Chris Burden
[Artist, b. 1946, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2015, Los Angeles.]
It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity.
I will be shot with a rifle at 7:45 P.M. I hope to have some good photos.
I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around for longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event and see them only as symbols or indicators of what went on.
