With the recent one year anniversary of Chris Burden’s death, now seems an appropriate time to evaluate the danse macabre, between performance and sculpture. Trained at UC Irvine, many of Burden's nascent student works, were large-scale public sculptures. He then eschewed objects for body-based actions: "As a young artist I tried to figure out what sculpture really was," Burden said, "and my conclusion was human action, movement-- performance, in a sense, was the core of sculpture."
From 1971 to 1974, Burden produced a series of durational, spooky, physically intense performances, that re-defined alternative art. Like many artists, who worked in performance early in their careers, as he got older, Burden stopped performing and returned to his original medium specific interests. His final work, Metropolis, was a large scale model of LA. But the fifty-four, unflinching performances, he did in his twenties, made his name and set the tone for artists interested in action, mediation, and violence.
LA is home to Hollywood's illusion-factory. In the introduction to his collected performances (available on UBU) , Burden says what's important is not the video or photographic documentation, but the experience itself. When asked why he shot himself, for his Shoot piece, Burden said: "getting shot is as American as apple pie," and that whenever he turned on the TV, someone got shot, so he wanted to know what that felt like. Burden's unadorned, anti-pleasure aesthetic, his 8mm one minute and thirty second video, is the underside of Sam Peckinpah's baroque violence.
In her video series, Whispering Pines 6/7/8, Shana Moulton uses performance to explore new age spirituality and digital culture as a relief from physical pain. The video begins with Moulton in a green screen environment. The first shot establishes Moulton sitting on a couch, working on a puzzle. We cut to a POV of Moulton, studying the puzzle. She can’t find the final piece and she tears the room apart. The video cuts to Moulton walking through a trade-show environment. She's surrounded by cheapish, plastic tree and nature models, the type of products sold on infomercials.
Next shot is back on the couch, with Moulton unpacking a tree sculpture. We hear a synthesized, meditation-like soundtrack. When she plugs in the tree, animated, powder blue streams of water pour from it. We cut to a close-up of Moulton's face, as animated water streams from her eyes, like tears. Moulton finds the puzzle piece but when she fits it into the puzzle, she notices the piece has her picture on it. She completes the puzzle and is nonplussed by her dissatisfaction. Her reaction is ambiguous. We can't tell whether she's actually in pain, or just faking it, a melodramatic reaction to a scenario that's unimportant.
Moulton engages with new age objects that are marketed as fulfilling a need for serenity, stability and peace. The video questions the dichotomy between mind and body. If modern medicine is unable to quantify a person's pain, because that pain is not manifesting physically, does the pain exist? In a youtube interview, Moulton said she was a sufferer from chronic pain, enough to get disability benefits, and yet she wonders whether the pain actually existed, or whether it was all in her mind.
I n Whispering Pines 6/7/8, Moulton pulls a pore strip, the product used to remove blackheads, from her nose. On the underside of the blackhead remover is a fictitious quote: "Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”— Jonathan Livingston Seagull. These objects promise psycho-physical freedom from pain. The video ends with Moulton escaping up a ladder into a Rave. Surrounded by ravers, she dances furiously, then vomits.
Moulton's video, T he Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down ( 2008), is shorter and more sinister. She continues her dual interest in new age ephemera— the cheap, plastic objects, that recreate the natural world, and her interest in infomercial, body-improvement culture. The video begins with Moulton inflating an exercise ball. We see a diagram for how to use the ball. Cut to Moulton in a rocking chair, wearing a carpal tunnel wristband, and rotating yin-and-yang zen balls in her hand. On her shoulders, she wears plastic bags, filled with unknown liquid. She then uses an ab-cruncher, while wearing a neck brace. Cut to her using the zen balls, then suddenly, she's in pain, and the balls drop.
The camera frames her in a wide angle, sitting, surrounded by her crystals, while the objects move, containing Moulton in a grid-like spin redolent of old science-fiction shows that used the TV image to “hypnotize” the viewer. Cut to a close-up of Moulton removing a square from her forehead, so that red streams, like video game blood, pour from her brain.
The UBUweb description is apt, when it declares the video as more than flashy visuals— “it investigates the human need to place faith in something.” For Moulton, faith in new-age objects and practices prove ambiguous: they promise new perceptions and the possibility for an inchoate, psycho-physical freedom; but Moulton's work simultaneously highlights the possibility of faith exacerbating a pastel-colored, total-pain.
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