Artist expresses himself by pushing the envelope

Artist Chris Burden has been known to do some pretty wild things. While he was a UC Irvine student, he once had a friend shoot him in the arm for one of his early performance pieces.

He’s nailed himself to a Volkswagen and locked himself into a locker.

He sacrifices what he feels he needs to in order to convey a message through his art, even when he sent many critics reeling over his over-the-top performances.

“He was very well known for doing performances that were grueling and sometimes gruesome…. But he was really trying to both test the limits of his body, but also question the definition of what art is,” Orange County Museum of Art curator of collections Karen Moss said. “He basically stopped doing performances because he felt the critics misunderstood him — they thought he was sensationalist; he thought he was challenging what art could be.”

Burden now focuses more on large-scale installation works, and one such exhibit, called the “Tale of Two Cities,” opened Saturday at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach.

Burden was unavailable for an interview.

The installation is made up of more than 5,000 war toys, which include mini Army figures, transformers, planes, sharks, bullets, plastic robots, cars and boats, as well as sand, herbs and houseplants.

It was initially done on a smaller scale in 1981 for the Los Angles County Art Museum, but it was made larger and became a major retrospective for the Newport Harbor Museum in 1988. The museum bought the installation in 1987.

“It’s one of our most important installation artworks, and it’s important because these large, very monumental scale installations he started to do at this time were very much looking at things like institutions, infrastructure, politics and the social history at a time when the Reagan administration was very invested in the arms race,” Moss said. “The whole group of these works investigated money, power and the military.”

The “Tale of Two Cities” installation came from Burden’s fascination with war toys, which he collected from Europe, the United States and Japan. The detailed exhibit is what Burden imagined the 25th century might be like, and he imagined the world returning to a system of feudal states.

The armies are poised for war, gearing up for battle, with a few casualties already visible and walls of bullets separating each other.

“He was posing the idea that superpowers would be replaced by ongoing battles of smaller nations and ethnic factions, and that’s kind of what has happened,” Moss said. “It’s interesting, 25 years later, how relevant the “Tale of Two Cities” is [to] the fantasy he projected.”

Coto de Caza resident Kathy Shafranske examined the exhibit on its opening day Saturday and was intrigued by its meaning.

“It’s interesting that he’s thinking about such a world, and today it’s almost come true,” Shafranske said after checking it out.

But the installation’s draw won’t only be its message. The sheer time it takes to put it together and the detail that goes into it will delight some guests, Moss said. It took five people two full weeks to put the exhibit together.

“It’s really interesting,” Irvine resident Brennan Turner, 19, said. “It looks like fun” to build.

For more information about the exhibit, visit www.ocma.net or call (949) 759-1122. The museum is at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach.