Chris Burden

                                           

 Chris Burden was a new media artist who used extreme methods to create abstract work representative of world issues. One work he is known for is "Shoot" a private performance piece gone viral in 1971 where he was purposefully shot by a friend, a response to the violence seen on US Television at the time (Vietnam, national guard killings, and political assassinations). His younger work was seen as masochistic and rather than representing the issues at hand directly, used more symbolic performances. 

His style seems tom change as he grew older as he now uses an abundance of technology to help tell his messages. In one work called "When Robots Rule: The Two Minute Airplane Factory" in 1999, created a miniature factory that produces toy planes. After a plane was made, it would be sold creating a miniature version symbolic of Fordism and mass production and consumption. The system would often fail and engineers and helped would have to fix in a hurry, representing the human labor not seen in the products we use every day.

Chris Burden passed away on May 15th, 2015, from Cancer at age 69. Through his time, he created a wide range of works from ceramics to performance art. One theme present throughout all his work is its insistence on exposing the hyper reality that we live in. We as human lived in a system called nature, but as we grew smarter, began to create smaller realities that allow us to live more luxurious lives. We often use extreme and selfish methods to obtain this luxury by beginning political wars killing thousands of "no bodies" relative to the noncombatants. We may create large factories to mass produce the consumables we gluttonously consume without thinking of the effect it has on nature and the people producing it. Even people who are aware of such things play ignorant distracting themselves in factional simulations like going to Disneyland pretending everything is all right. Like mentioned in Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, the image we try to live by masks and perverts' reality. The more issues come up the more we try to mask over the problem over and over again, avoiding the issue. Eventually we forget reality because it has no resemblance to the life, we simulate ourselves living in. The lives we live in become its own little simulacrum (pg 11). Chris Burden realized this and used new media as a tool to bring awareness. Whether he succeeded or not depends on each person as we all mask ourselves from reality.