

"They feel this was sort of domestic terrorism. There should have been more outrage and a firmer response," said Sarah Watson, a director at [the gallery that] represents Burden and Rubins. . . .

The brief performance involved a simulation of Russian roulette, in which the student appeared before the class holding a handgun, put in what appeared to be a bullet, spun the cylinder, then pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, according to one student's account that was confirmed by law enforcement sources. The weapon didn't fire. The student quickly left the room, then the audience heard a shot from outside. . . .

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office determined Friday that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal misdemeanor charges . . . .

Lawrence Lokman, UCLA's assistant vice chancellor for communication, said the dean of students' office was continuing to investigate whether university rules against weapon possession were violated, which could lead to disciplinary action. . . .

Burden made his name in the early 1970s with influential and controversial performance art. In his best-known piece, "Shoot," performed in a Santa Ana gallery while he was a graduate student at UC Irvine, Burden had an assistant stand 15 feet away and shoot him in the upper arm with a .22-caliber rifle.

Watson said Burden's work was controlled and that the audiences never felt in jeopardy. The UCLA case is different, she said, because it was a surprise action and "there was genuine fear."

Even before the incident, Watson said, Burden and Rubins were unhappy at UCLA . . . .

Campus police said that in the course of the investigation, [the student] handed over a gun that was not a real firearm. Robison, the district attorney's spokeswoman, said there was "insufficient evidence to show a gun was discharged or any bullet fired." . . .

Barbara Drucker, who chairs the art department, and Ron Athey, a visiting instructor who taught the course and was present during the performance, conducted a meeting at the Warner Building a week after the incident to dispel rumors and allow students to air any concerns, as well as to emphasize rules against possessing weapons on university property . . . . Athey, known for piercing and cutting his body as a form of performance, did not return calls.

A graduate student who attended the meeting said a few students expressed safety concerns but more were alarmed that the university, if it disciplined the artist, would be cracking down on freedom of expression. . . .


Wow. now this is GREAT stuff! Not often do you get such a direct confrontation of an artist with the world he has participated in creating. At first it might seem like Burden is a hypocrite, not allowing others to do what he did himself some years ago. One of these ex-hippie parents trying to keep their children disciplined (not that they shouldn't).
But if you think about it, the situation is slightly different: there is a difference between freedom of expression and freedom of chosing suicide. You are not (legally, socially, some will say - morally) allowed to put your life at risk. Some artists do that - and did that. Burden never actually went that far. And if you look closely at the body art of the 60's and 70's, practically nobody really did. Marina Abramovic, for instance, came pretty close on several occasions, but she never actually insinuated she was going to kill herself. Schwarzkogler, one of the Vienna Actionists, died, but not in an "artistic suicide". His work was not about suicide and taking one's life. There are many other examples.

Francis Alÿs

For a long time Francis Alÿs was one of these artists I couldn't stand. He seemed incredibly pretentious in his "I'm-so-simple-and-so-deep" attitude. You see, the guy walked. That was the only thing he really did. He travelled around the world, in Mexico (which is where the Belgian artist currently lives), Sao Paulo, Stockholm, and - walked. He accompanied it obviously with "add-ons", like leaving a trace of paint or using shoes with magnets, so metal objects that lied on the ground would stick to them. But come on! Is that it? Can't you come up with anything better, stronger?
Well, he did - and proved that I had underestimated him. The work is called "When Faith Moves Mountains" and was made in 2002. Here are some resulting images:


Yes, those are people. More precisely, a group of 500 volunteers somewhere in Peru. They are moving a sand dune. With shovels.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant. More about it - and about the artist - here and here.

Reading Room

Do not pay attention to the dates on the posts below. In the "Year 2000" archives, I am creating a review section with recommended publications. (this project has begun in May 2005)

DO IT FOR ANYTHING'S SAKE. "Perform" by Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas

Perform
Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas

Revolutions are often brought to art by young rebels, restless and impatient with the categories and conventions they encountered, keen to create something "new, different". For better or for worse, they take on the shape of dramatic conflicts with the old dogmas, as the revolutionaries (try to) establish new points of view, codes, methods. The 20th-century avant-gardes have exploited this mechanism to its full potencial, and beyond. They fought for modernity (futurism), or peace (dadaism), or the "true inner self" (a lot of the avant-garde of the 60's and 70's). But they fought - they were loud even when they were fighting for introspection.
What struck me in Perform was that these works are not loud. Some of them might be noisy, many are engaged and rebellious. But they are all serene, discrete. They know their place in the order of things, or maybe they simply don't pay much attention to it - in any case, the serenity prevails. What changes is the thing. You see, a revolution does take place, because of the way those artists concentrate on the object, the way they allow themselves to speak through it, or rather, to create the right conditions to make it speak. They do not demand, they do not state. They do things. Take the French artist Boris Achour, who in his L'Aligneur de Pigeons ("Pigeon Aligner") creates a narrow trough filled with corn that through its linear shape aligns the pigeons that eat from it. It is a small gesture that brings order, or blinks an eye, or does, something. The intervention is small enough to make it accessible, believable, to make me want to keep on watching. Or reading for that matter, since the descriptions of the individual performances are rather short. But we get the hang of it. We swing from one story to another, and every now and then an alternative idea might come up: the book should have some blank pages for notes. Fortunately, the margins are large.
The key of the book is simple: performance is not where we might think it is. It can surprize us in a photo, a building, a dance or a man that imitates his own father (Roberto Cuoghi). It is not necessarily about the very broad idea that anything could be a performance. It is much more about discovering how performance travels from one work to another, how its dynamics transform, how they fit different forms of expression. That is why a "classical" performance, like Allan Kaprow's Yard, can be found next to a sculpture (say, Yinka Shonibare) or a huge pizza (Paola Pivi): if today's creators often switch from one discipline to another (though a pizza-only specialist would be something, wouldn't it?), the audience does it much more. The only ones that seemed to remain behind in this "art zapping" phenomenon were the critics and theoreticians. Now, the gap has closed. What helped was the change in the attitude of the artists themselves:

Our first performances took shape as complicity exercises, like simple acts through which we tried to find each other's rhythm, such as by knitting and undoing the knitting in alternating patterns. (...) The problem was that (...) our first performances were exactly as embarrassing to watch as only performance art can be. You know, when it comes to a point where the toes of the audience really start to hurt and everyone but the performers gets soaking wet from sweating.

- Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset put it quite bluntly: performance art used to be a creepy experience. Everyone would be feeling quite uncomfortable, and if you felt that, it meant the performer was "certainly onto something". These times are slowly, yet surely heading for an end. Of course, some great classics remain. But even here, Joan Jonas knew how to choose the right work: Marina Abramović is shown through her astonishing Balkan Baroque, in which she

scrubbed the flesh off [bloody beef] bones for five days, six hours a day, while singing, almost hypnotically, songs she remembered from her childhood.

(remember Abramović was born in Belgrade, and the work was presented in 1997). This is my favorite piece by Abramović, as it stays with us, without running away too quickly into life-and-death metaphors.

Performance art seemed to stagnate for some time - it was too easy to guess what to expect. No revolution can remain original forever. If it could, it would be a terrible view. In Perform, we see how the ideals of the performance art of the 60's and 70's were integrated into new ways of doing things, how they got a new twist - and gained the freshness I hoped to find.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts

- John Locke, quoted in Perform (discover it at Amazon)

(date of review: June 13, 2005)

LIVE AND KICKING. "Live. Art and Performance", ed. Adrian Heathfield

Live. Art and Performance
edited by Adrian Heathfield

The drive to the live has long been the critical concern of performance and Live Art where the embodied event hasbeen employed as a generative force: to shock, to destroy pretence, to break apart traditions of representation, to foreground the experiential, to open different kinds of engagement with meaning, to activate audiences. This book is about the life of these traditions in the present; about the 'genre' of performance and Live Art; about the live element of contemporary art, its aesthetic, philosophical and cultural potential. Live looks at the performnace of the very late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

- Introduction, Adrian Heathfield

This is not a comprehensive study. In fact, it isn't a study at all. It seems careless in its selection of artists (Forced Entertainment and Marina Abramovic appear twice, for instance), it does not explain the theory behind every work it presents, or give more than I tiny paragraph about the artist's biography. It lets the artists do the talking. And they do. Or they don't. Some, like (Forced Entertainment's) Tim Etchell, are as much writers as performers. They impress with their honesty, attract with their wit, provoke with their straight-forwardness:

Perhaps what we did was not so new, exciting and innovative. Those were the favoured words of PR people and the press and the favoured modalities of late capitalism in all its destructive, hysterical and hyperbolic excesses. No. No thanks. Maybe what we did was not so new and exciting. But old. And simple.

To stand in front of other people.
I am forty years old.
To be there. To be present. To be visible.
Alive to the possibilities of the moment.

Others, as the group Goat Island, seem more comfortable with the image, the layout, the surrounded, scattered words. They are more laconic, disciplined:

We make a film at ehgteen frames per seconf in a time of twenty-four frames per second. The film lasts one minute. We have eight pages. This leaves forty-five blank frames per page. We fill them with words. At each missing section, we say, 'We are missing the beginning...' or,'...missing a dance. We apologise...' Then we wait until the missing times has elapsed. We replace missing parts with substitutes. We call this 'repair'.

All this makes a lot of sense. Plenty. Because it is a fragment, a recording of an instant (the book came about thanks to one event (though not only out of it), called Live Culture and presented at the Tate Modern in March 2003. Which explains the collection. And the predominance of British artists. And the intended gaps and spaces. But we are intelligent readers, and the authors know it. We love to fill the gaps, to say, 'ah, yes, if this is so, I get the feeling we're somewhere about...here' (pointing in some personally recognizable direction). This is what we do as spectators, and what we do as readers. And if you agree with me on this, you will find as much pleasure as I do in finding your own way out, or in, or through. With a little help from several wonderful critics (think RoseLee Goldberg and others, no worse writers or scholars), who do give some (though fortunately not too much) context of the amazingly photographed and incredibly diversified performances.

Don't lose heart. There is an audience that does not want old kinds of dramatic bull shit.
To stand in front of people. To be there. To be present. To be visible. From the top of my head to the tips of my feet.

- Tim Etchells, in: Live. Art and Performance (discover it at Amazon)
Some of the other included artists are: Ron Athey, Franko B, Bobby Baker, Jérôme Bel, Ricardo Dominguez, Jan Fisher, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Oleg Kulik, Alastair MacLennan, Hayley Newman (I hate her), Peggy Phelan, La Ribot and Stelarc.

(date of review: May 04, 2005, update: May 06)