Chris Burden, Beam Drop, Brazil.
ART MAKE OF I-BEAMS AND CONCRETE
By DOUGLAS C. MCGILL
“There is some violence in this piece, but there is beauty, too,” said Chris Burden, the conceptual artist, as he watched 60 steel construction beams fall one by one into a 30-foot pond of wet concrete.
The performance was held yesterday at Artpark, the 200-acre state park in this village, which is about 10 miles north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. It culminated in the creation of a sculpture called “Beam Drop,” the latest of Mr. Burden’s decidedly curious works.
Mr. Burden is best known for a work he staged in 1971, in which a marksman shot him in the left arm with a .22 rifle. On another occasion, he crawled on his bare belly across a parking lot strewn with broken glass, and he once crucified himself by having his hands nailed to the back of a Volkswagen.
Yesterday’s performance was gentle by comparison. Using a hydraulic crane, Mr. Burden had 60 steel construction beams hoisted a hundred feet into the sky, and then dropped them into a pool of wet concrete 30 feet square and 3 feet deep. The beams fell silently, looking weightless until they sliced into the ground with a terrific crunching, scratchy sound. After they stuck, they swayed a bit, back and forth, like thrown knives.
“The beams are symbolic of culture and order,” Mr. Burden said yesterday at the site. “Our most dignified structures, like the World Trade Center or Chicago’s Sears Tower, are made of them. My idea is to play with these building blocks of order, to be impudent with them. I think people relate to that.”
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Reactions Were Mixed
At Artpark yesterday, some related and some didn’t. About a hundred spectators, including other artists, concrete pourers and crane operators, gathered in the early morning to watch the performance, and the reactions were mixed.
“That cement would look great in my driveway,” said Jim Ellis, a summertime Artpark groundskeeper who was watching bemusedly from a distance. “I don’t really see this as art. I see it as a lot of money.”
Yet the work, formally called “Beam Drop,” and which will stand at the entrance to Artpark now that it is finished, had its defenders, too.
Mike Weber, for example, who poured the concrete for the sculpture, seemed to enjoy it for reasons quite similar to those predicted by Mr. Burden.
“I’ve always wanted to do something like this, only with cars,” he said. “A few of them. I see the demolition derby every year at the Erie County fair, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of that.”
Reminded of Childhood
A colleague of Mr. Weber, Wade Cook, who watched the falling beams with a large grin on his face, said that the event reminded him of certain childhood pleasures. “It’s like when you were a kid, you liked to poke twigs into your pancakes, or jab your birthday cake with candles,” he said.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the sharpest criticism of Mr. Burden’s sculpture came from other artists, many of whom watched the proceedings from a highway embankment high above the cement pit. For some of them, the Beam Drop seemed neither random nor violent enough.
“I was hoping to see concrete splashing all over the place,” said Alan Burton Thompson, a jewelry maker from Buffalo. “I’d like to see six trucks pouring cement, and then six cranes dropping I-beams all at once. Now that would be violent.”
As for the issue of randomness, Mr. Burden’s sculpture sparked a brief but fierce debate among fellow artists. At one point, for example, when a small beam fell over sideways, half out of the pit, Mr. Burden ordered it picked up and dropped again.
An Unanswered Question
“Hey, what happened to random?” demanded one artist. “Why’d he pick it up?”
“Because it fell on a damn pile of dirt, John, give him a break!” replied another. “It was a mistake!”
“How do you make a mistake if it’s random?” shot back John, unsatisfied. But the beam was hoisted up and dropped again, catching everyone’s attention, and the question went unanswered.
All in all, “Beam Drop” went off nearly perfectly. The only exception was when one 20 foot, half-ton beam hit a patch of hardened cement and toppled over, crushing a movie camera perched at the edge of the cement pond. “I think I got the footage,” said the film maker, Michael Rudnick, gamely.
As the beams fell, Mr. Burden walked nervously, and at a safe distance, from his sculpture as it took shape. From the crowd of television and print reporters, he was repeatedly asked, “Is it art?”
He answered every time with apparent earnestness and not a trace of a smile. “When the crane lets go of the beams, they seem to hang in mid- air for a full second, as if they’re trying to decide whether or not to fall,” he said. “And when they fall, they come down quietly almost like dancers. There’s something real nice when those beams go down.’
Little Bristling Soul 