Urban Light, 200007, now permanently installed at LACMA.
Burden’s “doodling” in performance art and video would earn him a cult reputation on the L.A. art scene. His longtime teaching position at UCLA, from 1978 to 2004, also ensured his influence on multiple generations of students, including sculptors Paul Sietsema and the late Jason Rhoades. Now, a spate of exhibitions is putting him before a much larger public and establishing him in the California pantheon alongside Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and John Baldessari. “Chris’s performance work is iconic—it’s written into the textbooks,” says Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). “I think what we’re seeing now is the maturation of a career.”
New interest in Burden’s oeuvre began to crest last year, with the publication of a hefty monograph underwritten in part by Burden’s dealer, Larry Gagosian. Adding to the buzz, his seminal 1979 video work Big Wrench is on view through June 8 as part of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition “California Video.” In the film the artist recounts the quixotic narrative of Big Job, a junky tractor trailer Burden wanted to convert into an art project before running afoul of legal and financial obstacles. The show’s curator, Glenn Phillips, suggests that the piece reflects a pivotal moment in the early Eighties when artists shifted away from abstract gestures toward personal narrative, and away from conceptual work toward marketable objects. In Burden’s career, the Big Job story also illustrates the artist’s path from performance back to sculpture, which would grow in scale to encompass what Public Art Fund director Rochelle Steiner calls “the grand gesture.”
“From the beginning of his career, Burden’s work has been about looking at limits,” she explains. “How tall can I make a tower with Erector set parts? What are the limits of my endurance? His curiousity is about how far you can take things—politically, socially, physically—and his studio is almost like a laboratory where experiments take place.”
In addition to Burden’s five-ton Medusa’s Head (1990) and his Erector set scale models, a prime recent example of his monumental work is Urban Light (2000–07), which was installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) earlier this year. The outdoor piece, 60 feet square, brings together in tight formation 202 antique L.A. streetlights from the Twenties and Thirties. Burden came across the first two at a flea market seven years ago and, caught by the collector’s bug, went on a buying spree that eventually led him to mortgage his house to cover the nearly $2 million cost of buying and restoring the collection. Explains Burden, “To me these poles are an early form of public art.” Frank Gehry wanted to acquire part of the set for a project in downtown L.A., and CAA considered buying a few to adorn its new Century City headquarters. But Burden decided to keep the group together. “I think that I’ve made a building without walls and a roof of light,” he explains. “It’s like walking through the Acropolis or something.”
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