Jennie Klein on Laura Paolini
A Crack in the Monolith: Chris Burden, Television, and Performative Affect
Image: It’s like talking to a wall by Laura Paolini, 2021, photo by Cara Tierney
Laura Paolini’s lecture on Chris Burden’s early performance work took place against the backdrop of the Flow Festival, a public performance event sponsored by Out of Site in Chicago. Flow advertises itself as embodied and sited/site specific. This year, as a result of the ongoing pandemic, it has been forced to be completely virtual, with artists and scholars participating remotely in the workshops, lectures, and performances. Paolini’s focus on Burden’s use of television to change the affective nature of the relationship between the performer and their audiences was particularly appropriate as it harked back to the early days of media when artists were enamored with the immediacy of video. Paolini focused on four performances: TV Ad Piece (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Match Piece (1972), and Velvet Water (1974). These four pieces, Paolini argued, troubled the power dynamic between the artist and the audience, who in each case was forced to experience the performance at a distance through the medium of the television, or, in the case of Match Piece, at an oblique angle to the live performance which was simultaneously broadcast on a video system that simply live streamed the performance rather than recording it.
The other three performances were all experienced through the medium of television. TV Ad Piece was a short film of Through the Night Softly, a longer durational performance made earlier that year where Burden, his hands bound behind his back and wearing only his underwear, crawled across broken glass. Burden purchased late night tv spots on a local television station and ran a 10 second clip of the performance. In TV Hijack, Chris Burden took television host Phyllis Lutjeans hostage during a live television broadcast and threatened to make her perform obscene acts if the film of the interview wasn’t turned over to him so that he could destroy it. Burden offered his own film of the event to the station manager, who refused. TV Hijack was only available to the few viewers (if any) who were watching the interview in real time. In Velvet Water Burden attempted to breath water until he passed out from the effort. For about 5 minutes, Burden, seated on the one side of a constructed wall, did his best to extract oxygen from water while the audience, seated on the other side of the wall, watched him do so on a small television monitor.
Paolini, whose own work addresses embodied experience through live performance, screen media and documentation, was interested in what happened to the masochistic contract (as defined by Kathy O’Dell) between Burden and his complicit audience. What changed or shifted for the audience when they experienced the “flow” of live television rather than the embodied artist in the flesh? How did Burden, who the magazine Esquire named as one of the most important people of 1973, use the media to reach a larger public who embraced media, particularly television, as a disseminator of knowledge? Paolini’s lecture included comparisons performances done by women body artists such Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) where the audience was invited to come up to the stage and snip off a bit of Ono’s clothing. In comparison, Burden’s use of women makes apparent the degree to which the masochistic contract between the artist and his public was based on the debasement of the female body. Match Piece included Burden’s wife Barbara, who agreed to lie on the floor naked while Burden threw lit matches at her. Contemporary accounts of the performance refer to Barbara as “the girl,” certainly she was never considered to be a collaborator or fellow artist, although she helped to facilitate Burden’s early work.
The discussion following the lecture turned quickly to the gendered violence implicit in Burden’s work. Duff Norris, who facilitated the lecture, asked Paolini how this talk related to her own work. Paolini replied that she was interested in how her work operated within the legacy of body-based endurance. The discussion quickly shifted to the women who were asked to endure Burden’s art: Phyllis Lutjeans and Barbara Burden. During the lecture, Paolini pointed out that both women insisted that they participated voluntarily in Burden’s performances, although they both looked pretty uncomfortable in the documentation at the time. One piece that wasn’t mentioned, but should have been, was Burden’s 1980 made-for-television film Big Wrench. Big Wrench was inspired by a truck he purchased that he called Big Job, a truck that he later had to sell, although not before he had published a performative essay about the truck in the March 1979 issue of High Performance. Big Wrench, which was excerpted in Burden’s posthumous biopic of 2016, Burden, is pretty disturbing. The truck was purchased and the film was made after he broke up with the artist Alexis Smith, with whom he had been having an affair while he was still married to Barbara Burden. As Sydney Stutterheim wrote in 2019 for the Gagosian Quarterly:
'The work’s personalized narrative—in which Burden recounts his anger and sadistic fantasies, as well as his recreational drug use—and the artist’s repeated declarations of the veracity of his claims reflect a confessional mode of performance and video art that was prevalent in his earlier projects.'
The movie includes a chilling scene where Burden appeared to be stalking Smith while driving around in Big Job. In 1980, Burden’s sadistic fantasies were hardly abstractions. Just three years earlier Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz had performed In Mourning and In Rage on the steps of the Los Angeles Federal Building in response to a series of brutal murders perpetrated by the Hillside Stranglers. When Lacy and Labowitz orchestrated this performance (which coincidentally was designed to be featured on the local news stations, who had been alerted to cover the event), violence against women was treated as something to be expected, and even casually accepted. There continues to be something really creepy about Burden’s work that makes evident the sexual violence that informed the work of so many male artists at the time. Burden's audiences remained complicit through it all.
