
Chris Burden during his performance piece ‘Shoot’ at F-Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California, 1971.
Chris Burden, the influential American performance, sculpture, and installation artist known for courting controversy with his work, died early Sunday morning at his home in Topanga Canyon, California, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. The cause of death was malignant melanoma. Burden was 69.
The Boston-born artist rose to prominence in the early 1970s following a series of works focused on personal danger as artistic expression. In one of his earliest and most well-known performance pieces, Shoot (1971), Burden stood in front of a white wall at F-Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California, where he was then shot in the arm with a .22 caliber rifle at close range. Other “danger pieces” followed throughout the 1970s, including Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Match Piece (1972), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Doomed (1975), and Honest Labor (1979).