Response 1

Chris Burden’s Documentation of Selected works was very interesting. His voice was very monotone conveying a sense of tranquility to the viewer but his “art pieces” were ones that made me very uncomfortable. It made me wonder how he could be so calm under such uncomfortable circumstances. The piece in which he locked himself in a room lying on a bed for 22 days where he was only provided food, water and a restroom made me feel sick to my stomach. Doing nothing besides laying in a bed for nearly a month sounds no way appealing to me yet Burden could go about the art piece so nonchalantly. Then the piece where he sets a pair of pants on fire so that he can roll in the fire to set it out made me wonder a little about his sanity. He mentioned who had worn the pants before and it’s supposed to add to the specialty of the subject at hand. His museum display of a TV and a chair made me laugh because he mentioned smoking pot while sitting there watching TV, it reminded me of Berkeley and some of the people on the streets. He then had to have his helpers take pictures of him so that viewers would distinguish that it was an art piece and not just some crazy man watching television, which does make sense because I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was “art”. His art works were unique and very different and although I don’t understand it I can see that he is trying to make people feel different emotions, happiness, excitement, depression, fear etc. Even though Burden was passive throughout all his pieces, I was never really bored because I always watched with anticipation that something dramatic was going to happen (maybe his hair was going to catch on fire).

Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes on the other hand was very unobtrusive because it was very mundane and repetitive. It was hard for me to keep my eyes on the screen because it was, for lack of a better word “boring”. The experiments themselves were interesting, it just took a really long time of the same thing over and over before something would happen. There, on the other hand, were some exciting experiments such as the one in the beginning with the fly catcher. I understand why the piece was titled “children’s tape” all the experiments are like ones we would do as a children, trying to catch insects with a trap, using candles for the sole purpose of playing with the wax etc. I really enjoyed the piece with the matches in which Fox had bent in half forming a star. Fox poured some sort of substance between the star and it started to expand, but I have to say I was a little disappointed because I thought the matches would catch on fire doing a domino effect. His choice of material for his media piece seemed to be candles, and the interesting thing is most children, or at least I know I did, found fire very interesting and since a candle is a safer way to handle fire it was logical to use a candle.