Post by Rob Curedale

Since I moved to the United States from Sydney twenty years ago I have mostly lived in and around the village of Topanga Canyon in California with periods in Detroit and Silicon Valley. Most of the population in Topanga works in creative industries, including the music and film industries. One of the most influential artists who has lived here was Christopher Lee Burden. Disclaimer I do not condone any of Christopher Burden’s activities or recommend that anyone imitate him. Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015. Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece (1971), was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine,] and involved his being locked in a locker for five days. His best-known work from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about sixteen feet (5 m) with a rifle. Other performances from the 1970s included Deadman (1972), in which Burden lay on the ground covered with a canvas sheet and a set of road flares until bystanders assumed he was dead and called emergency services (leading to his arrest);  B.C. Mexico (1973), in which he kayaked to a desolate beach in Baja Mexico where he lived for 11 days with no food and only water; Velvet Water (1974), in which he spent five minutes attempting to breathe water as a live audience watched; and TV Hijack (1972) wherein, during a live television interview to which he had brought his own camera crew, he held interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans at knifepoint and threatened to kill her if the station stopped live transmission. David Bowie's 1977 song "Joe the Lion" was inspired by Burden's 1974 Trans-Fixed, where Burden crucified himself on the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle. Laurie Anderson titled her 1977 song "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You – It's the Hole (for Chris Burden)". Burden was also mentioned in the Jeff Lindsay book Dexter by Design, and in Norman Mailer's book The Faith of Graffiti. The poem "Doomed (1975)" by David Hernandez in his 2011 collection Hoodwinked] describes the Burden installation of the same name in Chicago. Burden was married to multi-media artist Nancy Rubins. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, California. His studio was located in Topanga Canyon. From 1967 to 1976, Burden was married to Barbara Burden. Burden died on May 10, 2015. He was 69.