Advertisement

Review: Documentary ‘Burden’ portrays provocative artist’s popular and critical ascendence

Share

With “Urban Light,” Chris Burden’s photo-hotspot installation of antique streetlamps at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the artist became indelibly linked with his city. Another piece at LACMA, the gleefully intense kinetic sculpture “Metropolis II,” deepened the love connection. But as Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey demonstrate in their illuminating new documentary, “Burden,” the artist’s embrace by the general public and the art establishment was an unlikely outcome for a man who began his career as an enfant terrible, his performance pieces flirting head-on with violence.

The directors have unearthed low-fi but still alarming footage of those ’70s provocations, among them “Shoot” (an assistant shot him in the arm) and “Trans-Fixed” (he was nailed to a VW Beetle). Perhaps more disturbing than the self-injuries was Burden’s video-confession-as-art, revealing an extramarital affair to the world before telling his first wife.

The filmmakers are concerned more with career trajectory than personal history, and though they don’t sugarcoat the bouts of troubling behavior, their affection for Burden is evident. Their one naysayer is, rather pointedly, almost a caricature of art-critic snobbery; a more robust debate would have heightened the inquiry.

Besides its archival glimpses of the industriously self-promoting bad boy, “Burden” communes with the serene elder statesman at his Topanga Canyon studio, just months before his death in 2015, at age 69. Whether as a constructor of large-scale enchantments or a notorious conceptualist, he emerges in this portrait as sincerely searching. “Everything I do,” a young Burden quietly tells an interviewer, “is real.”

Advertisement

-------------

‘Burden’

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Playing: Landmark Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles; Regency South Coast Village 3, Santa Ana

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour »

Movie Trailers

calendar@latimes.com

@LATimesMovies

Advertisement