This Burden lightbulb was pre-Internet, by years, so as we did back in those days, I took myself to the campus library. After loading up microfiche and microfilm of dispassionate LA newspaper stories about early Burden work like him crawling across glass and shutting himself in a locker, I finally asked the art teacher where I might get more meaty information on Burden and the meaningfulness of his work, and she sent me to the art-media library at the top of the art building. But still, there just wasn’t that much information there, or I simply had no map for navigating old issues of Artforum.
I asked around, but my friends in the art-and-music dorm didn’t know much about him either; we were all still teenagers. Thinking back on this, it seems insane that Burden information wasn’t more available to a Texas kid at a big state university, but Burden’s early works had created their own kind of folkloric mystery realm, even though he had moved past his extreme performances by that time and started on his engineered pieces, including The Big Wheel and Samson. And I was such an intrepid little 18-year old researcher, up to a point. I would track down the most obscure stuff on the Replacements and Elvis Costelleo—piled on my shelves at home were old back issues and other ephemera I would drive all hours to buy off of crusty old collectors. Why couldn’t I get the same satisfaction with Burden? And I hadn’t met the art school’s formidable Vernon Fisher yet, who might have filled me in (or chosen not to). I wasn’t even an art major.