You can see Liu’s work in the upcoming exhibit “Performing for the Camera” at the Arizona State University Art Museum from February 4 – March 19, 2012.

The following is an interview with Eli Klein, head of Eli Klein Fine Art, the New York and Beijing-based gallery that represents Liu Bolin.

Trenda: Can you describe the work of artist Liu Bolin?
Kline: He is the master of camouflage. He is described as the “invisible man.”

Trenda: Would you primarily describe Bolin as a performance artist?
Kline: No, he is much more. I describe him as an artist.

Trenda: What makes Bolin’s work so intriguing right now at this moment?
Kline: People are interested in his work because of multiple aspects: It’s not just a performance, but also a painting and a photograph. This reaches a wider audience. We look at the photographs as documentation of these mediums, and this is what we sell. But he is also an accomplished sculptor as well.

Trenda: Does he take all the photographs himself?
Kline: He sets up the photograph himself. He has assistants, obviously, because he can’t be in two places at once. But he is the artist. He is the one doing everything.

Trenda: Chinese artists have a lot of currency in contemporary art world at the moment. Why do you think that is?
Kline: [China’s] economic power in the world creates a strong presence in the contemporary art world. They are doing such a great job internally by supporting the arts through education, museums and other funding. Contemporary art is part of the Chinese culture. It’s not a phenomenon as some people respond to this. It will continue to explode and hopefully will be widely collected in the west.

Trenda: Does that come from the Chinese government allowing more western ideas to be accessible on the Internet and a part of the daily life in China?
Kline: Yes. Contrary to what you hear in the media, they are allowing more images to surface with fewer constrictions. If you agitate the government, they will bite back.

Trenda: What made you decide to represent him?
Kline: We have represented him for over four years. I thought he had an important message in his work. His work is also aesthetically pleasing, and the reaction is phenomenal. You have the best of everything.

Website: www.ekfineart.com

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The first piece, Soldadera (Scenes from Un Banquete en Tetlapyac) was a two-channel video by the artist Andrea Fraser. It presented a female peasant, Frances Flynn Paine, played by Fraser herself as a heroic figure set in the 1930s. This was juxtaposed next to scenes of Eisenstein at the Hacienda de Tetlapayac in Mexico.

Boxing was a 8mm film transferred to 16mm from Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu. He was known for making work on the political regime in a time of social decline. The country in the late 70s was impoverished and authoritarian. In Boxing, Grigorescu, he fights with an image of himself. It’s as if he is fighting his own alternate persona.

Kadar Attia’s slide projection titled “Open Your Eyes” (2010) juxtaposes disfigured soldiers of war to broken pottery. Two histories unfold through a presentation-style-display that reinterprets two contrasting processes. The collection of both non-western techniques of repair and occidental cultures relay an idealistic interpretation of restoration and collective objects.

Martha Rosler’s She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day is an installation of twelve chromogenic color prints presented in a gird and an audio recording of a female speaking with an abusive mother whom is not present on the other end. Rosler’s piece offers a personal examination of international politics has on one’s vernacular activities.

In Deimantas Narkevicius’s Once in the XX Century, is a video comprised of reversed Lithuanian television clips. The statue of Lenin is shown being erected and not disassembled. Therefore, the socialist party is starting instead of terminating.

Performance Histories was not only about a different perspective on historical events but a memory capsulated by cinema. This offered new ways to deconstruct important moments by creating a vantage point from a performative structure. This repository of social, political, and cultural narratives were reassembled into an unfamiliar storytelling. One can’t help but reflect upon the similarity to the recent Documenta 13’s statement (along with the inclusion of Kader Attia’s work) by suggesting that the viewer creates his or her own connections through a diverse range of artists. There were direct relationships and therefore, more information might have made a stronger introduction into the show. As a collection of works, it was well curated. The next part of the exhibition will be highly anticipated.

– Tiffany Trenda

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We met with Rasmussen at the Armory Show 2012 in New York City after her performance Amorphous Assemblage. She had hired professional modern dancers to act as living sculptures by placing them into white cocoons. They were sporadically placed around the fair’s grounds.

TT:  How do you describe this work that we are seeing?

LR:  I had constructed spandex costumes with poles. The dancers were then scattered throughout the fair for one to two hours.  In the performance, they transformed their bodies into living sculptures by making different forms out of their costumes.  The body then becomes architectural.  I also had hoped to references minimalism because the dancers are working with geometric shapes that are quite organic.

TT:  What is your process?

LR:  My process always starts with a concept and is usually about gender issues.

TT:  Do you always use dancers for your pieces?

LR:  I have only worked with dancers a few times. Usually I am a solo performer. This piece I was the conceptualizer and the instructor.

TT:  What kind of directions did you give the dancers?

LR:  First day they were given the cocoons and they had time to play around with them.  I observed their interactions and encouraged them to find their own unique forms within the structure. I wanted each of them to have their own expression and to be individualized. I didn’t want them to dance but to have them find their own shapes.

TT:  What kind of dancers did you work with before?

LR:  I worked with ballet dancers on another piece but I found it to be very hard to break the ballet mold because they were so used to instruction. Ballet dancers are more mechanical but they do something special too. In this piece, I wanted the dancers to be more free and semiotic. So, I chose modern dancers for this work.

TT:  Were you ever a dancer?

LR:  No, but I considered it when I was a young girl.

TT:  As a performance artist, what is your relationship to your body?

LR:  It is my tool. I make myself vulnerable.

TT:  Do you have any artists that have inspired you?

LR:  It always changes. My first ever was Vito Acconci. I really liked how confrontational he was with the viewer in his early videos. Most of the performance artists from the 60s and 70s have inspired me.

TT:  How has your show here at the Armory?

LR:  I have heard “enchanting” and “curious”. It’s been a great audience and very well received.

TT: Describe performance art.

LR:  That is a complex question. Performance art these days can be anything. There are more fields that are being explored. It’s live. All performance art is confrontational. You are the artwork and a direct dialogue happens with the audience.

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Liz Magic Laser in not a performance group but a single performance artist who was born with this extraordinary name. She graduated from the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and received her masters from Columbia University. She has won numerous grants and awards. Her work has international acclaim with major exhibitions at Performa 11, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and MOMA.  Recently, she presented her new work at the brand new gallery, Various Small Fires. She showed I Feel Your Pain, Flight, and The Digital Face.

For the evening of the reception, Laser had an actress named Katie Simone Nehra perform the piece, Preview. This was an interactive work of art that focused on movie trailers with common theme, losing ones’ identity. The performance lasted approximately six minutes. This also debuted at another location, Recess Inc. in Manhattan, New York.
The exhibition had photographs and video throughout the gallery space. The most eye-catching video of all was I Feel Your Pain from her latest commissioned performance at Performa 11. This was edited and filmed in an actual movie theater along with an audience.

Another work of art that was presented was Flight. This piece was part of the MoMA PS1 which featured 6 performers. They recreated scenes from American film classics:  28 Days Later, American Psycho, and Vertigo.

Liz Magic Laser was an unexpected brilliance. The performance was strong and captured the audience in a fresh new way. Although, her work focuses on pop cultural American references, it surprises the audience by stripping the masquerade and the hyper aesthetics. Instead, her work is about the rawness of what is actually happening upon our screens. She makes us reexamine what we are watching.

– Tiffany Trenda

Please see our video of Liz Magic Laser’s performance at Various Small Fires.

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“I can say that all my relationship with performance…can be traced back to that episode,” he said in a 2005 interview.

Zhang Huan, born in 1965 in Anyang City, Henan Province, China, has had a long, distinguished career. He’s had solo exhibitions all over the world and has worked as a painter, set designer, photographer and sculptor. He also claims to have coined the name for the prominent 1990’s Chinese artistic community known as the Beijing East Village.

In contrast to his humble beginnings, recently he has been able to live abroad and employ more than a hundred assistants at a time. But it was his outlandish, body-centered performance art pieces from the ‘90s that have left the greatest mark in public and critical imaginations.

A few of his notable performance art works from that period include “12 m2,” a 1994 performance for which Zhang smeared his body with fish oil and honey and sat naked in a filthy, fly-infested public bathroom for three hours; his 1995 piece “To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain,” for which people laid naked on top of each other in order to add a meter to the mountain’s height; and 1997’s “To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond,” for which Zhang and his assistants stood naked in the Nanmofang pond in order to raise the lake’s water level.

There have been political readings of Zhang Huan’s work. However, the artist has instead repeatedly emphasized his work’s physical and spiritual dimensions. As he told Art Journal in 1999, “The contact of…iron chains, ice, sparks, flies, and earthworms with my naked body makes me feel my body more strongly and helps me to develop a deeper understanding of the body.”

During the last few years, his work has taken a religiously iconic direction, related to his conversion to Buddhism.

In looking at photos of his art, a single quality might explain Zhang’s popular appeal beyond conceptual art circles: much of his work bears a kind of brute, aesthetic beauty that goes beyond its conceptual framework.

Written by Patricio Maya

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Russia conquered Kazakhstan in the 18th century. By 1936, that vast Middle Asian country had become a Soviet republic. This means that for most of the 20th century indigenous Kazakhstani culture was de-emphasized in favor of Soviet culture. Russian became the country’s official language and communism the official system. The loaded term cultural genocide has been employed. This much is certain: for several decades a set of cultures was forcibly repressed in favor of a foreign ideology. Call it what you will; the scars are still there.

Kazakhstan became independent in 1991. Discarding the Soviet ways and going back to Kazakhstani culture seemed like the natural next step. The problem is that Soviet immigration policies shifted the country’s ethnic make up. Nowadays ethnic Kazakhs make up only about 60% of the population. Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainian and others make up the rest. Russian is spoken by over 90% of the people and has remained the country’s intercultural language. Finding a common Kazakh mythology for citizens to gather around seems too intricate, to say the least. And yet, Almagul Menlibayeva is giving it a try. Why? Performance artists have a penchant for herculean acts. Also, her quest fulfills a personal need.

Here’s what she said about self-identity during a recent interview:

“People born in the Soviet Union, we don’t know our past. I learned traditions when I went to my grandmother’s village. But in the village you notice only the rituals and everyday behavior. The intellectual information, you cannot get because, it’s very sad to say, but during collectivization, during the 30s, there were a lot of people who died, moved, and ran away from the communists. [It was hard] to get information about who you are, from where you came and why. There was a big gap. I used to say: I’m a modern person, but who am I?”

Here the idea of atavism emerges. Atavism is the recurrence in a plant or an animal of certain primitive characteristics that were present in an ancestor but have not occurred in intermediate generations; it is a reversion to a former or more primitive type. In her art, Menlibayeva continuously invokes her ancient self. She looks for it around the Kazakh steppe. This is a huge grassy area that first was populated by Turkic nomads before the Arabs arrived in the 8th century (Mongols joined in during the 13th century). Now, it would be wrong to pretend to understand who these Islamic Turkic and Mongol nomads really are. It suffices to know that Tengrism—a Central Asian religion characterized by shamanism, animism, totemism, polytheism and ancestor worship—was integral in the development of Central Asian nomadic culture.

“Who am I?” Almagul Menlibayeva asks.

She was born in 1969 in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, and attended Academy of Art and Theater of Albaty. At first she was a painter but eventually found her way to performance art, photography, and video art. She’s a fashionable dark haired woman, who wears thick-framed glasses, speaks English, and calls herself a nomad—not that she gallops through the steppes on horseback looking for animals to sacrifice. She works the Albaty, Berlin, and New York gallery circuits. She’s not a steppe nomad, but then again—here is where her atavism crystalizes. Her rituals evoke the nomadic world. And in her best work, she seems to stand in the middle of her own dreams, changed.

It’s important to understand, however, that instead of inserting herself into an ancient mythological realm, Menlibayeva’s art brings the mythological world out into the present (that is, globalization and post-modernity). Menlibayeva videos and photos display strange images of goddesses that could have been taken from an Alejandro Jodorowski movie, but they also display editing that mirrors the MTV music video aesthetic. The sound effects could have come out of any Hollywood horror movie. Her long legged models would not be out of place in Vogue. In terms of artistic language, Menlibayeva is as accessible as, to use two extreme examples, Cindy Sherman and David LaChapelle. But that’s just the bait. Almagul Menlibayeva’s metaphysics are destined to remain impenetrable.

This serves a purpose. Traditionally, Western artists have been attracted to Orientalism for various reasons, but it has mostly come down to a search for freshness. That’s fine, but unnaturalness is always a danger for those who are overly eager in their foreign expeditions. The opposite is also true. Non-Western art can be either unapproachable or too self-consciously derivative of Western forms. Menlibayeva has devised a cunning system. Her tools may be Western, but she reaches down and digs underneath her own feet. The outcome is rare to the point of implausibility uncontrived exotic art.

-Patricio Maya

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She received her BFA in Photography & Media from California Institute of the Arts.

She is currently finishing up a project with EZTV which is a documentary and web database of women in the arts in Los Angeles called L.A. Woman.  It will premier as part of 18th Street Art Center participation in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time.

Crash’s feminist DIY approach to production allows her to collaborate with many different types of artists, and has led to her understanding of the important contributions of the interviewees in this project. She hopes to inspire others out of apathy into action by the example of these women.

Crash has just been signed by Joan Jett to Blackheart Records.

Interview with Kate Crash by Tiffany Trenda

Where were you born?
Hollywood, CA.

When did you first know you were going to be an artist?
I knew right away. As a child, I had severe social problems and decided to create costumes and worlds of my own to deal with all the darkness. I felt powerless to adults and therefore I could control this by making the content and the characters in my world. I was considered a freak so looking different made it easier and less of an attack on my character. I remember having the feeling that no one understood me, but when I listened to music or experienced art, these things transcended all the isolation. In making art, you are free to express what you want while most things in life contain censorship.

What childhood memories transpired in to your work?
My mother was a civil rights lawyer, so I was interested in studying the Civil Rights Movement and seeing ways of changing oppression in society. I related to this by the feeling of not having a voice. My mom is an amazing woman. I hope to inspire and awaken [others] because people are neither completely dark nor light. They always contain both. Everyone has the potential to be a person of good character, but turn a wrong corner. I saw a lot of this growing up.

Describe your work.
My main interest is to entertain with a message. I think that the global corporate takeover, and the general encouragement of suppressing free will, is something I am interested in and is revealed in my work. I’m not into accusing anyone, as we all are in a world where we can’t help but hurt the environment and each other. I live in Los Angeles, I drive, I pay taxes, so I’m guilty. I like to grab people at the heart of human emotions, to tell a story, to reveal what is underneath. Also, collective consciousness, even what some call “evil” people, can just be misunderstood. I like to come up with solutions and also encourage people to challenge their belief systems and ask themselves why they believe in these constructs. Is this because of the way you were raised, or what the television says to you? There are always contradictions in your belief system so do your research.

Which artists were influential to your work?
EZTV. Michael Masucci of EZTV has helped me on numerous projects. This organization [is] dedicated to giving a voice to the unrepresented while maintaining a super avant-garde edge to the work.

Art with a message is essential. I also really admire S. Pearl Sharp, Kate Johnson — also from EZTV and one of the most amazing multi-disciplinary artists and filmmakers I have ever met. Barbara T Smith; Sue Dakin; my mom; Iggy Pop; David Bowie; Tom Waits; Jim Jarmusch; Van Gogh; Nick Launay, my producer; Eric Erlandson; Pablo Neruda; Li Young Lee; Henry Miller; Anais Nin; Patti Smith; Grace Jones; Leonard Cohen. This list could go on forever.

Are there any movements that inspired you?
Punk Rock, Dadaism, the Riot Grrrl movement.

How would you define performance art?
I’ll leave that to Barbara T. Smith. Her definition is best and she’s the mother of it all.

How do you use your body as a medium?
My body expresses emotion. I use movement to paint pictures. Anything can be a medium but it depends on your intentions.

How has working in different mediums affected your work and process?
I chose the medium that best gets my emotion/story/message across. I don’t automatically say, “I’m going to write poetry now,” or ” I’m going to do draw now.” I just create. I’ve been working with different mediums since I was a kid by writing, painting, taking photos, and playing guitar. Whatever moves and inspires me at that moment is a precursor to what medium I chose. The different mediums help me stay open-minded and create challenges for me to learn new things and break through self-doubt. Therefore, everything in life informs what you end up doing. People set their own limitations and are restrained by the chains they create. I like to feel limitless and break those boundaries.

There has been a lot of controversy over Lady Gaga claiming to be a performance artist. The term “performance artist” has been constantly defined and redefined. You are a musician yourself and an artist. Do you think pop singers can be performance artists? Why or why not?
I think Iggy Pop and David Bowie are performance artists. Go to one of their shows or watch some videos and it’s hard to disagree. But they don’t make pop music. They are pioneering artists as they go out into the world with the characters they have created. Rock & roll is performance art.

Is there a difference between performers like Lady Gaga and performance artists?
Um…this is a tricky subject. What one should consider is, who was first to do a particular performance and who is taking the credit? But I don’t like to make divisions in the world. I have no authority.

What projects are you working on at this moment?
Currently, I’m working on an album, a piece of music for a new film, and creating a stage show. I’m also, in the process of designing a website for my documentary and creating visual art with poetry for an upcoming art show. I’m always working on multiple projects at once. But I always [take] time out to help and collaborate with friends. We should always contribute in helping people however possible.

Tell us about the LA Woman Documentary. What is it about?
LA Woman is a documentary about emerging to ground-breaking female artists, social entrepreneurs, and philosophers expressing art in their own words.

Where did the idea of the LA Woman the documentary come from? Any inspirations?
It was actually first a multimedia documentary project with a website on female performance artists. I got the idea from hanging around EZTV at 18th   Street Arts Center, where one will see the most amazing legendary and unknown female performance artists. I realized that hearing the ideologies and inspirations was so far from my experience with the academics at Cal Arts. We usually read about critics’ and historians’ versions of what happened, not the artists who created it. I wanted to document these woman artists in their own words without the institution. Why do universities and colleges obscure the genuine art making of these artists and pay more attention to less fashionable or less business-inclined artists, I’ll never know. They seem to get left out.

When is the next showing of LA Woman?
You’ll be able to see it on the website soon. Each woman has her own page with video clips, bios, etc. So even if you can’t come to a screening in Los   Angeles, you can watch it anywhere in the world.

Which direction do you see your work going? Documentary? Visual Art? Music?
The melding of all of the above.

Kate Crash’s Documentary “LA Woman” was screened at EZTV’s “Hacking the Timeline v2.0” at 18^th Street Arts Center as part of the PST Events.

http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/events?id=eztv-s-hacking-the-timeline-v2-0

http://www.eztvmedia.com/lawoman.html

http://www.katecrash.com

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Both naked, (and probably very cold) the man and woman stepped upon two high lit platforms and began to hula-hoop. The rhythm of their bodies created a mesmerizing effect at first. The two figures were graceful and stoic but midway into the thirty-five minute set, the fascination was gone. The audience grew impatient as they began to question the veracity of the piece due to its repetition and freestyle method. It was unclear of the duo’s motivation.

The work was disjointed at times as their motions were sporadic with little or no choreography. At first, their sculpture-like characters seemed to represent Venus and Poseidon but later their positions appeared as contemporary squats similar to work out exercise videos from the 80s. There were often times when Hominal broke character by brushing her hair aside and going on point for a few moments.

The discouragement continued when both dancers faced each other. There was a hope for a climax with perhaps, a touch, a glance to each other?  There was no acknowledgment of either dancer. Instead, grunts and sexual moans were spoken from only Hominal. Now, the piece started to morph into a sexualized, provocative space but this stopped before a clear deliverance.

Their physical attributes worked as polarized opposites with both a feminine male and strong female. Hominal was confident, elegant and quite poised while Chaignaud shrugged and demonstrated a more submissive stance. This questioned if their incentive was some kind of power struggle but this was never worked out in the piece.

The end was predictable. The light went out and they dropped their hula-hoops. It was as if the ending said it all. There was no climax but moments of what could have been a brilliant piece.

– Chris Paynes

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Abramovic was born in 1946 in the former Yugoslavia. Her early pieces used body flagellation and life-threatening actions as ritualistic vehicles. “Rhythm O,” which took place in Naples in 1975, was the most taboo-shattering of her early works. For the piece, Abramovic placed on a table 72 pleasure and pain objects — ranging from honey, to a gun and a bullet — and encouraged the public to do as it pleased with her body. At first, the public was playful, but eventually people tore off most of her clothes, cut her skin and even engaged in mild sexual assault. At some point, a man took the loaded gun and pressed it hard against her temple. Years later, Abramovic described the performance as “Six Hours of Real Horror.”

In the mid-70s, Abramovic’s art took a different turn. She stopped putting her life at such risk. But, most importantly, in 1975 she met Frank Uwe Laysiepen, better known as Ulay. Both artists started a symbiotic artistic and personal relationship that lasted for over 12 years. They lived in a van and produced works that added cerebral and geometrical (or architectural) elements to Abramovic’s ritualistic concerns.

For 1977’s “Imponderabilia,” the two artists stood facing each other naked in a narrow museum entrance. To enter the museum, visitors had to turn sideways and choose to face, and rub up against, one of the artists. That same year, the couple performed “Relation in Movement,” for which they drove their van in counterclockwise circles for 16 hours, or 2,226 laps.

In 1988, Abramovic and Ulay ended their fruitful relationship with “The Lovers,” in which they walked from both ends of the Great Wall of China for 90 days (2,400 miles) met in the middle, hugged, and said good-bye.

After breaking up with Ulay, Abramovic went back to performing alone. Though her work remained ritualistic and, some might say, solipsistic, she was embraced by big art institutions. By the end of the 1990s, her oeuvre had grown to the degree that she started looking back both at her own history and that of performance art.

In 2005 she performed “Seven Easy Pieces.” Five of the seven pieces were recreations of earlier performances by other artists: Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane and Joseph Beuys. Performing someone else’s work was not normally done at the time. Abramovic argued that performance art was about live actions more than about photographs or written records, and that reenacting performances might be the best way to keep performances alive. In 2010, with the artist in her 60s, Abramovic had a career-long retrospective at MoMA. During this retrospective, younger artists reenacted some of her most celebrated pieces, including “Rhythm 0.”

Before the retrospective, Abramovic wondered if younger audiences would actually be interested in her work. “The Artist is Present,” a new piece in which she invited individuals to do nothing but sit across her, and silently establish eye contact, was performed as part of the retrospective. Scores of people, including many celebrities, sat in front of Abramovic. Many cried. Abramovic’s new work, though cool in execution, was compared to old religious art in the fervent reactions it brought out in people. “The Artist is Present” was less shocking than some of her earlier works, but no less challenging than anything she’d done in the ‘70s. The main difference was the amount of mainstream attention the work got — unmatched in the performance art world to date.

Written By Patricio Maya

Featured Series  Made Me Cry
Portraits taken during the MoMA’s exhibit of performance artist “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present”.
Abramović sits at a table in silence, and museum guests can sit across from her and stare.
Some people couldn’t handle the heat.

Portraits > http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com

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Schimmel was protesting on behalf of the artist’s later, and less provocative, work, but undeniably, Burden’s early self-inflicting “danger” performances bore a kind of direct intellectual impact that was fundamental to the development of performance art. Take a piece like “Trans-Fixed” (1974), in which his palms were literally nailed, as if being crucified, to the back of a Volkswagen Beatle in a garage. A shocking act, its simplicity, energy, and referential iconography made it one of Burden’s most influential works.

The same holds true for “Shoot” (1971), a spontaneous performance piece held at the F-Space Gallery in which Burden was shot in the arm by an assistant so as to know what it felt like. Such an act may seem frivolous or naïve, but bringing visceral experience to the forefront of a metaphor-weary art world was subversive and groundbreaking in those days.

Burden was born in Boston in 1946. He studied art in college at Pomona in California, where he created minimalist environmental sculpture. He spent two years at in a grad program at University of California, Irvine with fellow artist Barbara T. Smith and others. He began to experiment with the ways the human body can be used in sculpture, or as the artwork itself, in order to re-engage his viewing audience. He began this period of his career by locking himself in a storage locker for five days with only water.

In a much more staid performance series in the mid-‘70s Burden bought commercial airtime on national television and created advertising spots featuring himself and selling nothing. On one, he broke down his taxable income as an artist. In other, he flashed the names of classical art masters like Michelangelo and Da Vinci, listing himself among them.

Across the last three decades, much of Burden’s work has been sculptural. Some of Burden’s non-performance art works include “B-Car,” 1976, a fully-functioning light-weight car he built himself; “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb,” 1979, an installation consisting of 50,000 nickels and 50,000 matches representing Soviet Union tanks; and, more recently, “Urban Light,” 2008, an outdoor installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art made of 202 restored antique street lamps. Today Burden lives in Los Angeles with his wife Nancy Rubins, also a multimedia artist.

In the years since his famously masochistic performances, he has proved curator Schimmel right by establishing a much fuller, varied career. But the early work was so transformative for the Performance Art Movement that there seems to be no shame in associating his name with his very daring young work.

By Patricio Maya

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