On hearing the sad news of the artist Chris Burden’s death, I wanted to dedicate a post to his work and, for obvious reasons, his monstrous 1990 sculpture Medusa’s Head seems to be the most fitting choice for Minus Plato.
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| Chris Burden, Medusa’s Head, 1990. Plywood, steel, cement, rock, model railroad trains and tracks |
Margalit Fox’s obituary in The New York Times begins by listing the various ways in which Burden has put himself in all kinds of danger for the sake of his art:
Chris Burden, a conceptual artist who in the line of duty had himself shot, pierced, starved, crucified, electrocuted, cut by glass, kicked down stairs, locked up, dropped from heights and nearly drowned, though by no means all at once, died on Sunday at his home in Topanga, Calif. He was 69.
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| Chris Burden, Trans-Fixed, 1974, performance. |
It is this element of danger in his performance work that, back in 1991, Roberta Smith (also writing in The New York Times) alluded to as a way of making sense of his ‘turn’ to sculpture via the specific case of Medusa’s Head:
“Medusa’s Head,” which took two years to make, is one of the few to meld the sense of imminent danger of his performance pieces into a truly powerful sculptural form.
Smith locates the danger of Burden’s sculpture not in its representation of the snaked-haired Gorgon of mythology (her review is called ‘Medusa’s Head, Without the Snakes’), but in how it replicates the effect of Medusa’s petrifying gaze.
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| Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa, 1597, oil on canvas mounted on wood. |
It is no mistake that Smith folds her description of the effect of the work on the viewer with the description of the work itself, as she makes clear the precise difference between the Classical myth and the contemporary artwork:
It is precisely this association between danger and activity that permeates ancient accounts of the myth. For example, consider the appearance of Medusa’s head in painting described in the ancient Greek novelist Achilles Tatius in his work Leucippe and Clitophon. The painting depicts Perseus saving Andromeda from the terrifying sea-monster, using the Gorgon’s head as his weapon:
In his left hand he held the Gorgon’s head, wielding it like a shield. Even as a painting, it was a frightening object, with eyes staring out of their sockets, and serpentine hair about the temples all writhing and erect: a graphic delineation of intimidation.
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| Wall painting from Pompeii found in the Casa Dei Dioscur, c.50CE. |
Here Achilles breaks the frame of his ekphrasis (a literary description of a work of visual art) by conflating the danger of the object (Medusa’s head) with the painting itself. Furthermore, like Smith’s review of Burden’s sculpture, it is precisely the unnerving sensation of movement that creates this effect. Classicist Helen Morales, in her brilliant study of vision and narrative in Achilles Tatius’ novel, points out that, even though Medusa’s head (and, by extension, the painting depicting it) is lifeless, the language of the description is suffused with movement, not only of the ‘writhing’ snakes, but of the Gorgon’s eyes.
Morales notes that the word that Achilles uses to describe her eyes (exepetasen), meaning ‘spread out’, ‘unfurl’, ‘stretch out’:
When read back onto Burden’s sculpture,we don’t necessarily need make the direct identification (with Smith) of the mythical snakes and the sculptural trains. Nor do we need to see the later sculpture as somehow ‘petrifying’ the danger embodied in Burden’s earlier performance works. Instead, with Achilles, in Morales’ reading, we must take responsibility for the way an artist intervenes in the space of the viewer (or reader) to the extent to which their perception of the world around them is changed in the process.
My favourite example of this, back in Columbus, Ohio, where I live and work, is Burden’s subtle but devastating installation of the building of the Wexner Center for the Arts:
Whenever I see the building now, I cannot help but recall Burden’s playful additions that, like Medusa’s Head, make the viewer both think about the past (i.e. the Medusa myth and the architecture of the castle) and understand the ambiguous claims of human progress and industry (i.e. the railroad strangled planet and Eisenman’s deconstructive architecture). For Burden, there may not be a better description of his pioneering vision than Achilles’ phrase: a graphic delineation of intimidation.