Chris Burden
Shoot1971/2023

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Artist or Maker: Chris Burden
United States, Massachusetts, Boston, active California, 1946-2015
Title: Shoot
Date Made: 1971/2023
Medium: Video, black and white
Dimensions: Run Time: 00:02:11
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by the Modern and Contemporary Art Council
Accession Number: M.2023.130
Classification: Time Based Media
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: Chris Burden produced a provocative body of work across mediums, ranging from monumental and kinetic sculptures to physically discomfiting performances and confrontational installations. A true skeptic, Burden questioned the world around him and the infrastructures (both visible and social) that shape and are shaped by it.

Shoot is perhaps his most famous performance. Against the backdrop of the protracted Vietnam War, in which about 10 percent of the artist’s generation served, the violence that Burden turned on himself was then commonplace in print and television media. He asked his trusted friend, art student and trained marksman Bruce Dunlap, to shoot at him with a .22-caliber rifle from a distance of about 15 feet. Standing in a sparse industrial space-turned-gallery, Burden expected the bullet would slightly graze his left arm. Instead, he received a flesh wound that caused a significant loss of blood. Word of this shocking performance spread rapidly, bringing Burden international notoriety for an extreme act largely aimed at snapping a violent American society out of its complacency. Through its deliberately bare and grainy footage, Shoot still transmits the psychological tension and palpable discomfort Burden sought to create in his performances, which, despite his proclaimed attempt to control fate, underscore the illusion of control and the precarity of human existence.

Lauren Hanson

Chris Burden
Shoot1971/2023

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Chris Burden
Shoot1971/2023

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