Doomed

"Burden's most trenchantly significant work was 'Doomed,' performed in April, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight, and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went. Burden didn't move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. ('It was awful,' he recalled.) Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis O'Shea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden's reach. The artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a public action that imperilled himself. It wouldn't have made sense. 'Doomed' unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In O'Shea's case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there until he died? 'Probably not,' he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenberg's famous intention 'to act in the gap between' art and life. There isn't any gap. Art is notional. There is always only life and death."

—Peter Schjeldahl, "Performance: Chris Burden
and the Limits of Art," from The New Yorker

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK