‘Deadman’: The most terrifying piece of performance art
When it comes to performance artists, at what point do you stop praising them for their bravery and start asking what the shiny hell is wrong with them?
I suppose that’s the dichotomy of everyone who takes their lives into their own hands in the name of art. We don’t have to think it’s a good idea; in fact, quite the opposite. We just have to have a visceral reaction to it, and be confronted with something that makes us think, “Jesus Christ, what the hell are they doing to themselves?!” At least at first.
The true masters will inspire that kind of response before you actually analyse what’s going on and find that there is a valid artistic point being made here.
The best example comes, as it always does, when it comes to performance art, from Maria Abramovic. In Rest Energy, she isn’t just staring at the business end of a bow and arrow, primed and ready to send its payload straight through her heart for the fuck of it. It’s a statement about the nature of relationships between men and women in our patriarchal society, where women kind of just have to trust men not to kill them and get away with it.
Compare and contrast that with the work of Chris Burden, who spent his entire career as a performance artist brushing so close to death that there’s an argument that the work entitled Deadman isn’t even the closest he came to mortal danger.
After all, this is a guy who once consented to a friend of his shooting him in the arm with a small calibre rifle, yet to me, the prize for most terrifying risk of his own life goes to Deadman, a work that saw him find a parked car on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, cover himself with a green tarpaulin, lie directly in front of the back two wheels and wait to get reported as a dead body.
Or, y’know, wait for the owner of the car to get in, start it and actually become one.
Of course, that’s simplifying it, but only slightly. Two 15-minute flares were placed on either side of the road to alert oncoming drivers to what was lying in the road, and the car he picked didn’t actually belong to a stranger, but to Los Angeles gallery owner and art dealer Riko Mizuno, whom he’d helped develop the stunt. Still, though, had the slightest thing gone wrong (and on LA roads in the 1970s, the slightest thing goes wrong a lot), Burden would have very much become what the title of the piece suggested.
Fortunately, the flares were barely lit before the police were called to investigate this literal body bag lying in the road. As you can imagine, the police were probably more annoyed to discover a living artist in that bag rather than a dead one, and he was arrested for causing a false emergency to be reported. The case went to trial but the charge was thrown out. However, this was more than a mere prank at the expense of the cops. This was, essentially, a prank at the expense of the audience.
By the time the stunt was staged in 1972, Burden had been making performance art for a couple of years and was finding that the small audience it was attracting was becoming desensitised to their role in it. In an interview with Liza Bear for Avalanche, he outlined the kind of effect he wanted to have on the audience with Deadman, saying, “Increasingly the audience is more prepared and is somehow implicated in the work… No one can avoid being used somehow and used in a most intimate way, even though it’s imaginary. I’m just trying to get at some of the different ways in which audiences are part of the performance now.”
After all, the piece was staged directly outside one of Mizuno’s galleries on a night that a new show by Burden was being advertised. He wanted people leaving the show to be confronted with this tableau and wonder what to do next, see whether they would take it as a piece of art or spring into action and try to help. When the doors opened, Burden was confronted with a number of people who merely saw it as a piece of art. Though one person did come to Burden’s aid when the cops came.
Some would say that’s a lot more than this stunt deserved. People like me, for one.