Chris Burden’s “1 Ton Crane Truck” dangles heavy object in lobby gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 12, $10-$16 (pay-what-you-wish Thursdays 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
The New Museum has given itself over to performance and installation artist Chris Burden for “Extreme Measures,” his first major U.S. museum retrospective in more than a quarter century, comprising works across five floors, on the building’s facade, and even on the inaccessible roof. The Boston-born, L.A.-based Burden, who received his BA from Pomona College in visual arts, physics, and architecture and whose father was an engineer, incorporates all of those disciplines and more in the show, which continues through January 12. Burden takes things to extremes with installations that were challenging just to get into the museum, including “1 Ton Crane Truck,” a fully restored 1964 Ford F350 that resides in the lobby gallery, dangling a handmade one-ton cast-iron weight; “Twin Quasi Legal Skyscrapers,” a pair of four-ton structures that required a special addition to the roof in order to hold them; “Ghost Ship,” a two-ton, thirty-foot handcrafted sixareen sailboat suspended on the front of the building, its unmanned four-hundred-mile trip documented in the lobby; “Porsche with Meteorite,” a bright yellow two-and-a-half-ton restored 1974 Porsche 914 balanced against a nearly four-hundred-pound rock fragment from space; and “The Big Wheel,” a three-ton cast-iron flywheel that is powered by a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle. (“The Big Wheel” is activated Wednesday – Sunday at 11:30 and 2:30 and 7:30 on Thursday.)
Chris Burden, “Porsche with Meteorite,” restored 1974 Porsche with 390-pound meteorite, steel frame, 5,025 pounds, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The massive, carefully constructed pieces display Burden’s unique approach particularly to transportation, employing technological and found objects involved with small- and large-scale movement, something that becomes even clearer on the third floor, which features the stainless-steel “Triple 21 Foot Truss Bridge,” the concrete “Three Arch Dry Stock Bridge, ¼ Scale,” the reverse-arched “Mexican Bridge,” and “Tyne Bridge Kit,” a multidrawer chest that reveals some of Burden’s working process, along with “Pair of Namur Mortars,” two beautifully detailed full-size three-ton cannons with cannonballs, the type of weapon that could be used to blow up bridges in olden times. (The smaller bridges also recall the six-story structure “What My Dad Gave Me” that Burden raised in Rockefeller Center in 2008.) Burden investigates the theme of war, power, and authority on the second floor with “L.A.P.D. Uniforms,” fully outfitted, oversized replicas created in response to the Rodney King beating; “Beehive Bunker,” a conical bunker constructed of cement still in its store-bought bags; “All the Submarines of the United States of America,” consisting of 625 miniature cardboard submarines hanging from the ceiling, representing all of the subs launched by the navy between 1897 and 1987, accompanied by a board that identifies each one; and “A Tale of Two Cities,” a spectacularly elaborate battle scene between two warring city-states, built with sand, live plants, more than five thousand children’s toys, and bullets, best viewed with binoculars.
Chris Burden, detail, “A Tale of Two Cities,” two miniature cities with approx. five thousand toys, sand, plants, boulders, approx. 53,000 lbs., 1981 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Each work is accompanied by new or old text from Burden, shedding light on the piece in various ways; for example, for “Rant,” the artist explains, “An extreme close-up of my face is projected onto a wall, several times larger than life-size. Assuming the persona of a ranting xenophobic preacher, I deliver a short, intense monologue in French.” Also on view are eleven of Burden’s seminal performance-art videos (among them “Shoot,” “Bed Piece,” “Deadman,” and “Fire Roll”); three short films documenting his “Beam Drops,” in which he drops dozens of I-beams vertically into wet cement; and “Tower of Power,” which calls into question the whole nature of the value of art, both as commodity and visual pleasure, by allowing one person at a time to view a pyramid of one hundred gold bars surrounded by matchstick men, guarded by an armed NYPD detective. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about “Extreme Measures,” both on its surface and lurking just beneath it, resulting in a vastly pleasurable, thoroughly unusual museum experience.