Burden / Fox

Before watching Chris Burden’s works, I read through the description below and immediately felt that watching his video would not be a comfortable experience for me. Being a squeamish person who avoids most gory movies, I prepared myself to face my fear. The long introduction in which Burden explained the quality of his videos and the reasoning behind his works did very little to comfort me. At this point I was wondering how extreme these pieces must be for it to be difficult to record good video footage. After watching the first few pieces, I realized that they were not as graphic as I had expected. Nonetheless, I felt incredibly disturbed because of how calm and nonchalant Burden seemed as he narrated the video. In many of the pieces he was stoic and displayed no signs that he was in pain. I especially got this impression from “Shoot”, in which he simply showed off his arm after being shot and then just walked off camera. In my opinion, I felt that most of Burden’s works seemed to be more about having shock value than artistic value, perhaps because of the poor quality of the footage. Particularly in “Velvet Water”, I felt that Burden’s main accomplishment was forcing the viewer to feel emotionally uncomfortable. To take drowning, a natural human fear, and turn it into Burden’s idea of breathing a higher form of oxygen is a concept I could see as being artistic, but the actual performance gave off no artistic value to me at all. Burden’s beautiful explanation of his piece was not even slightly apparent in “Velvet Water” as he struggled to continuously breathe water in an ungraceful and brutally painful manner. The only piece I thought could be somewhat accepted as art was “Through the Night Softly”. Burden’s explanation of the glass shards on the floor being “stars” was reasonable to me, and the video’s lighting did make the pieces appear to be glistening on the dark floor. If I had not known those were pieces of glass on the floor prior to watching the clip, I think I would have actually thought this piece to be quite beautiful.

Terry Fox’s video was a lot easier to digest, but I still felt a bit uncomfortable watching it. The way the work was shot made it more artistic to me because Fox paid attention to how he was recording the “science tricks” and chose to set each one up in front of the camera in a more professional way. Because the work was in black and white, the settings were eerie (particularly when there was a candle involved in the experiment) and I got chills running up and down my back from waiting for Fox to finish some of his “science tricks”. The complete silence in the video also did not help, since I had no idea what to expect from each experiment. The fact that the video is titled “Children’s Tapes” gives me the impression that perhaps it only seems mysterious to me because I am so used to watching color television and back in the 70s, children would have actually been quite entertained by this work.