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Chris Burden

Three Ghost Ships

July 11–August 30, 1996
Beverly Hills

Installation view with Three Ghost Ships (1991) Artwork © Chris Burden/Licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Douglas M. Parker Studio

Installation view with Three Ghost Ships (1991)

Artwork © Chris Burden/Licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Douglas M. Parker Studio

About

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition by Chris Burden.

Burden’s Three Ghost Ships is a trio of actual sailboats fitted with solar panels, electronic gear, and global satellite hookups for unmanned navigation. The artist intended these seemingly innocent vessels to carry a small amount of tea as they sail in unison from Charleston, South Carolina, and appear miraculously in the harbor of Plymouth, England.

Burden carefully selected the sites: The Mayflower embarked from Plymouth, and Charleston is home to major US air, naval, and Polaris submarine bases. The artist also invokes the Boston Tea Party, as well as Christopher Columbus’s own triad of vessels. There is, however, a sinister underside. Could these three electronic pleasure crafts be used to anonymously transport dangerous cargo? Three Ghost Ships epitomizes Burden’s masterful fusion of real machinery and complex metaphor.

In the Gagosian installation, the computer within one of the Ghost Ships will be programmed to periodically unfurl the boat’s sail, pivot its rudder, and simulate the mechanisms of automatic navigation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a selection of Burden’s Small Guns, elegant groupings of toy instruments of war and domination, including metal soldiers, plastic hand grenades, simulated bombs, and two pairs of Chinese foot-binding slippers.

Image of American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim

In Conversation
American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim on Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden

Join Gagosian to celebrate the publication of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden with a conversation between American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim presented at the Kitchen, New York. Considering the book’s sustained examination of sixty-seven projects that remained incomplete at the time of Burden’s death in 2015, the trio discuss the various ways that an artist’s work and legacy live on beyond their lifetime.

Photograph of the installation process of an unrealized performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, 1974. Photo: Brian Forrest, courtesy Michael Auping

At the Edge
Chris Burden: Prelude to a Lost Performance

Michael Auping tells the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the preparations for a performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Southern California in 1974—and the event’s abrupt cancellation—providing a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career.

Takashi Murakami cover and Andreas Gursky cover for Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022 magazine

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022

The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).

Chris Burden, model for the installation Xanadu as proposed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008. Photo: Joel Searles

Chris Burden: Poetic Practical

A new publication exploring the work that Chris Burden conceived but left unrealized delves into his archive to present sixty-seven visionary projects that reveal the aspirations of this formidable artist. The book’s editors, Sydney Stutterheim and Andie Trainer, discuss its development with Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Chris Burden Estate.

Chris Burden: Big Wrench

Gagosian Quarterly Films
Chris Burden: Big Wrench

From January 23 to February 21, 2019, Gagosian Quarterly presented a special online screening of Chris Burden’s 1980 video Big Wrench.

Big Wrench

Big Wrench

Sydney Stutterheim looks at the brief but feverish obsession behind this 1980 video by Chris Burden.