online: 24 september 2009 modified: 18, 19, 20, 21, 24 september 2009 18 september 2009 beam drop and other works
by Chris Burden
...at a sculpture park, the sight of scores of long I-beams dropped from a crane into sandpits topped with wet concrete... they project into the air at odd angles, some have crashed into others or fallen irregularly, but most are now fixed in the accidental angles that Chris Burden may have intended as he signalled to the crane driver or pulled a release cord...
...that's a compressed account of what i guessed while gazing at the resulting sculpture... or learnt from the handout... the somehow encouraging sight of a large scale version of something anyone might have done in childhood: stuck sticks or feathers (or other long objects) to stand irregularly into the sand on a beach... as i looked i became more and more interested in both the wonderful everydayness of the thing now presented as 'art' and in the person and the other works of the artist...
...pause... at that first fixing of thoughts in the moment...half-an-hour ago in the park that is now closed for the night when the dropped beams will be spending time alone in the darkness with the the other sculptures... so different... and with the tall beech trees particularly that far exceed any sculpture in complexity, beauty and barely describable purpose...
...there is so much in the work of Chris Burden, and in the very idea of public sculpture... or of ordinary life thus exposed to amazing comparisons of utility and beauty and much else very else in the assembly of these words aswellas any object now seeable as being of multiple purpose, or none, and of no value or greatly overvalued as collectable art... but what will the dropped beams or all else in our worldseem to indicate to the archeologists, if any, who may find these things when this time is over and this culture has gone... if it will?
...something drives me to go on and on writing this (as quickly as i can with one finger on a touchscreen of a handheld)... it must be the wide range of Chris Burden's works and of his background, so called... i read avidly (from the unusually no-nonsense language of the handout) that he studied architecture, physics and also visual arts at which i think yes yes it's as always in our time, it's the ones who've experienced both science and art who are mentally and physically equipped to to do good work in the art sense, and the world sense, of both inward thought and outward action...
...pause to read what i've rushed to write no matter how roughly when faced with this sculpture... and it's origins and the profusion of thoughts it provokes... i decide to leave it like this partly uncorrected... in homage to these accidental beam drops and their brave creator and practical re-thinker and re-arranger of our time...
...but it's time to eat now!
...days later, as i edit this slightly here and there, i remember what i learnt of his other works in the sculpture park and in the handout... large scale videos of various beam drops i progress (art become engineering, as with the running fence and other works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude), and an indoor exhibition of his large scale work built with Meccano and an earlier constructional toy called Erector Set... he's reproduced at human scale the triangulated beams and other features of famous bridges and then invited people to stand on them - at which they didn't collapse... and he's also made a vast indoor racing car track full of moving traffic hurtling along straight tracks and curves and steep climbs and chutes to give a filmed impression of life in a metropolis of the 1930s (but greatly speeded up)... and even a set of Meccano-like skyscrapers (one with a million parts) that are large enough to be photographed alongside existing skyscrapers and with a Goodyear airship sailing slowly above this scene of toys become reality... or near to it...
...but before all these constructions (or deconstructions?) of recent decades he was doing some daring and forthright action pieces in the 1970s: such as lying on a highway under a tarpaulin with flares to warn off approaching vehicles... (he was sent to court for this but the jury took three days and failed to decide if it was a crime and let him off)... i also remember his being the first artist to publish framed accounts of his income and expense claims so as to make his work economically transparent... and before that he paid for brief but very frank commercials on television channels... which were broadcast among 'the other commercials' as he called them...
...most of these early works were deliberately dangerous... for instance being shot in the arm by a friend with a .22 rifle... crawling through broken glass, supporting thick sheets of glass on which was burning gasoline... it's difficult to see the connection between these early danger projects and the later ones that magnify toys... or make toys appear to be at the scale of grown-up engineering constructions...
...i have the impression that Chris Burden has no physical plan but that he
improvises these works and actions out of his scepticism and bravery in confronting the life-and-death powers of the dangerous technologies we encounter every day but treat as they were safe and harmless... a serious art of social harm and manufactured joy... and even toys...
...he makes us think, does he not... of what on earth we are doing here!
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