Chris Burden - Definition and Overview

Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist.

He studied visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971. In 1978 he became a Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's mishandling of a graduate student's classroom performance piece featuring a possible loaded gun.

Burden's own reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the performance piece Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his right arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Other performances from the same period were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972) and Fire Roll (1973).

From 1975 and on he made fewer performances and began a period in which he created installations and objects that dealt with science and politics. In 1975 he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon". Some of his other works from that period are The Speed of Light Machine (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light, and the installation C.B.T.V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made television.