Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Chris Burden crawled through broken glass because the gallery was air-conditioned and someone had to feel something real. This was 1971, maybe '72, when art had gotten so goddamn cerebral it forgot it had a body, forgot bodies could bleed, break, that pain wasn't just a signifier but an actual motherfucking fact.
The thing about Burden is he understood what Warhol wouldn't admit and what the minimalists were too precious to acknowledge: that spectacle and sincerity aren't opposites. When he had his friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle, it wasn't some grad school semiotics game. It was as unironic as a car crash. The bullet tore through flesh at 1100 feet per second and what came out wasn't meaning. It was blood and the sudden understanding that the membrane between art and life was always bullshit.
He locked himself in a locker for five days. He laid under a tarp on a LA freeway while traffic roared overhead. Each piece a dare, a middle finger, a question no one wanted asked: What are you willing to endure to feel alive? What risks would you take to make someone else feel something?
The academic types tried to file him under "body art" or "performance," like taxonomies could contain someone who treated his own flesh like a material no more precious than steel or concrete. But Burden was doing something rawer, stripping away every buffer between impulse and consequence, revealing the electric brutality underneath our polite arrangements.
He made art dangerous again. Made it hurt. Made it matter in a way that couldn't be theorized away in a seminar room while everyone nodded knowingly over wine.
Wanderlust 2017
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 […]
ReadSpeculation 2013
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
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FalseArt 2013
When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, […]
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