It is 1954. A woman is driving down the pacific coast highway. She stops at Pamona college, drops into an art show, and buys a work of art and begins writing about the local scene. It is 1971. A man is in a room, on a platform, 14 feet above the floor. He screams into the void. It is 2022. A letter from the artist to the art critic is auctioned, along with a tape recording of the performance for $15,000. This is a story of collision and consequences: for art, for commerce, for human relationships. It is a story of how the man sent the woman a letter. It’s also a story of art and markets and the artist’s body.
Chris Burden is perhaps best known for another 1971 performance. Standing at a distance of 15 feet, his friend musician Bruce Dunlap raised a shotgun and fired.
Earlier that same year, in the same gallery, Burden engaged in another of his violent, body-conscious performances. Perched on a platform of 14 feet in the F-Space gallery, the artist repeatedly yelling at visitors to the gallery to “get the fuck out”, his voice amplified by speakers, Shout piece carries the same sense of urgency and danger as the more famous Shoot piece.
One wonders what a tape recording of it might sell for.
In Burden’s work the artist’s body–or voice–is the art piece, made solid. Literally, embodied. There’s a certain irony that the handwritten note1 and tape recording of his performance—a performance embedded in the performance art anti-capitalist revolution of the 70s—by an artist who spent much of his career considering the parameters of the museum and gallery—being sold as “art ephemera” at auction. That irony is perhaps escalated by the fact that before her death Zlotnick, who began publishing a newsletter about art in the early 70s and purchased many of her pieces directly from young artists, had hoped her art collection might be kept together. While her daughters donated some of the works to museums, the majority were auctioned of—in some cases to the commercial resale market—for a total of $2.1 million2.
Artists must feed themselves somehow, and that typically means entering the labour market in one way or another. But the “art object” in this case—and the entire secondary art market— is a prime example of the alienation of labor. As one of Chris Burden’s contemporaries, Adrian Piper noted in her journals, “inconceivable amounts of money are lavished on objects, while artists expend their energy in plumbing and secretarial work in order to support themselves and their art”.
Burden was very specific about the way in which he documented his art, using silver gelatin prints instead of video because “film and tape are taken as reality while you the viewer or anybody is watching them [rather than] symbolically”3. He certainly never intended a scrawled note sent to an art critic to become an art object. But it has. The object sold as “remnants from Shout (1971)” at auction two years ago has been reassembled, in combination with an audiotape—completely inaudible in all likelihood if it is at all like the one from “Shoot”—to form a physical object, a sculpture.
Burden, who died in 2015, cannot tell us at this point how he might feel about the direct produce of his labor and body being sold to benefit a third party he never met. We can only imagine what an artist famous for making hard to commodify art with his body would think of this particular totem of his work.
- Per LAMA: Lot is comprised of a casette recording from Shout Piece. F Space: August 21, 1971, and a hand-written letter and an envelope addressed to Diana Zlotnick. Signed and inscribed to letter: ‘Dear Diana Looking through some of my stored things in the garage I came upon this tape—which is the one you requested (I believe). Chris Burden’. ↩︎
- Catherine Wagley. “Diana Zlotnick Was the L.A. Art Scene’s Original Booster. So Why Are Her Contributions in Danger of Being Lost to History?” in Artnet June 2022 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/diana-zlotnick-was-the-l-a-art-scenes-original-booster-so-why-are-her-contributions-in-danger-of-being-lost-to-history-2126007 ↩︎
- “An Electronic Arts Intermix Presentation” performed by Chris Burden with clips from projects 71-74 https://vimeo.com/29168858 ↩︎