Chris Burden, was born in Boston in 1946 and grew up in France and Italy. At the age of twelve years old, Burden was involved in a motorcycle accident in Italy, where he had to have his foot operated on without anesthesia. For Burden this traumatic event was a catalyst for his future works. He studied physics, architecture, and art receiving a degree from Pomona College, and another from the University of California. For Chris' thesis he locked himself in a locker in the fetal position for five days. He only had a five-gallon water jug and an empty five-gallon hug for waste. A lot of his art pieces were done in front of a small audience who heard about the event from word-of-mouth. His most well known act from 1971 was a performance piece called Shoot, in which he was shot in the arm by his friend. In 1974 in a performance piece called Trans-Fixed, Burden laid face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both his hands, crucifying him to the car. In Chris’ later works he deviated from hurting his own body. Although his pieces were not as shocking as his others, they still provoked a lot of questions, and emotions. In his piece Metropolis II (2011) he created a sculpture that was a tiny city that had tracks making roads around the city buildings. This piece created a feeling of anxiety and was mesmerizing because as the 1,100 tiny cars moved around the …show more content…
I believe that although his ideas of how Shoot worked and how it came to be are interesting it's so bluntly thrown in your face that it is to much. I do not think he had to be shot for this to get across, inflicting this much pain to yourself to create emotion from a viewer is just wrong. Guns are associated so much with war and violence and it creates an uneasy feeling that is not something I want to view a real life human