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A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art.
How you feel about performance art will most likely not affect your feelings towards directors Richard Dewey and Timothy Marrinan’s impressive first feature documentary, “Burden,” which focuses on THE performance artist of them all, the (in)famous Chris Burden. He arguably started the whole “performance art” trend, leading to the likes of Marina Abramović covering James Franco in honey and golden leaves (no, really, look it up!), Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the balls with a BB gun and Vito Acconci masturbating underneath a gallery (though it’s possible that Acconci was the “PA initiator,” who knows, whatever). I myself am skeptical towards the whole thing and its artistic merits, but I cannot deny its entertainment/shock value. Dewey and Marrinan’s doc is plenty entertaining, detailing Burden’s life in vivid detail, but it’s never really shocking, avoiding, for the most part, the difficult task of examining the machinations behind the troubled artist.
And troubled young Burden was, his last name oddly standing in as a metaphor for his existence. A borderline-sadistic man back in the late-1960s and early-1970s, Chris performed a variety of wild feats, such as locking himself in a locker for 5 days, nailing himself to a VW, putting a knife to the neck of a woman, dropping large beams from an impressive height and shooting a gun at a departing passenger airplane. The most famous stunt involved Burden, fueled by gun violence and the Vietnam War, having a friend shoot him in the shoulder with a real rifle. “Jackass”? Or “genius provocateur”? it’s up to you to decide.
Towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Burden went through drug-related issues and a concurrent curious transition from performance artist to sculptor, which he describes as quite similar in nature: “What is the essence of sculpture? Sculpture is action.” His later pieces, quite impressive by anyone’s standards, involve the world-famous “Metropolis” – a giant model reconstruction of Los Angeles with hundreds of moving parts (“It took nine months to reinstall”) – and, of course, his “Urban Light” piece, the much-photographed lanterns that illuminate LACMA every evening. In a lovely passage, Burden reminisces about strolling through the lanterns at night and seeing the tourists take pictures. Not a lot of folks know his name, but the piece transcends the artist, and Burden is perfectly content.
The man himself, captured in the final stages of cancer (he died shortly after filming wrapped, right before the unveiling of one of his works), is eloquent, soft-spoken, living out his days in a large studio, located in the vast emptiness of Topanga Canyon. “Some of the publicity I got helped me change direction,” he says, looking at his coyote-hunting dogs. The documentary switches between the quiet present, with the meticulous Chris and his proud workers relentlessly pursuing that next piece that achieves the “equilibrium” he’s looking for, and the punk-rock past, with a young Burden – “Art-Martyr,” as newspapers labeled him – rolling down a flight of stairs in public.
Consisting of archival footage, a plethora of photos, interviews with colleagues, lovers, and friends, “Burden” is a pretty straightforward documentary that wisely keeps its lens on the fascinating subject, which keeps it rollickin’ along. While never less than entertaining, it doesn’t reveal enough of Burden’s personal life, touching upon but never fully exploring his somewhat-abrasive relationship with women (did he fear/resent them?), or the drug addiction, or the aforementioned sadistic streak to his early work. It’s almost like his later pieces are atoning for the brutality of the earlier work… with a hint of nostalgia to them, which, again, I wish the doc more fully explored.
Whether you consider Chris Burden’s art goofy or radical, whether you’re a cynic, skeptic or admirer, chances are, you will enjoy Dewey and Marrinan’s brisk and witty doc. The directors could have scaled back a bit on their almost reverential approach to the subject, but they certainly show promise. “Burden,” like the performance artist’s work it depicts, may not be art, but it’s certainly fun as hell.
In theaters Friday, May 12th
