Chris Burden is an extremely significant abstract artist who began exhibiting in 1971. He established a reputation that year with a performance piece entitled Shoot in which he instructed a friend to shoot him in the arm while a few other close friends watched. Since then he has explored, and presented through his creative works, the culturally popular themes of money, power, military force, and technology.
Burden was born in 1946 in Boston, the eldest of three children. His father was an engineering professor at Harvard. At the age of thirteen Burden took up photography as a serious hobby. In 1969 he received his B.F.A. from Pamona College in Claremont, CA. He started out as an architecture student but later changed his major to sculpture because, as he said: "When I design something, I can't wait to see it."(People Weekly). In 1971 he received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irving. It was during his graduate studies at UCI in 1970 that he first began attracting the attention of his peers. He locked himself in a locker for seven days with five gallons of water suspended in the locker above him. (Horvitz). Burden continued doing performance art such as this until 1983. In 1983, after realizing he did not want to become a novelty act, he decided to pursue his interests in sculpture and model building. His most recent works still continue to portray these interests. He currently teaches and heads the New Media department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has been teaching since 1978. .
Shoot is Chris Burden's most notorious work. Although it is considered a performance piece, the end result for display purposes was several photographs and this description-"At 7:45 pm I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long-rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me."(ArtForum 23).
This quick, painful momentary action was made permanent by its brief, concise documentation.