Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 179

We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a man rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes of him a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about him. His voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all the great works of arr or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then true in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that he is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation. To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us-such is the creative and ruling principle of the universe-such is the fullness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes man a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce men to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away.

raveneuse:

Chris Burden, Through the Night Softly, Main Street, Los Angeles, California: September 12, 1973.

“He was every inch an artist, as tough and uncompromising as any I have ever met.”

– Larry Gagosian on Chris Burden

Chris Burden, the American sculptor and pioneering performance artist, has died from cancer at the age of 69, his art dealer, Larry Gagosian, has confirmed.

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In 1973, Chris Burden purchased  ten-second clips late night commercial spots on a local television station in order to air his ironically-titled action Through the Night Softly. This piece consisted of Burden crawling and slithering across shards of glass in his underwear with his hands bound behind his back. This raw performance forced the audience into stark confrontation with the the pain  Burden felt as the field of broken glass shredded his bloodied torso. By offering this piece to viewers in the detached setting of their homes, Burden emphasized our increasingly desensitized reception of atrocities. Burden’s “ad” was proceeded by a Ronco record ad and followed—in an eerie juxtaposition—by a soap commercial in which man lathered his nude body. This piece suggests American alienation from social pain—indeed, his crawling posture evokes the pose of American soldiers in Vietnam (our first dramatically televised war), confronting the viewer with the ways in which we alternately disengage from the suffering of others and keep it at a remove through transforming it into an object of spectacle.