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Shoot
Shoot
	Film still
Artist	Chris Burden
Year	1971
Medium	Performance, video

Shoot was a 1971 performance by Chris Burden, in which he arranged to have himself non-lethally shot.

Description

On November 19, 1971, at the F-Space gallery in Santa Ana, California,^[1] Bruce Dunlap (a friend of Chris Burden, the artist) raised a .22-caliber rifle at a distance of 15 feet from Burden and shot him in the left arm.^[2] The performance was documented in an eight-second video^[3] on 16mm film and photographs.^[4] There was a small audience for the performance, including the videographer and photographer.^[4] The work was later presented through documentary photographs and text from Burden.^[5]

Analysis

Burden said that the performance came from the common folklore and televisual motif of getting shot in America, whether real or faked, without knowing how it actually felt. The performance was then to feel what he only experienced visually. Additionally, themes from the Vietnam War were frequent on American television news during the time of the performance.^[6]

Burden displayed a high degree of control in the work's presentation.^[1] In the artist's self-published documentation of the work, the relics of the performance and its text are terse and leave the reader to infer the performance's narrative.^[5] Burden himself referred to the photographs as symbols.^[1]

Commentators have also noted the role of non-intervention on the part of the performance's attendees, that in a bystander effect, no one contested the potentially deadly action.^[7]

Legacy

Shoot has been described as Burden's "most infamous" work.^[4] With Shoot and his later work, Burden pioneered the use of deadly risk as artistic expression.^[3] It made him known as "the artist who shot himself", although this description is not technically accurate.^[4] As a critic in X-TRA put it, Shoot's primary medium is rumor.^[8]

Artist Laurie Anderson's 1976 song, "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You (It's the Hole)", is in reference to Burden's performance.^[9]

The performance spawned multiple reproductions. In 1999, an Israeli artist painted Burden after Shoot based on an image in Lucy Lippard's 1973 Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object.^[10] Tom LaDuke's 2004 Self-Inflicted Burden is a three-foot self-portrait sculpture modeled after Burden after Shoot.^[11] UCLA art student Joe Deutch simulated Russian roulette with what appeared to be a loaded weapon in a 2004 performance class.^[12] Burden spurred an ensuing media controversy comparatively larger than Shoot's by resigning his teaching post at the university, blaming the university's inaction against a hostile work environment, and likening the work to domestic terrorism. Burden later said that the offshoot work was meant to co-opt, demean, and parody his own. Burden's retirement in reaction to Deutch's performance assured that the work would be remembered in connection with Shoot.^[13]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c Bedford 2011, p. 82.
^ The New York Times (May 22, 2015). Shot in the Name of Art | Op-Docs | The New York Times. Retrieved August 15, 2024 – via YouTube.
^ ^a ^b "8 Artists Who Went to Extreme Measures for Their Art". Artsy. April 11, 2016. Retrieved July 18, 2020.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Paulsen 2017, p. 75.
^ ^a ^b Bedford 2011, p. 81.
^ Paulsen 2017, p. 78.
^ Paulsen 2017, pp. 75–76.
^ Lord, Benjamin (Spring 2016). "Chris Burden (1946–2015)". X-TRA. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
^ Fallon, Michael (2014). Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s. Catapult. ISBN 978-1-61902-404-5.
^ Bedford 2011, p. 83.
^ Bedford 2011, pp. 83–84.
^ Bedford 2011, p. 84.
^ Bedford 2011, p. 85.

Bibliography

Bedford, Christopher (2011). "The Viral Ontology of Performance". In Jones, Amelia; Heathfield, Adrian (eds.). Perform, Repeat, Record Live Art in History. Routledge. pp. 77–88. ISBN 978-0-415-59469-1. OCLC 641536228.