An iconic artist who famously allowed a friend to shoot him in the arm during a performance has revealed that the event did not go as planned.
Performance artists such as Marina Abramovic are known for pushing boundaries, often creating shows that leave audiences in shock, whether positively or negatively.
While Abramovic, at 78, has engaged in extreme acts like stabbing her hand, inviting others to manipulate her body, and publicly masturbating to multiple climaxes, the late Chris Burden arguably took these extremes further.
Burden, originally from Boston, gained notoriety for his provocative pieces that focused on the themes of personal risk and body art. One such piece involved him confining himself within a university locker for five consecutive days, a work titled Five Day Locker Piece.
In another daring act, he fired several shots at a Boeing 747 as it took off from Los Angeles International Airport, an act that brought him under FBI scrutiny. However, this wasn’t his only controversial performance involving firearms.
In November 1971, when he was 25, Burden asked his friend, Bruce Dunlap, to shoot him in the left arm with a .22-calibre rifle from just 15 feet away in F Space, a Californian gallery.
The eight-second performance, aptly titled Shoot, clearly shows Burden being wounded, revealing that the plan did not unfold as intended.
In an interview with The New York Times before his passing at 69 in 2015, Burden recounted how he had imagined the bullet would “whiz by my arm and it would scratch it and one drop of blood would roll down my forearm.”
“That was the ideal,” Burden continued, acknowledging that reality differed.
“He stood about 15 feet away from me and he asked if I was ready and I kind of stiffened up, stuck my left arm out a little so he’d have some -,” he laughed.
As seen in the footage, Burden was hit in the arm, and Dunlap noted that it “looked okay” until Burden walked away and appeared “a little wobbly.”
“It turned out to be a flesh wound. The bullet went in and out of my arm with a .22,” Burden explained. “It’s just like hitting a corner of a tractor trailer on a freeway, your arm just got nicked by a giant force, it just goes numb.”
Worried about the severity of the injury, Burden’s team took him to the hospital, where they informed the police that the shooting was accidental.
“I don’t think they believed me for a moment, they probably thought my wife had shot me and I wasn’t pressing charges,” Burden added.
Burden explained that his idea stemmed from seeing “a lot of people being shot on TV every night” during the Vietnam War, many of whom were his age at the time.
To recruit Dunlap, a skilled marksman who left the army for studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he met Burden, the artist noted it was a straightforward choice.
“I knew I couldn’t go down to the local gun store and ask, you know, ‘Hey is there a gun instructor who would like to come and do an art performance where you kind of nick my arm,’ you know, that wouldn’t go over,” he said.
“I had to ask somebody who was a friend and who was willing to do it.”