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Chris Burden: Extreme Measures

10/02/13-01/12/14

The New Museum presents “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” an expansive presentation of Chris Burden’s work that marks the first New York survey of the artist and his first major exhibition in the US in over twenty-five years.

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Chris Burden, Ghost Ship, 2005. Thirty-foot handmade sixareen sailboat, aluminum mast, computers and software, hydraulics, GPS system, auto rudder, and rigging, 6 ft × 8 ft 6 in × 30 ft (1.8 × 2.6 × 9.1 m). Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photo: Dean Kaufman

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Burden’s epoch-defining work has made him one of the most important American artists to emerge since 1970. Spanning a forty-year career and moving across mediums, “Extreme Measures” presents a selection of Burden’s work focused on weights and measures, boundaries and constraints, where physical and moral limits are called into question.

Over the past four decades, Burden has created a unique and powerful body of work that has redefined the way we understand both performance and sculpture. Startling at the time, his early works remain some of the most extreme and influential performances of the era, inspiring younger artists through his radical approach not only to the body but also to issues within a larger sociopolitical context. In the 1980s, he began a series of ambitious sculptures of increasing size and complexity using materials common to childhood playtime activities (such as Erector sets, toy soldiers, model train sets, toy vehicles, and construction models) to create miniaturized yet still monumental reconstructions of structures and environments. These works diagram dense political and historical relationships, and register the depth of our mechanical and technological imagination.

Chris Burden, Trans-fixed, 1974. Performance on Speedway Avenue, Venice, California, April 23, 1974. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Occupying all five floors of the Museum, “Extreme Measures” offers an extraordinary opportunity to examine the ways in which Burden has continuously investigated the breaking point of materials, institutions, and even himself. The exhibition also features an ambitious installation on the exterior of the Museum.

“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” is organized by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, with Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions, Jenny Moore, Associate Curator (until July 2013), and Margot Norton, Assistant Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue including essays by scholars Thomas Crow, Amelia Jones, Guy Nordenson, and Johanna Burton, and artists Oscar Tuazon, Matthew Day Jackson, and Tom Marioni, among others.

Chris Burden (b. 1946 Boston, MA) attended Pomona College and received his MFA from the University of California in 1971. He had a retrospective exhibition (organized by Paul Schimmel) at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, in 1988 and at MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, in 1996. His work was presented in the 48th Venice Biennale and at the Tate Gallery in 1999. In 2008, the Public Art Fund presented WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME, one of his skyscraper sculptures, at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

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Sponsors

“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” is made possible through the lead support of the Henry Luce Foundation.

Major support is also provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lonti Ebers and Bruce Flatt, Gagosian Gallery, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Generous support is provided by the Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc., the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, LLWW Foundation, Eugenio López, Catriona and Simon Mordant, Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Foundation, Aby and Samantha Rosen, and Åke and Caisa Skeppner.

The International Leadership Council of the New Museum is gratefully acknowledged.

The publication for “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” is made possible by the Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson Foundation.

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Voices

Chris Burden at the juncture of art and architecture: Collaboration and Risk

It has been a little over a month since the New Museum’s solo exhibition of Chris Burden, “Extreme Measures,” closed. Two works central to the exhibition—Ghost Ship (2003) and Twin Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers(2013)—both installed on the building’s exterior, will remain installed for the foreseeable future, now corralling attention exclusively toward Burden’s interaction with institutional architecture. This long-term area of interest for Burden is a core thread that has driven other projects… Read more

2/28/14
by Joshua R. Edwards, Director of Exhibitions Management, Margot Norton, Assistant Curator, and Bevin Savage-Yamazaki, Associate at Gensler, the New Museum’s Architect of Record

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