Featured Image Credit: Youtube/New York Times/David Livingston/Getty Images
Topics: Art
Jess Battison
Sure, we all trust our friends. Well, most of them anyway. Because while we can’t be sure they won’t take an opportunity to embarrass us, we know they wouldn’t wish us dead.
And one bloke trusted his friend so much he let him shoot him with a live bullet from 15 feet away in order to make an important point.
Back in 1971, artist Chris Burden arranged for himself to be non-lethally shot by his mate Bruce Dunlap with a .22-caliber rifle.
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Ok, so, Burden wasn’t just any old bloke and this is definitely not something we’d be encouraging either way. The American was an artist who was well-known for his performance art with his first significant work, Five Day Locker Piece, seeing him locked in a locker for five days.
He made a rather controversial series that basically saw him putting himself in danger, like the time he fixed himself on the rear bumper of a Volkswagen Bug with nails through his palms.
Or for Through the Night Softly in 1973, Burden bound his hands behind his back and slithered across shattered glass in his undies.
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But it’s Shoot that many know him best for.
On 19 November 1971, he stood in the F-Space gallery at Santa Ana, California, surrounded by bare white walls as his pal stood 13 feet away.
As documented in a very, very short video on 16mm film and photos, Dunlap raised the rifle and shot at his friend's left shoulder. The bullet however ended up going straight through the edge of his arm.
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Basically, Burden said this was to do with the normalisation of seeing or hearing of people getting shot in the US, without really knowing how it feels.
“I had an intuitive sense that being shot is as American as apple pie. We see people being shot on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it’s like. So I did it,” he reportedly explained.
Although Burden did apparently later admit it was just supposed to be a graze and his friend ended up missing and shot him in the arm.
Although not totally accurate, Shoot led to him being known as ‘the artist who shot himself’ and inspired other pieces of art like Laurie Anderson’s song ‘It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole)’.
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Burden died at the age of 69 in May 2015, 18 months after he was diagnosed with melanoma.