Of course this part of the story works out fine in the end, because over all these years there has been plenty of information made available to anyone and everyone about Chris Burden. And over the years, thank goodness for cheap plane travel, jobs in curating and journalism, retrospectives, and the damned internet. And I finally saw The Big Wheel in person and in thunderous, terrifying motion, at Burden’s 2013 retrospective at the New Museum.
So early this morning (I’m writing this on Monday) my cell phone pings—no big deal. I’m a night owl so I’m not up yet. It pings again, and then one more time, and then I’m like: Oh shit. The repeating text ping. Something bad is happening.
It’s my boss, and she’s letting me know that Chris Burden is dead. He was 69. And then I join the small but very real heaving wave of the art-loving people and professionals, world-wide, who are genuinely dismayed by this news.
Chris Burden was—as far as my aesthetic, visceral, and intellectual understanding of art stretches—the most convincing living artist we had going. He frightened some people, and left others cold, but his art qualified the existence of a new kind of art from 1971 onward: When your own California art professors are reluctant to give you your MFA because what you do scares the daylights out of them, then you might be onto something. There are caveats to this idea nowadays, but back while the Vietnam War was raging, fear of art was a political issue.
That introduction to Burden’s work in my UNT art-appreciation class brought together for me a nearly instantaneous understanding, through its very intersection, of art forms I’d not been previously exposed to. It was performance, conceptual, something they were calling body art, and art that was profoundly politically engaged with its time in a way that was recent enough for me to comprehend. His extremes caught my attention, but the door his work opened—for my actual desire to see and understand contemporary art—lasts through today. And his rigor and commitment, his endurance and even gratuitousness is something I find missing in 99 percent of the art I see being made all around us these days.