California-based artist Chris Burden has been an icon of contemporary art since his early performance works of the 1970s. His conceptual interrogations of power and technology, which began with 1971's infamous Shoot and Five-Day Locker Piece, have consistently raised both controversy and critical approbation. Having retired from his senior faculty post at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005, Burden has continued to pursue his career through an overwhelming number of projects and international commissions. To coincide with Frieze Art Fair 2006, the South London Gallery hosted Burden's 14 Magnolia Double Lamps (2006) in its Camberwell space along with The Flying Steamroller (1996) outside Tate Britain. During the frenzy of Frieze weekend in October, KultureFlash caught up with Burden to share a few thoughts on his current practice.

Additional Info
CB video works
Artforum article (01/2005)
Art in America article (04/2004)
Artforum article (12/2001)
KF#177 CB

This interview was conducted in person during Frieze Art Fair at the Royal College of Art and Design in October 2006.

Tyler Poniatowski: So how are you finding London during Frieze, other than exhausting?

Chris Burden: London's fine, you know... I've been walking around a lot. Seems like it's faster to walk than it is to take a cab. It's just insane. It's not the expense, it's just that you sit in traffic. Walking here today from my hotel took about half an hour -- it probably would have taken that long in a cab.

TP: But the exchange -- I've been over here for a year from the States and I'm still exchanging money from there over to here and it's killing me.

CB: Well yeah, basically it's like a pound is a dollar... It's two dollars, but...

TP: ...a pound buys a dollar's worth of goods.

CB: I don't know how you do it, quite frankly.

TP: I guess the last time you were over here [in London] was for Ghost Ship [in 2005].

CB: Well I was over here two weeks ago for the opening at South London Gallery. That was for about three days. Then I had to go to a bunch of other places in Europe, and I have a show in Milan, and I checked into some possible projects in France. Then back to California, and now I'm back over here.

TP: What's the show in Milan that you have going on?

CB: It's a one-person show composed of four elements -- four rooms that you walk through consecutively. The first room is a video projection; a very close-up shot of my face with green goggles on in a Jacuzzi. It doesn't specifically have a title, but I had to have some way to refer to it, so I'm calling it The Rant. It's kind of a xenophobic, um, well, I guess a rant -- in French, because I speak French. "I am the preacher of the truth... I want to announce" -- it's in French, so -- "I want to announce to the people that I sense among us a foreign force..."

TP: Filmed, of course, in Los Angeles.

CB: Filmed in my Jacuzzi, yeah. "A force that violates the equilateral triangle. As you know the world is composed of three forces that form an equilateral triangle. The three forces are: wild dogs, domestic dogs, and civilised humans... This other, this fourth force, this wild man... the danger of this fourth force is that he can infect the wild dog and make him even wilder, and in turn the wild dog can infect the domestic dog, and the domestic dog can infect the civilised human."

TP: And this is all in the video piece?

CB: Yeah, it's all in French, so... "and then the whole world will become wild. In French the word is sauvage. Avant que tout le monde devienne sauvage... How do you recognise the wild man? Well they're cooking steaks, and their women are all whores and ugly... and furthermore their soldiers run and hide like rabbits. But most importantly they have not accepted in the bottom of their hearts the goodness of the Good God. Like invisible snails they are arriving. The invisible snails are not slowing down... it's all about French words, you know -- escargot."

TP: Let me ask you this, because this is something I wanted to ask you later but it seems fitting now: in the work that you've done recently, starting with Ghost Ship and up to your current show at the South London Gallery, 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, it seems like you're working with an idea of displacements... it's French spoken in a Jacuzzi in LA transposed to Milan.

CB: Well, to be honest, originally I wanted to show [The Rant] in France, but it didn't work out because the gallery down in Paris didn't do it. So a gallerist from Milan came, and I had the show all planned for the French gallery, but he said he'd do it so I thought "fine". So I did it... but that's the first room -- this xenophobic rant about the Other, the wild man, the fourth, the Other... you know, it was always redouble one's effort to fight the fourth, this wild man, the old asshole himself -- the devil. So that's the first room. It's a big projection on the wall, and lasts about two minutes. It's got no credits, or title, or anything -- it just loops. The next room is Beehive Bunker; the next room is the six police uniforms -- the LAPD Uniforms [1993]; and the last room is Gold Bullets [1993]. So it's got a sort of sequence to it.

TP: So the video was produced this year?

CB: Yeah, this year... just a couple of months ago.

TP: And that show is concurrent with this one. I can't imagine your shipping costs.

CB: Well, you know, videos don't cost anything to ship... the concrete [for Beehive Bunker] does cost something to ship though. We shipped the concrete bags from LA because they don't have it here. We designed the whole thing to work with pre-mixed concrete, you know... and people were saying "well why do we need to ship bags of concrete from America? Why don't we just buy..." Because they're different here -- they're not the same. And we spent months and months figuring out how all this fits together, and if you want to pay my staff to come over for three months and try to work it out... and actually, there was one [Beehive] in Basel, at the art fair, and they went from there to Milan to build it -- we had shipped two 40-foot containers -- and I said, "Hey, while you guys are there, have the head gallery guy take you out to a local hardware store and see if they've got it, the concrete, just out of curiosity." So we find out in Italy their concrete comes in a bag, made of plastic, and the gravel is in a separate plastic bag -- it's totally different...

TP: I've found everything over here tends to come out smaller.

CB: Yeah, and it's a totally different thing -- it never would have worked, cause basically you're using the paper as the form... the paper gets really saturated with these drip lines, and the concrete gets wet... but you have to be careful because if the paper gets too wet it gets soft and the thing falls down, so you have to kind of monitor it. But we couldn't do it in Europe -- that's basically the bottom line.

TP: So you just move everything over here.

CB: My experience in doing art projects anywhere away from home is: bring everything you need.

TP: To keep in control.

CB: Because they won't have it... so if you need a pair of needle-nose pliers, don't think that you can go down and get them at the hardware store. If you need a special kind of glue, bring it with you. Bring every single thing with you. Just pretend you're going into outer space and there's nothing there. You can't rely on anything... that's been my experience.

TP: Unfortunately I didn't get to hear you speak about your 14 Magnolia Double Lamps at the South London Gallery. What's going on there?

CB: Well, they're antique street lights and they're part of a bigger collection...

TP: I've seen pictures of them all outside your studio.

CB: Yeah, that was all of them lined up. But these 14 I got later, after I'd restored the ones I had out that day. And when Margot Heller [Director of SLG] came to visit me about a year ago she was interested in showing all the lamps.

TP: How many of them are there?

CB: About 150. The logistics are just much to be honest, I have no interest in showing them temporarily. They either go from my studio to their permanent home, or they stay at my studio. They're not for a temporary exhibition.

TP: They do look like the perfect number for the space though... I just assumed that was why you picked 14.

CB: I guess if we had 16 we just would have squeezed them a little more. There wasn't much choice of where to put them really because there's this Walter Crane panel underneath the floor. The building's from the 19th century -- it was purpose-built to show contemporary art... bring it to the poor people... So there's this historical panel in the middle of the room that's concrete, and there are only two strips of concrete beside that panel that are available, so we didn't really have much choice of where to put them -- the only choice we really had was how far apart to space them and where to start and where to end.

TP: So going back -- I'm obviously trying to force you to answer this -- but there's this ultimate irony to me that you're working with an architectural intervention based around elements that, while they come from America, are based on European design... so you're basically shipping back these reflections to their origin. It's kind of like your own Boston Tea Party...

CB: Yeah, I think that's true to a certain extent -- but all American design is basically European because America was settled by Europeans... excluding the slave population and a few things like that... so our cultural influences are all basically from Europe.

TP: So that wasn't a dominant strain in your thinking?

CB: No -- well there's a possibility of all 150 being sent to Vienna, which I think is quite funny, because shipping antiques from Los Angeles to Vienna, Austria is a really sort of ironic idea... whether it happens or not, we'll see... I don't think most Viennese, if they saw them, would think they're American -- they'd assume they were from Salzburg.

TP: Well I think the battleship grey is what really makes them American.

CB: I chose that colour because it's the colour that shows the most contour... it's not the same thing with black or white. I picked that grey specifically because it's right in between. I know this from reading about early German locomotive manufacturers who would always paint their prototypes that same grey for the brochures. After you made your order, they would paint them black or green or put a stripe... whatever colour you wanted. But initially they would always make the prototype in that grey.

TP: Maybe it's strange, but I think looking at some of your past work -- especially some of the stuff you were doing in the '80s -- a lot of it is about military presence, so especially with the environment right now it gets pretty easy to construe this new work as that too... like you've sent over 14 army "peacekeepers" from America.

CB: Yeah -- I know what you're talking about.

TP: So I guess the other question is about the double pairing of this exhibition -- steamroller and street lamps -- how did that come about?

CB: That was Margot Heller's decision. She really wanted The Flying Steamroller (1996) here, and when she first approached me about it I said, "Look, I don't own this work, it's owned by a Swiss drug company and I doubt very much that they would want to lend it. I'll give you the contact names, but then you're on your own." I had no expectations that it would actually happen.

TP: But she got it.

CB: She got it. I'm really happy she did, it's great to have it here, but if you asked me six months ago I would have bet $100 there was no way.

TP: So she really wanted to have something off-site?

CB: She did a great job. It has been a real ordeal to get it here. It's been shown in Vienna, and in the biennial in Lyon, so this is the third time it has been shown.

TP: It seems like Margot picked the two projects to go together partly because they represent two strains in your recent work, at least as I see them: one following a sort of science experiment logic and the other taking on the less "dangerous" aesthetics of architectural intervention. Topically, what are you most interested in working with now? I think back to projects like Reason for the Neutron Bomb [1979] and All the Submarines of the United States of America [1987] and it was like you were doing a public service by trying to help us conceive of what those large [military] numbers really meant. What they looked like...

CB: I was trying to render what was basically a figure on a piece of paper into some sort of concrete fact.

TP: Which seems so abstract...

CB: Right. What's 50,000? Is it different from 5,000? Well yes, it's got another zero, but what does that mean? What do 50,000 tanks look like? Oh my god. What do all the submarines ever launched by the US Navy look like?

TP: It seems like something that would be appropriate for now. Proliferation treatises. Is that something that could tempt you, or are you not in so much of a political mindset?

CB: Well, I think the show in Italy is pretty political.

TP: The police uniforms?

CB: Well, and the bunker's pretty political, and the bullets are pretty political... I'm trying to start a sculpture called Atomic Compass that points towards the source of gamma rays. It's not a real useful instrument, because that's not how they really measure radioactivity -- they do it through air samples and stuff -- gamma rays just go in a straight line, along the line of sight. It's an interesting idea... it will look something like a Buck Rogers cannon made out of lead.

TP: Big?

CB: Yeah, it should be about 10-20 feet long. If you went out there with a Coleman lantern, which are highly radioactive, or one of those Timex watches with iridium in them and stand back 50, 200, 1200 feet this thing would be turning slowly, scanning, and it would pick that up, stop, and sound an alarm. It doesn't have any real world practical application, you know? But it's a real scientific instrument in that sense -- it has to work.

TP: It tests itself and its own abilities... that's another thing with The Big Wheel [1979] and some of your other works where you've put your engineering and scientific background to use, it's not enough to simply perform an intervention on a given site -- you have to figure out how to make the thing actually work...

CB: Well once it's produced its pretty much the same thing anywhere... I had no part in this [Steamroller] installation whatsoever. The people who set it up in Lyon were brought over along with a local company called M-Tech and together they installed it. I had absolutely nothing to do with this installation. I'm not involved in that sense.

TP: So when you're working on things like the gamma ray gun -- projects that pose more of an early technical challenge -- are you working with engineers in the planning phase?

CB: Yeah. But engineering is not an exact science, though they would like to have you believe that.

TP: Put it together and see what works best...

CB: When I was working on The Big Wheel I went to a turbine engineer because I was worried about the supports. This is a guy who makes turbines, right? He said, "Listen, if it looks right, it probably is." And I thought, whoa, maybe it is just like that. You absorb things culturally... remember the DC-10 airplanes? There was always something wrong with those planes. The jet engine sat in the back, and if you looked at the tail there was this extra fin sitting on top of the engine. I knew that was funky. It wasn't integrated -- it was something they must have added later.

TP: You've heard about this mid-air collision that happened over the Amazon in September -- some small business jet and a 737 collide, and it's the 737 that crashed. The smaller plane had its fin and airfoil torn off, but it was able to land safely. It still looked like a plane.

CB: There's this sort of intuitive feedback... If you look at early railroad bridges, they were really spindly. They were these massive trestle structures made of steel, but the steel was like these little spindly things that make you go, "Oh god, that just looks weird." They were good for a while, but as soon as the locomotives got heavier they were not so good.

TP: But whereas you could intuit what something like The Big Wheel should look like, with a project like Ghost Ship... the technology involved is mind-blowing.

CB: Well I don't think art really has a purpose except to give people ideas. With a project like Ghost Ship, while it may seem frivolous, it could have real world applications. Why couldn't freighters be sailing giant cargoes across the ocean without any sailors?

TP: When I first heard about Ghost Ship, which I guess was about a year ago, the first thing that came to mind was the X-Prize competition for unmanned space flight. It's kind of a parallel model of grassroots innovation, which is basically a new development methodology for the sciences.

CB: Yeah, private sponsorships.

TP: I think a lot of your work in the last decade and a half has been sort of like that. Setting these challenges for yourself and seeing if they can be resolved into a work.

CB: Yeah, something like that.

TP: So what's next? Are you going to stay home for a while?

CB: I don't think I'm coming back anytime soon. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of not travelling at all...

TP: I have a friend who moved to LA a couple of years ago and I haven't seen him since... I think we've lost him to the climate. It possesses a certain allure for East Coasters, obviously... you're originally from Boston, right?

CB: Well I went to high school there and was born there, but actually I lived in France for a long time and only went back to Boston for high school, in Cambridge. But I took a Greyhound bus to LA between my junior and senior year of high school. I studied at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography -- I had a National Science Foundation grant. Then I got an interview at Pomona College, which was on Route 66, so I didn't care... [laughs]... but once I'd been in California for a year, I couldn't go back. The East Coast and Europe are closer together, psychologically, than the East and West coasts. There's a bigger distance there -- a bigger gap. So I bought a piece of property in 1981 in the southern Santa Monica mountains. I'd looked for about a year and I finally found something I liked -- I had been in New York and when I came back they said, "here's another 10 acres, but it's in the mountains and it's probably too steep, but here's a topo[graphical] map -- why don't you hike around it..." And I did and thought, yeah, this is great. I bought it from the granddaughter of the original owner... he'd bought it from the State of California in 1909, and I bought it from his granddaughter in 1981...

TP: When does that happen today?

CB: That doesn't happen here, and it doesn't happen on the East Coast -- every rock has already been turned over.

TP: And that's where your studio still sits right? Kind of like a hilltop fortress...

CB: Yeah, yeah... it's very steep.

TP: Going back to your inspiration for discovery -- what made you move from an oceanographic institute to making art in the first place?

CB: I'll tell you what happened... I went to Pomona College and wanted to be an architect. They didn't have a pre-architecture programme, so what they made you do was take physics, math and art classes. I mean, Pomona College was pretty hard to get into and they had the cream of the crop -- it was an exclusive school. The kids who were doing physics and calculus were really into it -- it was their life -- so they'd spend 40 hours on one calculus problem and that was exciting for them. It wasn't for me. I couldn't keep up with the physics. So then I went down to the art department and started working on sculptures. At that point I was still in the architecture programme... but then I went back to Boston for the summer and I worked in an architectural office and I was just appalled by what I saw. These guys were getting out of Harvard graduate school -- four years after undergraduate -- and they were down in the basement putting toilet bowls into blueprints. Not for me. It occurred to me that you had to be 50 years old before you got to make a decision in the firm.

TP: Like a law firm.

CB: Exactly. You had to be a major partner to make a decision. But I knew that in sculpture you could make something... two months and you have a product and you can move on. Also, I noticed that none of the students in the art department were going in after class -- this was a kind of rich private school, so there were just stacks of plywood and tons of other materials just laying around and I thought, fuck -- all that's mine... so that was basically it -- I dropped out of the architecture programme and decided to be a sculptor.

TP: Well maybe it's a bit too easy to make this claim, but it certainly does seem that if you want to get something done in architecture, one way is to go the sculptural route.

CB: Oh no, I was just telling you how it was done at the time -- I don't think that's true anymore...

TP: Well, maybe... if you look at some studios like Hadid or Koolhaas, these are big firms...

CB: Yeah, Frank Gehry and all that...

TP: Well, what about Vito Acconci? Your development and his bear more than a passing similarity to me...

CB: I think he's fine... he's taken a different tact in a certain sense -- he has a design studio, he's more involved with architectural projects... he did a great piece in the museum in Vienna. I've seen some great works of his.

TP: But it seems like his development from conceptualism, conceptual architecture, to realisable, functional, projects...

CB: To an extent, but there was that island he had -- that sunken island... they're more or less successful, but then again success is a hard thing to measure. I think failure is interesting too -- spectacular failure...

TP: That's the California ethos...

CB: I think it's informative, you know? I gave a lecture last night at the Tate Modern and used this analogy that the perfect race-car disintegrates at the finish line. That would mean no part is too heavy. It's theoretical obviously, but that's the ideal race-car: every part is exactly right for the job.

TP: And lasts exactly as long as it needs to.

CB: Exactly. As it crosses the finish line it just evaporates. But to find that edge is difficult.

TP: Is B-Car [1975] still around?

CB: Yeah, sure is -- it's owned by a museum in Sweden.

TP: Have you though about venturing back there? Designed efficiency?

CB: Actually, yeah, I've had some fantasies about making another car. It was going to be called... what was it going to be called? The Hog Bucket. It was going to be a titanium formed mono-cockpit body -- like a pick-up [truck] bed -- it would be a two-seater powered by two Harley Davidson motors mounted in the mid-section on either side of the driver. I made drawings for it, but I never really pursued it... but it would be the pool-man's dream... and it would have all these references to motorcycle culture too, being powered by two flatheads.

TP: So you have to be pretty involved in that car and motorcycle culture when you live in California, right?

CB: Well, I'm interested in cars because they're the most mundane consumer item possible.

TP: But necessary.

CB: Well -- in California -- yeah definitely.

Tyler Poniatowski is the manager of Riflemaker Gallery and often works with special programmes and exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery. He recently completed his MA in contemporary art at the Sotheby's Institute, London.

Image © Tyler Poniatowski