[-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked

[Kristine Stiles]

Not so, Alan. 

Chris performed Shoot 15 months after Kent State and the action was aimed directly at the cultural condition of student/citizens/black panthers, etc. being shot. The question Chris asked himself was what would happen if, during a period when "everybody's trying to avoid being shot, I flip it over and do it on purpose?" His answer: "I'd be right in that weird gray area," meaning between perpetrator and victim. That Chris has not publicized the context of that action is consistent with the fact that he performed in with only 5 friends present, even though he had been invited to "do something" for the Duchamp symposium being held at that time and could have brought a lot of attention to himself. The work was not even widely known until two years later with GQ named him one of the "men of the year" for having done the work. I have written a lot about this action, and his graduate student who brought a gun to UCLA and shot it off, causing first Nancy Rubins, followed by Chris, to resign. My essay is "Burden of Light" in Chris Burden published by Locus + :unblushing, Ltd, 2007.

Kristine

On Oct 27, 2012, at 8:24 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:

> 
> 
> On the line for what? This had to do with Chris and art-making, not Vietnam. It wasn't protest; it was relatively decontextualized body-art.
> 
> - Alan
> 
> 
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Kristine Stiles wrote:
> 
>> Yes, Alan, but then there is Chris Burden's Shoot, 1971. Few put their
>> bodies on the line like that.
>> Kristine
>> On Oct 27, 2012, at 4:45 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
>> 
>>      There's also the other Goffman book, Stigma, which is relevant
>>      and excellent.
>> 
>>      I remember one oddity during the Vietnam war - there was an
>>      oddly apolitical stance, I think, among performance artists in
>>      the US; one could watch an Acconci piece, for example, and read
>>      political action into it, but it wasn't overt; what I remember
>>      in conversation with him was mostly discussions about art which
>>      was emerging out of modernism, but was still bound by a rather
>>      linear idea of success, style, and progress.
>> 
>>      - Alan
>> 
>>      ==
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> 
> ==
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