Artist field note

Chris Burden

Risk as a way to expose systems.

Appears inPerformance
Shoot by Chris Burden
Art Institute of Chicago · Public domainSource ↗

01 / 05

Shoot

1971

A friend shoots Burden in the arm. The act is brief, but it makes spectatorship, violence and consent impossible to treat abstractly.

The five in one idea

Burden used his body, then machines and systems, to make abstract structures of power physically legible.