Extended through March 12, 2016
Works Exhibited
About
It’s about trying to frame something. And to 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.
—Chris Burden
Gagosian New York is pleased to present Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15), one of the late Chris Burden’s last works.
Beginning with a series of startling actions in the early 1970s, Chris Burden challenged his own mental and physical limitations, as well as the boundaries of art and performance. Shut inside a locker for five days (Five Day Locker, 1971), shot in the arm (Shoot, 1971), and nailed through the palms of his hands to the roof of a car (Trans-fixed, 1974), he sought to reflect the violence that defined American politics, society, and media at the time. Burden soon channeled the daring spirit of these early performances into imposing technical feats that similarly explored challenges both individual and social. He uses toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) as the building blocks for expansive scale models of buildings, dystopic cities, and battlefields, while deploying actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) in surreal and improbable ways.
Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15) is a dense cluster of thirty-two antique cast-iron vernacular street lamps, electrified with cool, bright LED bulbs and standing almost twelve feet tall. The work is related to Urban Light (2008), Burden’s celebrated permanent installation of 202 lamp posts, which stands at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2000, Burden began collecting the street lamps that used to line residential streets in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s, repurposing them as sculptural installations. In Buddha’s Fingers, the hexagonal lamp bases are set in a tight honeycomb formation. The whimsical title refers to the fingered citrus fruit “buddha’s hand,” a recurrent still-life motif and subject in classical Asian art, and a religious symbol of happiness, longevity, and good fortune.
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Spotlight
Burden
The story behind Chris Burden’s Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15) and its connection to all of his streetlamp installations. Text by 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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
