Chris Burden (American, 1946–2015) made performances early in his career in which he put his own body at risk, including being shot in the arm in Shoot in 1971. From the late 1970s he turned to technology and the mechanics of construction. In later decades he made monumental sculptures and large-scale installations, several of them from toys and found objects.
Burden was born in Boston and moved to California in 1965. His first mature works of the early 1970s rested on the idea that important art of the future would be ephemeral and would address political, social, environmental and technological change. In Shoot, an assistant shot him in the left arm from five metres away in front of an audience of friends and peers at the F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California. He described it as an inquiry into what it feels like to be shot. For White Light/White Heat he spent twenty-two days on a platform above the floor of the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, out of sight of visitors. He said that his own aim was to examine “the origin of power both physical and bureaucratic”. The TV Commercials, from 1973 to 1977, explores the place of culture in the country's mercantile systems. He was among the artists who helped form the core of the Long Beach Museum of Art's early video collection. In 2007 Eva and Franco Mattes re-performed Shoot with avatars in Second Life. The artist Julien Prévieux has called Burden his hero from art school, and his own performances in the early 2000s partly replayed Burden's 1970s pieces.
