Chris Burden: At A Crossroad

CHRIS BURDEN: AT A CROSSROAD Fred Hoffman reminisces about seeing the 1979 presentation of The Big Wheel and examines the work’s significance in relation to subsequent sculptures by the artist.

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hroughout the 1970s, Chris Burden tested the limits of his body’s tolerance for discomfort, stress, and pain as part of an expansive performance practice that captivated the art world’s attention. Burden got off to a fast start with his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine, when his Five Day Locker Piece (1971) had him confined in a locker for five days. Seven months later he followed this work with Shoot (1971), a piece in which he directed a fellow artist to shoot a rifle bullet through his arm. A third early performance, Transfixed (1974), had Burden essentially crucified on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle, a nail hammered through each palm. Burden’s performances of the 1970s set the bar, catapulting him to the forefront of this quickly emerging platform for cutting-edge contemporary art.

Having demonstrated his identity as a maker of sculpture—though sculpture significantly removed from traditional concepts of the medium—and his commitment to advancing the dialogue of contemporary art, by the end of the decade Burden was ready to make a significant shift in his production.

In 1979, his sculptural works began to outnumber his performance pieces. In these first sculptures, including The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, What the World Might Have Been, and The Big Wheel, motifs and interests that would continue throughout his career began to take shape.

In 1979, Burden exhibited The Big Wheel at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles. The work comprises a 6,000-pound cast-iron flywheel mounted vertically on a wooden support structure of six-by-six-inch timbers. Accompanying this unexpected and mesmerizing object is a modified Italian Benelli 250 cc motorcycle, positioned in front of the flywheel. The back wheel of the bike is raised off the floor and suspended by a small wooden device. Upon inspection one realizes that the function of this device is to enable the bike’s back wheel to become engaged with the much larger flywheel.

The venue of The Big Wheel ’s initial exhibition was a modest-sized gallery located down an alleyway off La Cienega Boulevard, a heavily trafficked street that was then the city’s gallery row. I recall that when I first encountered the work, on the opening day of the exhibition in which it was first shown, it was at rest; Burden and an assistant (most likely the future food critic Jonathan Gold, the artist’s assistant at the time) were huddled over the motorcycle, making some adjustments to its motor.

Soon thereafter Burden mounted the bike and the engine was fired up. The sound was overwhelming,

significantly enhanced by reverberation pounding against the confines of the room in which it stood, and heightened by the sheer improbability of having to deal with a roaring motorcycle in an art gallery. Burden slowly and methodically revved the engine, seeking to take the bike to its maximum capacity in first, then second, then third gears, and finally opening the throttle full blast. As the speed of the engine increased, the artist maintained his total and undivided focus on achieving the maximum amount of horsepower from each gear. The sound was almost deafening. The experience was fascinating yet forbidding: while you were physically drawn to the power that this vehicle was creating, your ears rebelled against your eyes’ desire to witness this absorbing spectacle.

As the bike’s back wheel generated torque, it was transferred to the flywheel, so that both increased speed in unison. Burden maintained the bike’s maximum speed in its highest gear for a couple of minutes, then decelerated and turned off the bike’s engine, rocking it forward to disengage from the flywheel, which, by this time, had itself taken on an overwhelming presence. Here again, the viewing of the work became a matter of attraction and repulsion: watching a three-ton flywheel spinning at about thirty miles an hour is hardly something you are prepared to experience so close at hand, let alone in the interior of an art gallery. Not only was the size of the object formidable, but now all kinds of thoughts raced through my mind, especially what might happen if the object’s force and weight separated it from its supporting base. Visions of the wheel busting out of the gallery and racing down the street were just one of my fantasies. What was particularly disconcerting was how quiet this massive object was, even at its peak power and speed.

The sound coming off the wheel was like a light, whispering wind; it was a sound not just seductive but virtually hypnotic. All of my fantasies of danger and destruction were nullified by the actual peacefulness of my sensory experience, heightened by the contrast with the previous roar of the engine as Burden ground through the gears.

The conflict between the thoughts of the mind and the feelings of the body and senses seemed ultimately to be resolved in favor of visceral response.

As object, the wheel facilitated a soothing, contemplative experience. Because the raw and primordial energy of this unwieldy mechanical object served no utilitarian function, it invited a voyeuristic journey into a more ethereal realm. At the same time, at this initial showing I never forgot that “the real world” was just behind the room’s white walls. The potential for real destruction seemed much more

The conflict between the thoughts of the mind and the feelings of the body and senses seemed ultimately to be resolved in favor of visceral response. As object, the wheel facilitated a soothing, contemplative experience.

than the fantasy of a restless mind. Burden was able to make this feeling of sublime danger an important part of his practice, from his first performances all the way through his highly engineered sculptures.

All of these works disrupted any passive consumption of his art.

Shortly after the 1979 exhibition of The Big Wheel, I wrote the first critical review of the work for Artforum: Inescapably, then, this piece has humanistic implications. Burden’s work has attempted to expose the fallacy in depending upon institutionalized order and security. He has therefore evoked feelings of unexpected danger and menacing violence in order to demonstrate that the irrational can provoke feelings of honor and respect. Big Wheel might possibly be one

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of the artist’s most successful pieces precisely because it presents these issues through a form that is physically, emotionally, and erotically engaging.1 With the creation of The Big Wheel Burden successfully integrated performance and object-making. When I saw the work at its initial showing, I did not recognize how much this single exhibition would mark a turning point in the artist’s career.

Jumping forward, in 1996 Burden unveiled The Flying Steamroller as the centerpiece of his major survey exhibition at mak, the Museum für angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts), Vienna.

Much like The Big Wheel, The Flying Steamroller has two lives, at rest and in motion, but unlike the earlier work, his sculpture for Vienna was monumental in scale. It would become the first of several

large-scale works incorporating functional vehicles or machines removed from their “normal,” expected usage or setting, such as 2009’s 1 Ton Crane Truck and 2013’s Porsche with Meteorite. The Flying Steamroller comprises a 1968 Huber roadgrader, weighing twelve tons, attached by a pivoting arm to a counterbalance weight. As Burden states in his description of the piece, “The steamroller is driven in a circle until its maximum speed is reached. At the same time, a hydraulic piston is activated and pushes up the beam from which the steamroller is suspended, causing the steamroller to lift off the ground.” Once off the ground, it spins for several minutes. The first time I watched this massive object as it began to move faster and faster, eventually lifting off the ground, my mind immediately raced back to that day on La Cienega Boulevard when Burden fired up his motorcycle.

Previous spread: Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979, cast iron flywheel powered by a 1968 Benelli 250 cc motorcycle, 9 feet 4 inches × 14 feet 7 inches × 11 feet 11 inches (2.8 × 4.4 × 3.6 m) Above: Chris Burden with The Big Wheel, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2009. Photo: Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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urban planning and development. Burden’s original client never followed through on the proposal, and it took another twenty-four years before an artworld institution recognized Beam Drop: Inhotim, the expansive sculpture park near Belo Horizonte, Brazil, commissioned a version in 2008. A third installation occurred in 2009 at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp.

From the moment when the spectators assembled at dawn at Inhotim, it was evident that something strange and unexpected was about to unfold.

We stood in front of a large gray square of dense, quasi-liquid concrete that had been poured into the earth, alongside which was positioned a 125-foot crane. Positioned off to the side of this mysterious “construction” site were piles of steel I-beams, both old and new, ranging from fifteen to forty feet in length. Seeing these three related construction elements—beams, concrete, and heavy lifting equipment—I began to make wild speculations about what was about to unfold. Soon hard-hat-wearing workers reached for the end of the very long cable hanging down from the top of the crane’s boom and connected it to an I-beam. At this point I began to recognize that a very different kind of structure was about to be created. Within seconds, the steel mass was hoisted above the pit to the maximum height of the boom’s vertical reach. Lifted to that height, the beam was soon to take on a new life. After a short period of adjustment, a command was given to the crane operator and the beam was released into free fall. In less than a second or two, one end of it had plunged into the cement pit and half its mass had disappeared into the murky substance. The sounds and sensations of impact were like nothing I had previously experienced. While partially shocking, even a bit disturbing, they were equally exhilarating; whichever of the two responses the spectators might have felt, they spontaneously let out expressions of relief and exaltation.

Feelings of shock, excitement, and even fear were no smaller with the dropping of subsequent I-beams. In fact they were heightened.

While in one sense the mystery of what was to occur diminished, speculation about how each dropped I-beam would interact with those previously dropped only increased. As the number of dropped I-beams increased (at Inhotim, approximately seventy-five were dropped over a period Like the earlier experience, the thrill of watching a giant yellow steamroller, removed from its “normal” context as it circled in a large but nonetheless enclosed exhibition space, was countered by “what if ” fantasies of this object becoming a destructive force. Now seventeen years removed from the artist’s initial presentation of a large-scale “functioning” machine, the structural support and mechanism used to propel The Flying Steamroller airborne was fully engineered and unquestionably reliable. Even so, the spectator’s mind always holds on to the possibility of something improbable occurring. Countering those fears, the sound emanating from this massive form as it rose from the ground was reminiscent of the peace and tranquility that The Big Wheel conjured up after it was disengaged from the motorcycle. As with The Big Wheel, if you went with the unexpected experience of engagement with Burden’s massive steamroller as it circled in the air, you realized that the experience of this object actually transported you out of your daily lived experience into a subtler realm not bound by your expectations, your fears, your need for order and predictability.

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Falling between these two sculptures, Burden’s 1984 Beam Drop at Art Park in Lewiston, New York, holds an additional key to the development and continuities of his practice. Beam Drop consisted of approximately sixty steel I-beams, each raised approximately 100 feet into the air by crane and then dropped, one after the next, into a thirty-fivefoot-square pit of freshly poured concrete. The original Beam Drop, planned and conceived as a temporary exhibition, was subsequently destroyed, and is today known only from photos and a short film produced at the time. The work was first conceived in response to a developer’s request for a sculpture for an urban setting in Northern California. Because Burden’s potential client was a builder, the artist saw it as “efficient” to “build a great sculpture that was both big and affordable without turning to outside resources.” He felt that the client’s familiarity with I-beams, concrete, and cranes would make him more comfortable with the realization of the project. Not only did Burden see this as efficient, he also saw it as a “fun way” of doing something different with materials so associated with construction, and by extension with

This page, top: Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979, cast iron flywheel powered by a 1968 Benelli 250 cc motorcycle, 9 feet 4 inches × 14 feet 7 inches × 11 feet 11 inches (2.8 × 4.4 × 3.6 m). Installation view at the New Museum, New York in 2013–14. Photo: Benoit Pailley This page, bottom: Chris Burden, The Flying Steamroller (drawing), 1991, ink on photocopy paper, 8 ½ × 11 inches (21.6 × 27.9 cm)

of seven hours), it became evident that they would inevitably hit each other as they made their way toward the cement foundation. After the release of about fifteen beams, the sounds accompanying their impact, both with other beams and with the cement in the pit, were significantly enhanced, becoming an even more central part of the experience. The sound of beams tearing into each other was not merely disturbing; it brought on the feeling of fear. As the space in the pit for each additional beam diminished, it became more likely that a dropped beam would hit another. While at first the possibility of a beam hitting another and flying away was just a thought, and idea, near the end of the process it became a reality and a new concern for the spectator.

With the execution of Beam Drop Burden expanded his approach to performance art. The work also introduced radical new possibilities of form, composition, and even beauty. For the artist, the challenge was to find a way “to use the steel as Jackson [Pollock] used the paint.” As Burden saw it, Beam Drop asks the question “How did it get there and how did it happen?” Unless you

actually witnessed the installation, the completed artwork never really answers these lingering questions. In part, then, Beam Drop implies the telling of a story, giving this nonrepresentational artwork a kind of narrative content. What the “story” of the work is remains unclear, and in many ways is not that important. It will differ according to what any one viewer brings to the moment of viewing.

What is important is how Beam Drop transcends the limitations of most abstract sculpture. To the degree that part of one’s initial response to the work is to question how and why, the sculpture separates itself from most other postwar works, whether gestural or Minimal. In good part this separation results from the way in which the physicality of Burden’s forms has left the evidence of their impact with the concrete foundation. The beams haven’t simply dropped into place; rather, they thrust and contorted themselves as they made their way toward the concrete, gouging out and dislodging sections of it. Even more profoundly, some beams, dropped near the end of the “event,” dramatically crashed into previously positioned beams and rebounded out of the pit and into the realm of

Above: Chris Burden, The Flying Steamroller, 1996, steel, concrete, 1968 Huber road grader, height: 21 feet (6.4 m), diameter: 56 feet 6 inches (17.2 m). Installation view at the Chelsea College of Arts, London, 2006.

Photo: Locus +

Following spread: Chris Burden, Beam Drop New York, 1984, approximately 60 I-beams, concrete, 35 × 35 feet (10.7 × 10.7 m).

Destroyed 1987. Installation view at Artpark, Lewiston, New York. Photo: Chris Burden All artwork © 2019 Chris Burden/Licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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gasping spectators. The traces of violent actions found throughout the foundation, the beams lying against and at acute angles to the initial beams standing perpendicular to the base, and the beams displaced entirely from the pit raise the question “What has happened here?”

Our visceral response to Beam Drop is significantly different from our visual engagement with a painting. The “story” of how this work came into being, at least in part, becomes the description of an event in which we could have participated as spectators. Because Beam Drop in some ways relates to our experience of the world, engagement with it separates itself from our involvement with Pollock’s gestural forms, or with the way we experience Richard Serra’s monumental objects.

The Abstract Expressionist and Post-Minimalist object-makers may invite us to ponder their methods of operation, but we are much more drawn to an aesthetic consideration of the resulting forms.

While Beam Drop shares certain formal and compositional affinities with the work of Mark di Suvero, Tony Smith, and Richard Serra, the fact that it can equally fulfill a mission often reserved 134

for representational art, that of conveying a narrative—telling a story—gives it a unique historical and aesthetic position.

Beam Drop presents a challenge to postwar abstract sculpture. What makes it especially compelling is that it was accomplished by an artist who, five years after The Big Wheel, was primarily concerned and associated with performance-based art.

Burden’s willingness to challenge assumptions and the limitations of his body enabled him to recognize the opportunities presented by the less-thanfully-controlled circumstances of Beam Drop. Having learned to trust uncertainty early on, Burden was simply more adapted to engage sculptural opportunities that other artists might have resisted.

How rare it is for a work to declare its seriousness and at the same time have lightness and playfulness. While there is no denying the sense of authority asserted by the massive steel forms of Beam Drop, this is not the entirety of our takeaway from the work. Equally, we question how its creation could have happened; and in attempting to answer that question, we must inevitably recognize its maker as a provocateur, artfully playing

with our expectations, our comfort levels, our need for clarity and correctness. Beam Drop simultaneously declares states of order and disorder, peacefully coexisting. The work’s formal organization links it to a historical lineage. But the existence of forms that have smashed into each other, some even having busted out of their “designated” confines, declares that this work of art is far different from its historical predecessors, and reminds us that its maker also sought out a “lighter” side for the viewer’s experience, driven by inquisitiveness and the need to have fun.

1 Fred Hoffman, “Chris Burden, Rosamund Felsen Gallery,” Artforum 18, no. 5 (January 1980):78.

2. Chris Burden, quoted in Hoffman, ed., Chris Burden (Newcastle upon Tyne: Locus + Publishing, 2007), p. 274.

3. Burden, in Hoffman, Beam Drop: Chris Burden, exh. cat.

(Antwerp: Middelheimmuseum, 2009), p. 20. From an interview with Burden on February 19, 2009, in the artist’s studio, Topanga, California.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.