Burden

Burden, Richard Dewey y Timothy Marrinan, USA, 2016, 90', OV with Spanish subtitles, DCP

First attempt: Chris Burden was a young student at the University of California, when he decided to shut himself away in his locker at the school, as part of his graduation project. He spent five days and nights there, answering questions being put to him from the outside by professors and fellow students. This became a work of art (Five Day Locker Piece, 1971).

Second attempt, and with it full recognition: a few months later, at an art gallery, he asked a friend to shoot at him from less than five yards away, with a 22 caliber rifle. The result was a hole in the arm, a smoking arm, one of the most memorable performances in contemporary performing art (Shoot, 1971). Two steps that assured Burden’s immediate entry into the Olympus of art. It was the 70s, and the body and its limits - performance, body-art, action – had arrived with a bang, to stay. Joan Jonas, Marina Abramovich, Ulay, Richard Burden…

This documentary film takes a look back through 45 years of the career of this artist, via archive images, interviews, photographs: from his way-out beginnings, where body and transgression were coupled together in a limitless quest, to his later disenchantment with artistic institutionalism and his reinvention of self as a sculptor. Portrait of a figure key to understanding the history of the body in art, and the first chapter of our Season on artists portrayed in Contemporary Cinema.