BEFORE INSTAGRAM-From the mid-eighties through the late aughts, the main entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was through a hole in the postmodern fortress of the Art of the Americas Building on Wilshire Boulevard. In 2008, the museum opened a drastically reconfigured campus, designed by architect Renzo Piano, that shifted the center of gravity west to a new pavilion and walkway spanning the campus from Sixth Street to Wilshire Boulevard. To its west, a three-story red escalator rose to the top floor and main entrance of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum; to the east, a new staircase built to showcase Tony Smith's sky-scraping "Smoke" sculpture led up toward the old campus.
In the middle, the pavilion was supposed to be anchored with a replica steam locomotive hanging from a 160-foot crane and belching smoke, a still-to-this-day-theoretical work by Jeff Koons. Instead, LACMA head Michael Govan decided to erect an "open-air temple" on the site, made up of 202 vintage lampposts, painted a uniform gray, arranged symmetrically. Seven years later, it's hard to imagine a Los Angeles before "Urban Light," now the most famous work by Chris Burden, who died Sunday at his long-time home in Topanga Canyon.
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But it's also hard to imagine "Urban Light" before Instagram, which didn't launch until two and a half years after the installation was first lit in February 2008—the piece switched on a half-year after the first iPhone, a year after tumblr, and in the thick of flickr popularity, and by early 2009 it was already so well-documented that LACMA released an entire book of photos collected from submissions.
Before "Urban Light," Burden's most famous work was 1971's "Shoot," for which he stood in a gallery in Santa Ana and let a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle from 15 feet away.
In an appreciation for Burden published yesterday, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz writes that the piece turned the artist's body into "A living sculpture come to dangerous life in the blink of an eye, sacrificing for his work while enacting a complex sadomasochism of love, hate, desire, and aggression." Burden's early art was full of violence, mostly self-directed; he made the agony of artistic creation literal, and public. (Read the rest.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 40
Pub: May 15, 2015
