Shoot: A milestone in performance art
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In November 1971 a young American artist decided to get a friend to take a shot at him - in the name of art. His name was Chris Burden and the shooting would go down in the history of performance art. He spoke to Lucy Burns in 2012 about the ideas behind the event.
This programme is a rebroadcast.
(Photo: Chris Burden just after being shot. Courtesy of Chris Burden)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:39.4 | Today we're bringing you a program from our archives because it's 50 years since a young artist in California did something which would send ripples through the art world for decades to come. |
| 0:52.0 | His name was Chris Burden and what he did was called |
| 0:56.0 | Shoot. Lucy Burns reports. It's November the 19th, 1971, and one of the most controversial pieces of performance art in history is about to get underway. |
| 1:09.0 | Chris Burden has recently graduated from art school, and he's been thinking a lot about guns. |
| 1:15.0 | Guns in American culture are intertwined in some perverse way that seems very hard to separate. |
| 1:22.0 | Being shot as American as apple pie. |
| 1:25.0 | Burden was living in Southern California, |
| 1:28.0 | and there was conflict in the air. |
| 1:30.0 | It was during the Vietnam era, |
| 1:32.0 | and for the first time on news you'd see people |
| 1:34.4 | actually being shot I mean there's the famous one of the Vietnamese general |
| 1:38.0 | shooting the man in the head with a revolver but I was struck by the |
| 1:41.8 | difference between watching somebody actually being shot at as opposed to the entertainment industry where people are shot on film and TV thousands of times a day as entertainment. |
| 1:57.0 | So I was trying to wrestle with what is being shot and turning and facing this dragon that everybody tries to avoid |
... |
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