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From bullets to bridges: Chris Burden's new architecture-inspired works were recently on view at several venues in Los Angeles and New York
Art in America, April, 2004 by David Ebony
After a long absence from the New York and Los Angeles gallery scenes, L.A.-based artist Chris Burden recently presented exhibitions of new work in both cities. The performance- and body-art pioneer, who is better known these days for large-scale sculptures and installations, showed a series of bridges made of polished stainless-steel or painted Erector Set and Meccano pieces, like those in children's construction-kit toys popular in the early and mid-20th century. Titled "Bridges and Bullets," the L.A. show, at Gagosian, was Burden's first major exhibition in that city in five years.
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Gold Bullets (2003) was installed in a side gallery. This piece features two small Plexiglas boxes set on a high pedestal, each containing five bullets of different gauges with rounded or pointed heads, which the artist had cast in 22-karat gold. While the piece suggests a rather obvious equation between violence and capital, it also seems to allude to the artist's notorious 1971 performance, "Shoot," in which he had a gun-toting friend shoot him in the arm.
The glittering bridge sculptures appeared in a variety of shapes and sizes, from tabletop pieces to massive structures up to 32 feet long and 8 feet high. Made of countless miniature girders connected with nuts and bolts, the works, produced in editions, are based on actual structures, such as London's Tower Bridge, Victoria Falls Bridge in Zimbabwe and the Indo-China Bridge in Vietnam. Burden's rendition of the latter resembles a kind of stylized ironing board, with a fiat, narrow surface, several feet long, resting on triangular metal supports. In the largest and most impressive work in the L.A. show, Curved Bridge (2003), a dramatically arching trellis made of an elaborate network of girders is supported on each end by a wedge-shaped, meticulously craved plywood base. The bridges, with their modular components and prefab look, pun on Minimalist sculptures such as those by Sol LeWitt. But they also represent the culmination of a number of the artist's preoccupations, including children's toys, urban spaces and engineering. Burden is planning to build an actual bridge on his property in Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles. Suspended some 300 feet above a ravine, the footbridge would span a quarter mile between two mountains.
Like his Conceptual-art colleague Vito Acconci, Burden has made a recent foray into architecture. He filled a gallery at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) last summer with a 35-foot-tall, four-story housing unit, which he built in collaboration with TK Architecture of Los Angeles, directed by Linda Taalman and Alan Koch, formerly of the New York firm OpenOffice. Displayed on its side, the 400-square-foot structure, titled Small Skyscraper, could be used as a home. It is a full-scale prototype for the largest building that can be made in California without a permit. Burden simultaneously showed models for another experimental house at L.A.'s MAK Center for Art and Architecture.
At Gagosian Chelsea, in his first East Coast solo show since 1994, Burden presented all the works from the L.A. exhibition plus Tyne Bridge (2002), a 31-foot-long, structurally accurate scale replica of the 1928 green-painted bridge that spans the Tyne River in Gateshead, England. Commissioned by Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art for its inaugural exhibition and produced in an edition of two (whose components are stored in elaborate cabinets) plus one display piece, the work was presented at the Baltic Centre in a gallery overlooking the actual Tyne Bridge. Making its U.S. debut, the sculpture was accompanied in New York by two Tyne Bridge Kits (2003), the large wooden cabinets that constitute the edition. Each cabinet has numerous drawers filled with some 150,000 parts and the tools required to build Tyne Bridge, as well as instruction booklets and photos to aid in its assembly. Always the conceptualist, Burden regards each cabinet as a self-contained sculpture and suggests that its owner need not assemble the bridge itself. Since it took him and a crew of seven studio assistants about 5,000 hours to assemble the work on display, his suggestion is probably best taken.
"Chris Burden: Bridges and Bullets" appeared at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles [July 10-Sept. 13, 2003], and traveled in a slightly altered form to Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea, New York [Jan. 20-Feb. 28]. Burden's work was featured in Trespassing: Houses X Artists," at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles [May 7-July 27, 2003]; Small Skyscraper was shown at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions [May 1-July 17, 2003].
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