Back to list The internationally acclaimed American artist
Chris Burden will present an extraordinary new work for
his solo exhibition at the South London Gallery.
Fourteen 1920s cast iron lamp posts from Los Angeles,
meticulously restored and uniformly painted in
battleship grey, will be erected in the SLG’s beautiful
exhibition space to create a stunning installation which
combines architectural intervention with engineering
feat. 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, 2006, will emphasise
the special qualities of the SLG’s main exhibition
space. At 625cm high, the lamps will clear the
Victorian glass lantern ceiling by less than a metre,
and they will be illuminated throughout the show,
heightening awareness of the play of light in the space.
The apparent simplicity and relative sparseness of the
installation will belie its logistical complexity, the
sheer weight of each lamp post (each one weighs
approximately 1½ tons) making their installation within
the space a significant technical challenge. On a purely formal level the installation has the
potential to inspire reactions spanning wonder, awe and
even delight. Conceptually it refers to wider issues
around the impact of the urban infrastructure on a
location and on the people who use it, but there is also
a sense of irony behind Burden’s idea of exporting
‘antiques’, inspired by European design, from Los
Angeles to Europe. These historic lamp posts, in a
plethora of different designs, were dotted all over the
many smaller cities that make up the megalopolis of Los
Angeles and were originally installed as a demonstration
of civic wealth and pride. Most of these antique lamps
were removed and destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s, and
the few remaining clusters have long been subsumed by
the broader character of the city, almost to the point
of invisibility to those who see them daily. The
inextricable link between wealth and the provision of
public lighting in urban contexts is clearly referenced
by the work, as is the shifting character, significance
and role of municipal design, both over time and from
the perspective of commissioners, users and visitors.
The elaborately decorative and massive street lamps are
an ornate totem to industrialism and provide a richness
and beauty for urban dwellers. Born in Boston in 1946, Chris Burden studied
architecture, physics, and visual art at Pomona College
and the University of California. He completed a series
of performance pieces in the 1970s that engaged his own
body, as part of his conceptual art practice. In the
late 1970s and through the 1980s Burden’s practice
shifted towards installations with a political theme,
such as The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, 1979, in which
he used U.S. nickels and wooden matchsticks to represent
50,000 Soviet tanks, or All the Submarines of the United
States, 1987, in which he used generic hand-made
cardboard models to transform the statistics of launched
submarines into a sculptural form. In the 1990s
Burden’s appreciation of well-engineered structures,
coupled with a fascination with technology, led to a
number of works in which he rendered fantasy societies
in reduced scale, including Medusa’s Head, 1990, and
Pizza City, 1996. Also in 1996, Burden further developed
the fantasy element of his work with The Flying
Steamroller, uniting performance and sculpture in a work
which explores the relationship between man and machine,
and the ability of science and technology to confound
our expectations. Burden has noted that “my work has
gone from dealing with personal issues of power to
external issues of power”, and in 2000 Burden became
fascinated by bridges and the way in which they function
as enquiries into the nature of architecture and
technology, while instigating a dialogue between human
beings and scientific progress. Chris Burden has lived and worked in California
for most of his life and is very much associated with
the Los Angeles art scene which has thrived over the
past forty years. He has exhibited extensively
internationally and has had major retrospectives at the
Newport Harbor Art Museum (1988) and MAK-Austrian Museum
of Applied Arts, Vienna (1996). In 1999 Burden
exhibited at the 48th Venice Biennale and at the Tate
Gallery in London. In 2002 his solo show at Baltic
included an extraordinary model of the Tyne Bridge made
of Meccano, and in 2006 he produced Ghost Ship, a public
art project with Locus+. This exhibition is generously supported by
Bloomberg, with additional support from Gagosian
Gallery, and Vicky Hughes and John. A. Smith. | 
