His father was an engineer, his mother a biologist and art restorer. He was reared in Cambridge, Mass., and, thanks to his father’s professional travels, in China, Switzerland, France and Italy.When Chris Burden was 12, an accident on Elba seemed to prefigure his adult career. Tired, hungry and dirty, he smashed the clock and left his glassy confines.Would he otherwise have lain there until he died, The New Yorker asked him in 2007?Chris Burden, a Conceptualist With Scars, Dies at 69Chris Burden, courtesy of the Chris Burden Studio and Gagosian Gallery. The exceedingly high-risk body works crafted by Chris Burden are a means of working through ideas, while attracting attention to the violence in our culture and the media, which seems to be in command of all it delivers. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, California. Burden confirmed as much in a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, in which he looked back on “Doomed,” a conceptual piece of his from 1975.One of Mr. Burden’s most discomforting works — for spectators and for him — “Doomed” was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His survivors include his second wife, Nancy Rubins, a sculptor.In an act whose irony appeared lost on no one, Mr. Burden created vast, engineered sculptural installations, including “Urban Light” (2008), an illuminated forest of more than 200 cast-iron street lamps in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Mr. His work was the subject of a major retrospective, “In later years, Mr. He was 69.The cause was melanoma, his assistant, Tim Rogeberg, said.One of the foremost performance artists of the 1970s, Mr. His first significant performance work, “In that work, a kind of human origami installation, Mr. Summary of Chris Burden. To others, it celebrated the ability of Mr.
Come and see if a scripture, or a story behind a piece speaks to you, and be blessed. Burden “Modernism’s Evel Knievel.”Images from many of those works are in the collections of major museums worldwide. Where traditional artists had long depicted images on canvas, he In 2012, Los Angeles Magazine called Mr. Nearly all of Chris Burden’s numerous and generally laudatory obituaries include in the title or first line, “…the artist who had himself shot.” Burden lay on the floor beneath a lean-to fashioned from a glass panel.By prearrangement, he would not move from the spot unless an audience member intervened. I serve as Executive Director to the Estate of Chris Burden and the Studio of Nancy Rubins, where I am responsible for stewarding Burden’s art historical legacy and promoting Rubins’ artistic practice. There, as museumgoers looked on and a clock ticked away above him, Mr. Burden began his career by making art that employed the most minimal materials possible: segments of his own body. Mr. Burden a drink of water. At issue was their displeasure at U.C.L.A.’s failure to discipline an art student who, as part of a work performed in class, played Russian roulette with what appeared to be a loaded gun.If their resignation seemed to suggest that there are limits even to the art of endurance, Mr. Burden enrolled in the master of fine arts program at the University of California, Irvine. Burden with “Porsche with Meteorite” (2013) at his studio in Topanga Canyon. Burden’s first marriage, to Barbara Burden, onto whose nude body he flicked tiny incendiary devices as part of “Match Piece,” a 1972 installation, ended in divorce. Burden was transported to the hospital “and filed the requisite police report (‘accident’).”Its sober concerns notwithstanding, Mr. Burden’s work was not lacking in wicked humor. His studio was located in Topanga Canyon. Following a decade of his performance-based works, Chris Burden began to create large-scale installations and sculptures. From 1967 to 1976, Burden was married to Barbara Burden, who documented and participated in several of his early artworks. Performed against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, it evoked early Christian martyrs, latter-day Zen masters and the violence of the war itself.“Shoot,” for instance, was performed the year after the As The New York Times later reported, Mr. Mindful that works of art are meant to be seen but not touched, no one did. To some observers, it recalled the gleeful tradition of American hucksterism à la P. T. Barnum. The piece was made for a retrospective of his work at the New Museum. Burden’s art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and elsewhere. Burden had himself nailed, Christlike, over the hump of a Volkswagen Beetle.Chris Burden at Rockefeller Center, where “What My Dad Gave Me,” a 65-foot “skyscraper” fashioned from replicas of Erector set pieces, was exhibited in 2008.Mr. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. Burden and Ms. Rubins, both faculty members at the University of California, Los Angeles, resigned from the university in protest in 2005. Burden had largely abandoned body art. Severely injured in a motor-scooter crash there, he endured emergency surgery — performed without anesthesia — on his left foot. All Rights Reserved. Burden said in By the end of the ’70s, Mr. These are pieces you can give to encourage, to bring comfort, pieces to remind you, as a believer in Christ, what you are here for in this dark world. All Rights Reserved.Chris Burden, courtesy of the Chris Burden Studio and Gagosian Gallery. (“You can’t keep doing the same work over and over, otherwise it’s an act,” he told The Washington Post, with evident self-knowing humor, in 1982. 3 hp DC motors with motor controllers, 1080 custom manufactured die-cast cars, HO-scale train sets with controllers and tracks, steel, aluminum, shielded copper wire, copper sheet, brass, various plastics, assorted woods and manufactured wood products, Legos, Lincoln Logs, Dado Cubes, glass, ceramic and natural stone tiles, acrylic and oil-base paints, rubber, and sundry adhesives, 117 × 339 × 230 inches …