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 of two iconic works on the exterior of the Museum, which alters the visual landscape of Lower Manhattan. Twin Quasi Legal Skyscrapers (2013), each measuring thirty-six feet in height, are erected on the roof of the building. The two structures speak of the constantly evolving nature of the urban landscape while also evoking the lost Twin Towers. Ghost Ship (2005), a thirty-foot double-ended vessel originally designed to sail a four-hundred-mile unmanned voyage guided by computer, hangs on the Museum’s façade like a lifeboat at the ready. Burden’s exterior sculptures will remain on view for a year as part of the New Museum’s ongoing Façade Sculpture Program.

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. His early works of the 1970s remain some of the most extreme and influential performances of the era. These iconic works continue to inspire artists through Burden’s radical approach, not only to the body but also to issues of power, control, desire, and repression, and their connections to larger social and political concerns. In the late 1970s, he began a series of ambitious sculptures of increasing size and complexity that chart dense political and historical relationships, and register the depth of our mechanical and technological imagination.

At the New Museum, the exhibition features a selection of Burden’s work focused on marvels of engineering, such as buildings, vehicles, war machines, and bridges, consistently engaging with the representation of masculinity and the destructive potential latent in engineering pursuits.

The Big Wheel (1979), a pivotal early work marking the artist’s transition from performance to sculpture, presents a six-thousand-pound cast-iron fly wheel that becomes activated by a motorcycle. When the motorcycle is accelerated at full throttle, the fly wheel spins to a maximum speed of two hundred rpm.

Three examples
of different bridge models will also be featured in the show, including Mexican Bridge (1998), built through a laborious and intricate process with Meccano and Erector metal toy construction parts, and two new works, Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1⁄4 Scale (2013), where the cinderblock structure is held up without mortar by the force of gravity alone, and Triple 21 Foot Truss Bridge (2013), a fifty-nine-foot-long cantilever bridge. L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993), made in response to the Los Angeles riots that followed the beating of Rodney King, speak to Burden’s critical engagement with authority figures, the military, and those occupying positions of power.

These themes are also explored in a dazzling construction composed of 625 miniature cardboard submarines that, when it was created
in 1987, fully represented the piece’s title: All the Submarines of the United States of America.

Since the early 1980s, Burden has used materials common to childhood playtime activities (such as action figures, toy trains, and construction models) to create miniaturized yet monumental models of buildings and environments. A Tale of Two Cities (1981) is a particularly remarkable example of these large-scale tableaux, depicting two city-states at war. The massive installation is made out of over five thousand toy and model pieces, live plants, and heaps of sand, taking the child’s war game to another level of complexity, obsession, and absurdity.

These works will be presented along with documentation of Burden’s early performances, video works, and other ambitious installations that rigorously test the artist, the viewer, and the institution, and challenge our beliefs and attitudes about art and the contemporary world.

Until 12 January 2014
Chris Burden: Extreme Measures
New Museum
235 Bowery, New York