Please push pins into my body

I’ve been meaning to post something about Chris Burden and I think now is the right time. If you click on his name in the Hall of Fame on the right, it takes you to a video in which he talks about his art in the early 1970s. That’s the period that got Chris Burden a lot of attention — that’s when he did what I would call his Body Works.

For example, a performance called “Back to You.” Here’s his own description of the piece:

Dressed only in pants, I was lying on a table inside a freight elevator with the door closed. Next to me on the table was a small dish of 5/8″ steel push pins. Liza Bear requested a volunteer from the audience, and he was escorted to the elevator. As the door opened, a camera framing me from the waist up was turned on, and the audience viewed this scene on several monitors placed near the elevator. As the elevator went to the basement and returned, Liza told the audience that a sign in the elevator instructed the volunteer to “Please push pins into my body.” The volunteer stuck four pins into my stomach and one pin into my foot during the elevator trip. When the elevator returned to the floor, the door opened, the volunteer stepped out, and the camera was turned off. The elevator returned to the basement.

Four pins in the stomach and one in the foot isn’t so crazy, but he did many more extreme performances. In “Through the Night Softly” he crawled on his belly through broken glass; in “Shoot” he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22; in “Five Day Locker Piece” he spent five days in a locker.

I learned about Chris Burden 20 years ago when I went to see a major retrospective of his work. I think I went to that show 15 times or more. There’s so much more to his work than the body pieces that get all the attention, but what impresses me is how doing shit to his own body was at the center of so much of his work. It’s yet another one of those fascinations of mine that makes so much sense in retrospect. I was drawn to this smart and interesting artist who used his body in such extreme ways. 

I also like that he had a very loose “let’s try it and see what happens” approach. He had no idea what a volunteer would do when invited to push pins into his body. I’m trying to maintain that attitude toward my S&M adventures. 

Earlier this evening Miss Mitsu stuck many, many needles into my body.

One hundred needles.

There was a lot of blood.

Fuller details (and possibly photos) will appear soon.

[I cannot believe I wrote this just hours after that session. This guy is fucking crazy.]