Member-only story
Appreciating contemporary art
Burden (2017): a movie about theatrical extremes
Performance art may be baffling, but that doesn’t make it garbage
Chris Burden (1946–2015) an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation.
…
Many of the talking heads interviewed in this film give little mirthless chuckles as they discuss Chris Burden’s early work, as if they’re still not really sure what he was up to. They’re telling us the whole thing might, in the end, turn out to have been no more than a joke. Burden also appears ambivalent about his own efforts in the sense that, although he doesn’t giggle when explaining a piece, he often opts for banal, non-artistic explanations — the sort of boilerplate anyone might come up with — thereby undermining the cogency of the actions themselves. The documentary also gives the impression — possibly unintended — of wanting to consign Burden’s performances to an early phase in his career, thereby encouraging us to view the performances as student ‘experimentation’ — itself a subsection of vacuous tomfoolery — rather than as anything more serious.
Performance art is a highly specialised form of theatre which, rather than relying wholly…
