The son of an engineer and a biologist, Chris Burden was born in Boston in 1946 and grew up partly in France and Italy. His interest in visual arts and photography when he was 12 years old was the only early indication to his later art profession. In 1965, Burden moved from Cambridge to Los Angeles to study physics and architecture at Pomona College. But after working for an architectural firm his junior year, he was discouraged and changed majors. The decision could not have come at a better time as Los Angeles would turn out to be the perfect place for his art.

L.A. Art
Beginning in the 1950’s, entertainers in Los Angeles were exploring new mediums like live theater. French-born dancer Rachel Rosenthal started improvisation workshops and set up “Instant Theater” out of private homes with whatever is on hand as props. They were stylized performances, abandoning scripts for spontaneity, but disciplined in words and movements. This would evolve into the performance art that Burden helped pioneer later on.

In Leimert Park, there was a bourgeoning jazz scene – Duke Ellington and Chet Baker were regular acts at music clubs. And galleries were springing up all over West Hollywood. The Ferus Gallery (1957-1966) on La Cienega became a beehive for new artists who often collaborated on their paintings and projects. It would host Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibit of his famous “Campbell Soup Cans,” followed by Marcel’s Duchamp’s first retrospective in the U.S. It was the first gallery here to promote and sell works by living artists to serious collectors. Then the new LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) opened. It was the largest museum to be built in the U.S. after the National Gallery of Art in D.C. Los Angeles was fast becoming the new art city.

LACMA’s Sculpture Garden and The Resnick Pavilion, designed by Renzo Piano

Modernism
What followed were turbulent times in the 1960s and 70s – the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and closer to home, the Watts riots. The same way that Abstract Expressionism exploded in post WWII New York, a new kind of modernism was emerging here. But far from European art and the New York school that took after Cubism and Surrealism, Los Angeles scrapped art history and invented something not inspired by previous art movements, but by the city’s own lifestyle and architecture – the glitzy film industry, the fading boulevards and billboards in Hollywood, a ghost of a downtown in the background, even the counterculture on the decrepit streets of Venice where Burden would set up his first studio. And alongside the political activism and the antiwar movement rocking the country, these became inspiring and radical times. It was also Burden’s coming of age and they shaped his art and his life.

While Pomona College was modeled after the Ivy League universities – with a selective admission process and rigorous math and science programs – it was also and still is a liberal arts school. When Burden entered Pomona, its gallery was exhibiting local artists. He always felt more drawn to his art classes, and while working a summer job for an architectural firm sorting mail and magazines, he realized it would be years of post-graduate study before he could actually build anything. So he swapped architecture for sculpture even after the chairman of the arts department warned him it would be “financial suicide.” Burden’s first sculpture of plywood and lacquer cracked from moisture, another one was blown in by the wind. No matter. It only strengthened his conviction.

“One of the things I discovered was the fine line between being too instructive and letting people learn on their own. It’s really important to fail, to have a dream and to fail. If I was told not to do it, I wouldn’t have learned anything.”

“Ode to Santos Dumont” 2015. Chris Burden’s tribute to the Brazilian-born aviator who successfully steered the first airship around the Eiffel Tower.

Performance Art
After receiving his BFA at Pomona, Burden went on to UC Irvine, a brand new school whose art department quickly became a center for the advancement of performance and conceptual art. Other schools in Los Angeles also had growing art programs. CalArts, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Diego were attracting large numbers of art students and teachers. Performance art, body art, object making, installations, and video became the new mediums. At UCI, teachers stressed diversity and experimentation. It was here that Burden would thrive. Like many of his contemporaries, his art veered away from the canvas and focused on people and processes.

In his 1971 master thesis, Five Day Locker Piece, he locked himself in a locker with 5 gallons of water above him and an empty 5 gallon can below. Using his body as the canvas and action as the art, it exemplified minimalism, and was supposed to be a metaphor to student life. The faculty was split on granting him the MFA degree that they did. It was the beginning of Burden’s “performance art” period where he put himself in precarious situations, using danger as a form of expression. Later on that year, in a makeshift gallery, he had a friend shoot his arm with a rifle and a .22 copper bullet from 15 feet away. Though Shoot seemed simply an act, it was a complicated commentary on the violence of the Vietnam War.

“To what extent are we required to follow orders? What are the boundaries between rules and responsibility to fellow human beings?” Major museums would acquire a videotape of Shoot for their permanent collections.

The fame and criticism fueled his subsequent works. In Through the Night Softly (1973), Burden crawled over broken glass, his almost naked body cut by the shards. He bought 10-second commercials for the video as an exploration of how desensitized viewers have become to pain and other horrific events they see on television. In Trans-Fixed (1974), he was nailed to a car by the palm of his hands – the image of a crucifixion a metaphor for executions.

Sculptures
But after the controversies overshadowing the meaning of his performances, Burden went back to sculpture by the end of the 1970s. 1979’s The Reason for the Neutron Bomb was an installation of 50,000 nickels and matches to represent the Soviet tanks that the U.S. wanted to combat with the neutron bomb. “It was supposed to be this modern weapon that was so good because it didn’t destroy infrastructure, it only killed people…”

Burden wanted to show what 50,000 looks like and the absurdity of building more weapons, “Too many zeroes just seemed like an abstract figure.” He continued with themes of weaponry and warfare. In A Tale of Two Cities (1981), he used over 5,000 toy soldiers and pieces. He imagined a superpower (big city) like the U.S. being attacked by a small renegade state (little city) that has access to weapons of mass destruction. It would become an all too-eerie prediction.

Seven years in the making in his Topanga Canyon home, Chris Burden unveiled Pizza City at the Whitney Biennial in 1997. It came from an accumulation of thousands of miniature models he collected – everything from historical buildings to train components and paper models. It is a Z-scale (1:220) of an archetypal city, a mash-up of European, Oriental, North-American, futuristic and adobe buildings. What he first envisioned as a portrayal of a slice of an ideal city became this sprawling landscape of thematic architectures. And as he was building this Utopian city, he realized it was modeled after Los Angeles – the cultural diversity in so many neighborhoods, office buildings next to single-family homes, elevated highways bordered by the seas and the mountains.

“I have lived here for almost 50 years and there are still places I don’t know. The spread of this metropolis is huge. There wasn’t just one center, but you can walk anywhere and get these fantastic vistas. The city sort of never ends…”

LACMA
In December of 2000, Burden started to collect old street lamps from the 1920’s, not knowing what he might do with them. He was just drawn to the beauty of these cast-iron street lamps. To him, they were part of the city’s history.

“Most of these have been destroyed. But they’re part of the fabric of L.A. When L.A was being developed in the 20’s and 30’s, the first thing they would do is put the streets in, then they would put the streetlights up. And the quality of the streetlights was an indication as to how fancy the homes that they were going to build next to it.”

It’s rare, but you can still see lamps like these around L.A. After a 14-lamp exhibit in London, he proposed to have other lamps as installations to different galleries, one in New York, but they fell through. Meanwhile, he continued to refurbish the lamps, and in 2006 when LACMA’s new museum director saw some installed around Burden’s studio, he knew right away where they belong. And it should be no surprise that it would be on the LACMA plaza, right here in Burden’s own Utopian city, that all 202 of his lamps would find their home. Because for over 50 years, Burden also made this city his home, up until his death in 2015.

“This lamp will last 10,000 years… It’s such a weird idea, to make an object that is designed to be around for several thousand years. Nobody ever thinks in those terms anymore. At all. I like the fact that I’m making something that could physically outlast me.”

Just like Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Urban Light was nothing more than discarded objects resurrected into one of our most beloved icons. Both are unmistakably Los Angeles. Both are indelible landmarks in this beautiful sprawling endless city. Both are symbols of the ingenuity of its artists. One begun in 1921, the other installed in 2008. And in between is this spanning and complex history of Los Angeles art. To me, it’s a story and a city like no other.

“Limits is a relative term. Like beauty, it is often in the eye of the beholder.” -Chris Burden (1946-2015)