Awards
2009 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Chris Burden
Chris Burden (photograph by Lisa Eisner)
One of the most recognized and respected artists of his generation, Chris Burden has for more than thirty years engaged the most intellectually challenging and provocative ideas of our time. Beginning with his now legendary performance pieces of the early 1970s that tested the limits and endurance of the body, Burden helped to reshape the possibilities for body and performance art, and his work has had a major influence on artists throughout the world.
With his Vietnam-era piece Shoot (1971), he drew critical attention to the ubiquity of violence in American culture. Since the late 1970s Burden’s sculptures and installations have addressed physical violence and destruction, global conflicts, and the military-industrial complex. With The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979), he explored the buildup of Soviet and American nuclear power during the cold war. His practice has included drawing and sculpture, installation and performance, and photography, video, and television. Much of the artist’s work has been about experience and the concept of trust, and how society depends on interpersonal responsibility. Throughout his practice he has maintained his aesthetic and social purpose, principles based in deeply abiding personal ethics and grounded in his immense integrity. More recently Burden has drawn on urban history, architecture, and an expanded the notion of public sculpture. With Urban Light (2001–7), comprised of 202 meticulously restored cast-iron antique streetlamps from Los Angeles, reconfigured and placed in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Burden has created a work that has been quickly embraced by the public. It provokes questions about public art, historical memory, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
Jury: Stephanie Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, chair; Hannah Higgins, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Ann Temkin, Museum of Modern Art.
