Burden

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Monday, February 6th, 2017
6:15 PM to 7:45 PM

Directors Dewey and Marrinan present an insightful linear tale of how one artist, Chris Burden, went from being an outsider and provocateur to being… well… a crowd pleaser. As a reaction to inflated art markets in the 1970s, Burden felt that if one is to retain control of one’s art, it mustn't be bought or sold. In performance art, the experience is of more than the work’s social critique. It is also of the artist’s autonomy in composition and endurance, and therefore of the difficulty in replicating the action or effect. No sale, no sell out. Student Chris Burden first draws attention with a series of live performance-art pieces that begin while he is among the earliest attendees of the University of California’s graduate art program. There, he squeezes himself into a two-foot-square studio locker for five days. As his success intensifies he is unchanged by media attention and instead grows more set on his own path. Endurance artist Marina Abramovic and others owe a debt to Burden. In grasping the film’s larger themes, one can see how art that once seemed masochistic or simply attention-getting makes perfect sense in an overall arc that proceeded quite logically from shattering performance pieces to eventual, playful, congeniality. It’s a testament to Marrinan and Dewey that Burden gets us there.