Chris Burden, “Full Financial Disclosure”
If you were flipping through the TV channels (using your hand to adjust the dial on the set, most likely) in Los Angeles or New York in the mid-1970s, it’s possible that you caught some unusual commercials by an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo or Rembrandt. I refer to Chris Burden, and I know he belongs in the class of Michelangelo and Rembrandt because one of the commercials told me so—and commercials always tell the truth.
The New Museum in New York recently mounted “Extreme Measures,” an expansive retrospective of Burden’s work; it ended a week ago, but the exhibition is “partially on view through 1/26/14.” Burden is most famous for two artistic stunts: 1971’s “Shoot,” in which he enlisted a friend to shoot him in the arm, and 1974’s “Trans-Fixed,” in which he had himself nailed to a Volkswagen, Jesus-style. “Trans-Fixed” inspired a lyric in David Bowie’s “Joe the Lion” from his 1977 album Heroes: “Joe the lion / Went to the bar / A couple of drinks on the house an’ he said / ‘Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car.’”
A good deal of Burden’s work is conceptual and yet completely sticky: it’s not just dumb luck that he ended up inspiring a line in a Bowie song. In that way he reminds me a bit of Komar and Melamid. In the mid-1970s Burden got interested in television, specifically “the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television held.”
In “Poem for L.A.,” which aired in June 1975, Burden intones to the camera “Science has failed. Heat is Life. Time kills,” as the words appear on the screen. To fill the required 30 seconds, you just see the identical footage three times. My favorite is probably “Chris Burden Promo,” in which the six names “Leonardo Da Vinci / Michelangelo / Rembrandt / Vincent Van Gogh / Pablo Picasso / Chris Burden” blandly rocket towards the viewer in the manner of an aggressive movie title or a “Pow!!!” sound effect from the TV series Batman with Adam West. That one was shown during the first season of Saturday Night Live, in fact. According to the dates furnished by Burden (May 1976), the only shows it could have appeared on (should you be scraping your memory banks) were hosted by Madeline Kahn and Dyan Cannon. The other five names were chosen as the result of a nationwide survey establishing the most well-known artists to the American public.
Equally witty/conceptual was “Full Financial Disclosure,” which ran in the Los Angeles area in 1977; in this one Burden sits at a desk in front of the American flag and presents a summary of his 1976 earnings. The concept here wasn’t quite as random as the others; indeed, it could be seen as a legitimate commercial intended to promote a show he had at the Baum Silverman Gallery in which his own cancelled bank checks were part of the artworks.
Amusingly, in this YouTube clip, presumably generated by Burden, the content runs about three and a half minutes and then repeats a couple more times, similar to the commercials in which he was obliged to repeat the content to fill the time of a standard commercial.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chris Burden: Shot With His Own Gun
Chris Burden’s incredible Metropolis 2 coming soon to LACMA