Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve forgotten what war they were fighting. It’s pure American excess meeting accidental grace, which is maybe the only honest relationship America’s ever had with beauty.
This lamp will last 10,000 years. …
It’s such a weird idea, to make an object that is designed to be around for several thousand years. Nobody ever thinks in those terms anymore. At all. Do you know what I’m saying?
Chris Burden
There’s something almost obscene about that ambition, isn’t it? We’re talking about a species that can barely plan for next Tuesday, building monuments to a future we can’t even conceptualize. Instead of No Future, it’s screaming ALL THE FUTURE, EVERY FUTURE, FUTURES YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE, while everything around it crumbles into planned obsolescence and quarterly earnings reports.
The piece works because it shouldn’t. These streetlamps are obsolete technology, discarded infrastructure, the bones of a city that ate itself and shit out freeways. But Burden takes this junk, this beautiful antiquated junk, and makes it sing. At night, when they’re all lit up, it becomes this impossible cathedral of light: not religious, not spiritual, just there, glowing like some fever dream of civic pride that Los Angeles never actually had.
What kills me is the innocence of it. The naive belief that permanence matters, that we should build things to last millennia when we’ve proven we can’t even maintain the things we’ve got. It’s ridiculous. It’s heartbreaking. It’s exactly what art should be: a beautiful, defiant middle finger to entropy itself.