The New Museum hosted Chris Burden’s Extreme Measures exhibition, featuring two of his more prolific and socially significant artworks: Shoot and LAPD Uniforms. Shoot, one of his premiere performance works, was a presentation of Burden’s subjective examination of being shot. LAPD Uniforms, created in response to the social outrage incited by the Rodney King beatings and subsequent acquittal of the offending LAPD officers, was a sculptural representation of police intimidation. Seven police uniforms, accurate to those worn by the LAPD in the 90s, were arranged in such a way that from a distance they appeared ordinary, but up close, they are realized to be considerably oversized.
While each art piece was a curiosity in and of itself, and observably relevant to the social landscape of their respective eras (the seventies and the early nineties), my personal reaction to Shoot made it the standout between the two works. LAPD Uniforms spoke to me as a commentary on the times, which I could understand clearly. Shoot, on the other hand, while personally meaningful to the artist as framed by his interviews following the performance, rebounded against an innate distress that I, and I’m sure many others, have against self-damage. It invoked powerful negative emotions that left me questioning the underlying messages of Burden’s act. Why would someone shoot themselves simply to understand it? All evidence and common knowledge that has been accumulated since the dawn of the gun era implies that getting shot is an unpleasant experience. However, in that vein, if this unpleasantness is so well-known and distressing, why does gun violence command a significant portion of our entertainment? Why are we so eager to promote gun ownership? Why are first world countries frequently enthusiastic to go to war? I don’t believe that Chris Burden set out to answer such questions with his performance, but he was ultimately successful in raising them.
Shoot was first presented live in 1971. The New Museum was able to reconstruct the austerity of the original conditions by projecting the video against a bare white wall in a small room. In order to enhance the viewers’ scope of Chris Burden as an artist, Shoot was played on loop along with clips of many of his other performance pieces. In the clip, there is a brief explanation of what will happen and what to listen for, followed by the performance itself in which Burden is shot in his arm with a rifle by a friend/assistant. It was the artist’s reaction to being shot that made the piece. Although in his interview with BBC, he stated that it was impact that startled him, and not the pain, he had a very physical reaction which elicited a strong internal reaction in me as a viewer. Although I knew beforehand what I was going to see, and have watched violent movies before, the straightforwardness of the act was startling, and left me with a sense of confusion and, surprisingly, annoyance. My first thought was: “Why would anyone do that? Even in the name of art?”
It immediately brought more significance to the constant barrage of current event news stories of gun violence. Trayvon Martin, Newtown, the Aurora movie theater. Our negative, violence-filled news media reports these incidents like a factory line. It becomes monotonous and detaching, a never-ending cycle of grief followed by moving on and waiting for the next terrible thing to happen. But without the framing, Shoot presents a first-hand viewing of the disturbing simplicity of a gunshot. As Chris Burden stated, being shot is as American as apple pie.
LAPD Uniforms was significantly less jarring than Shoot, and, in my opinion, more directly significant, even if it wasn’t as memorable. LAPD Uniforms used eye trickery to allow the viewer to perceive seven police uniforms as normal-sized from a distance, however, when up close, the viewer realizes that they uniforms are actually seven feet tall, and menacing. It was immediately clear that this was a statement on authoritarian intimidation, and can easily fit with situations that we see today with the controversy surrounding New York’s “stop and frisk” laws. The artwork was an analogy to the idea that so long as an individual has the privilege of little interaction with a police force, whether that be because of choice, lifestyle, or the genetics of one’s melanin production, the presence of authority draws little notices. However, in the reciprocal situation, that same authority can put you in a position of being less powerful or “small”.
Each of Burden’s other works in the museum addressed his fascination with authority and occasionally the abuse of and disadvantage against said authority. Additionally, he address the detachment that our culture has from violence, and how society truly lacks an honest sense of the impact that violence causes. And that is true whether that violence comes from gun or from a bomb. The art piece A Tale of Two Cities, this message is particularly relevant, as the small rendition of a large city is comparable to that seen from the cockpit of a bomber jet. At the same time, the viewer knows that it is a “toy” city, and that knowledge allows them to break away from the idea of its possible destruction. This can be perceived as a mirroring of the kind of nonchalance that can occur when such wreckage is occurring to “them” or “it” and not to “us”. Can one truly know the impact of the kind of devastation that results of large scale violence if one is insulated from the devastation by distance or nonchalance?
The sculpture Beehive Bunker played with idea of vulnerability. The concrete symbolizes protection, however, the bunker is not made of concrete; it is made of bags of instant-concrete. This distinction is important, because the bunker is ultimately fragile. The bags can be knocked over. It is only the idea of concrete that provides an attribution toward safety. It is a notable because American society has a prominent attitude of invincibility, even though we can observe many examples in current events where we may not be as safe as we perceive simply because we refuse to examine or improve the constitution of the “bunker” in which we are housed.
Of the two main works that we were assigned to examined, each appealed to me on wholly different scales. Where Shoot jolted my emotions and senses, LAPD Uniforms appealed to my logic and my sense of justice. I went from feeling like a scandalized observer of a side-show curiosity to a middle-class purveyor of cable news. I can suspect that Shoot will linger with me for a while, especially as someone who believes that gun violence is not only addressable but preventable. Conversely, it is more likely that I will be more cognizant of the message of LAPD Uniforms as opposed to its physical representation. Overall, Burden successfully created easily interpreted representation of subtle social inequities discrepancies and that he sees in his everyday life as an American, and I appreciated the opportunity to view them.