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.
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.
Little Bristling Soul 