Chris Burden during the performance of his 1974 piece Trans-fixed where he was nailed to the back of a Volkswagen

Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts ( is a state located in the New England region of the northeastern United States. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The definition of an artist is wide-ranging and covers a broad spectrum of Activities to do with creating Art, practicing the Arts and/or demonstrating

He studied for his B. A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971. The visual arts are art forms that focus on the creation of works which are primarily Visual in nature such as Painting, Photography Physics (Greek Physis - φύσις in everyday terms is the Science of Matter and its motion. The term architecture (from Greek αρχιτεκτονικήarchitektoniki) can be used to mean a process a profession or documentation Pomona College is a private residential liberal arts college located in Claremont California. The University of California Irvine is a public Coeducational Research university situated in Irvine, California. Year 1969 ( MCMLXIX) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Year 1971 ( MCMLXXI) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the 1971 Gregorian calendar.

Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. This article is about Performance art For other uses see Performance (disambiguation This article is about the Decade 1970-1979 For the Year 1970 see 1970. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the performance piece Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Founded in 1869 Santa Ana ( is the most populous city in Orange County California and is the County seat and a city of about 353184 people. Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece. Other performances from the 1970's were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B. C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979). Year 1973 ( MCMLXXIII) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display full calendar of the 1973 Gregorian calendar. Year 1972 ( MCMLXXII) was a Leap year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.

Several of Burden's performance pieces were considered somewhat controversial at the time. Shoot, for example, involved Burden allowing an assistant to fire a loaded rifle at his arm. Another such "danger piece" was Doomed, in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, the concept of Doomed was that Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone from the museum staff interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water next to Burden, thus ending the piece.

In 1975 he created the fully operational B-Car, a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon". Vehicles, derived from the Latin word vehiculum, are non-living Means of transport. Fuel efficiency, in its basic sense is the same as Thermal efficiency, meaning the efficiency of a process that converts chemical potential energy contained in a carrier Some of his other works from that period are DIECIMILA (1977), a facsimile of an Italian 10,000 Lira note, possibly the first fine art print that (like paper money) is printed on both sides of the paper it is printed on, The Speed of Light Machine (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light, and the installation C. Etymology The word Libra developed its Lira shape from Italian, a language famed for its loss of initial consonants in two-part clusters (ie B. T. V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television. Also 1977 (album by Ash. Year 1977 ( MCMLXXVII) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays Mechanical television was a Television system that used mechanical or Electromechanical devices to capture and display images

In 1978 he became a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces. The meaning of the word professor ( Latin: professor, person who professes to be an expert in some art or science teacher of highest rank) varies The University of California Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Westwood Los Angeles, California, United The word student is etymologically derived through Middle English from the Latin second-type conjugation Verb "studēre" ^[1] Burden cited the performance in his letter of resignation, saying that the student should have been suspended during the investigation into whether school safety rules had been violated. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this.

In 2005, Burden released Ghost Ship, his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 28 July after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Shetland. Newcastle upon Tyne ( (often shortened to Newcastle) is a city and Metropolitan borough of Tyne and Wear, England The project cost £150,000, and was funded with a significant grant from the UK arts council, being designed and constructed with the help of the Marine Engineering Department of the University of Southampton. It is said to be controlled via onboard computers and a GPS system, however in case of emergency the ship is 'shadowed' by an accompanying support boat.

Chris Burden is married to the multi-media artist Nancy Rubins.

Notes

External links

• 1996 review of Burden's MAK retrospective
• Ghost Ship
• UbuWeb Film & Video: Chris Burden
• A feature article on Burden in June 2008 issue of Men's Vogue