Chris Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist.
He studied visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971. 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 graduate student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces, and made several faculty members including Burden (none of whom were present at the event) feel unsafe. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this.
Burden's own 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. 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. Other performances from the 1970's were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), and Honest Labor (1979).
From 1975 and on he made fewer performances and began a period in which he created installations and objects that dealt with science and politics. 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". 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.B.T.V. (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made television.
In 2005, Burden released his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle on 28 July after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Shetland. 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.
