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Topics: California, US News, Art
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A famous artist who once allowed a buddy to shoot him in the arm as part of a performance revealed that the stunt went terribly wrong.
Performance artists like the likes of Marina Abramovic are no strangers to the extreme, often putting on shows that leave you stunned in silence, for better or for worse.
Yet while the 78-year-old Serbian conceptual artist has stabbed her hand with knives, invited spectators to do anything to her body and masturbated publicly to the point of achieving nine orgasms, the late Chris Burden arguably took it a step further.
The Boston-born star rose to fame for his controversial works, centred around the idea of personal danger and body art, like locking himself inside a university locker for five days, as seen in his Five Day Locker Piece.
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He also fired several pistol shots at a Boeing 747 passenger plane as it took off from Los Angeles International Airport. Although the stunt landed him in hot water with the FBI at the time, it wasn't his only hot take involving guns.
In November 1971, the then 25-year-old invited his pal, Bruce Dunlap, to shoot him in the left arm with a .22-calibre rifle, just a mere 15 feet away in a Californian gallery called F Space.
In the eight-second-long performance, also aptly called Shoot, the shot quite clearly wounds Burden, and it soon transpired that something went wrong.
Speaking to The New York Times before his death at the age of 69 in 2015, the artist recalled how he envisioned the bullet would 'whiz by my arm and it would scratch it and one drop of blood would roll down my forearm'.
"That was the ideal," Burden continued, before revealing that it isn't exactly how it went down.
"He stood about 15 feet away from me and he asked if I was ready and I kind of stiffened up, stuck my left arm out a little so he'd have some -," he laughed.
As the footage shows, Burden was struck in the arm, which the shooter, Dunlap, said appeared to 'look okay' until he walked away and went 'a little wobbly.'
"It turned out to be a flesh wound. He went in and out of my arm with a .22 bullet," Burden explained. "It's just like hitting a corner of a tractor trailer on a freeway, your arm just got nicked by a giant force, it just goes numb."
Concerned about the potential life-threatening injury, the team decided to take Burden to the hospital, where they explained to the police that the shooting was an accident.
"I don't think they believed me for a moment, they probably thought my wife had shot me and I wasn't pressing charges," Burden added.
Explaining how he conjured up the wacky idea in the first place, he said it was inspired by seeing 'a lot of people being shot on TV every night' in the Vietnam War, many around Burden's age at the time.
When it came to asking Dunlap, a drafted marksman who had left the army to study at the University of California, Irvine, where he met Burden, the artist said it was a simple decision.
"I knew I couldn't go down to the local gun store and ask, you know, 'Hey is there a gun instructor who would like to come and do an art performance where you kind of nick my arm,' you know, that wouldn't go over," he said.
"I had to ask somebody who was a friend and who was willing to do it."