The man who shot a passenger plane in flight in the name of performance art
History shows that at one stage, you really could get away with basically anything on a plane. Smoking mid-flight? Light up, by all means! Taking that ceremonial knife collection you bought back home? Just make sure you show the host staff! Organising a cockfight in business class? We’ll help you take bets!
Of course, some of those examples might have been somewhat exaggerated for comic effect, but compared to the last 25 years or so, air travel in the mid to late 20th century seems like the Wild West. Few things prove this quite like one particular work of infamous American performance artist Chris Burden. Now, Burden was a wild card. This was a man who once arranged to get shot in the arm at point-blank range for the sake of his art, someone for whom taking risks was part of the joy of making art.
Yet there’s a big difference between taking risks when it’s your own skin that’s on the line and taking risks with an entire passenger plane full of people, and Burden, for one reason or another, wasn’t fussed – he pressed ahead with a bizarre project called 747, one where, at 8am on January 5th, 1973, he travelled to Los Angeles International Airport and stood a few miles away from the airport’s runway. When the first plane took off that morning, a Boeing 747, he raised a pistol and fired a few shots at it.
Now, right from the off, that would be the kind of thing that would get you put in the kind of jail you don’t get out of these days. Even if you didn’t hit the plane, you probably wouldn’t get a shot off before someone got one off at you first. However, Burden got away with it. He fired a few shots, then left. The only reason that anyone thought twice about it, the only reason that he got in any trouble for it whatsoever, was because of possibly the most mental thing about the whole endeavour.
He brought along a photographer to document this act of lunacy.
How was this a piece of art?!
It’s true, Burden took along his friend Terry McDonnell, who snapped off a few photographs of him literally firing a gun at a passenger plane full of innocent civilians. Not only did they get away with it at the time, but it was also only after those photos were published in an art magazine that Burden received any pushback for his actions at all. Though in fairness, it was a personal visit from the FBI, so the police were taking this seriously. At least, eventually.
According to Burden, it began with a calling card left at his studio, which turned into an in-person conversation at his apartment. For some reason, the police let Burden explain not only his actions but the artistic inspiration behind them. In a separate interview, he explained his interaction with the officer sent over to interview him.
Burden said that the plane had been in no danger and that the piece had been about “the goodness of man – the idea that you can’t regulate everybody. At the airport, everybody’s being searched for guns, and here I am on the beach, and it looks like I’m plucking planes out of the sky. You can’t regulate the world.”
Which, y’know, is half-true. Except that a plane can be brought down by a bird flying into the engine. I can imagine that someone firing a gun at one, even while it’s in flight, proves somewhat more of a risk. What do I know, though? Burden got away with it, and no one was hurt. The officer in charge of investigating him saw no reason to continue the investigation, and McDonnell’s photograph hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art today.
Simpler times.