Art Since the Sixties Reading-Body

Gray Zone: Watching "Shoot"

Author(s): Frazer Ward

Source: October , Winter, 2001, Vol. 95 (Winter, 2001), pp. 114-130

Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/779202

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot

FRAZER WARD

I wasn't the artist who shot himself and I am not the artist that pushes museums down.

-Chris Burden, 1996

Truth and consequences: the public as ethical realm

Chris Burden's description of his most famous (or infamous) performance, Shoot (November 19, 1971), consists of three simple sentences:

At 7:45 p.m. 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.1

The bullet was intended to graze Burden's arm, but caused a more serious wound.2 The performance took place after hours in a gallery space for an invited audience of about ten people; it is documented by the description and a black- and-white photograph that shows Burden with his back against a wall and the marksman with rifle raised and his back to the viewer (so that the photographer's view was close to that of the marksman, though not exactly the same). The photo- graph is blurry, as if the photographer, understandably, had winced. Another photograph occasionally appears, which is an apparently candid, head-to-knee image of Burden walking from right to left, with his left arm in the foreground, held slightly away from his body, clearly showing the entry and exit wounds in his upper arm, with a line of blood running down from the entry wound to below his elbow.

As Shoot makes clear, Burden's performance work reached a high pitch of physical violence early in his career, and there has been a tendency, subsequently,

1. "Chris Burden: Original Texts 1971-1995," Chris Burden (Paris: Blocnotes, 1995), n.p. 2. "In Shoot I was supposed to have a grazed wound. We didn't even have any Band-aids" (Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear, "Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy, An Interview by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear," Avalanche 8 [Summer/Fall 1973], p. 54).

OCTOBER 95, Winter 2001, pp. 115-130. ? 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Shoot. 1971. (Photo courtesy Chris Burden.)

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simply to assign it to a pathological state. Certainly, over the years since, critics have tried to fit Burden into categories of subjectivity, as if the right match between type of person and performance would explain the work. Among other things, Burden has been described as a masochist; an avant-garde novitiate; a social therapist; an existential populist; a hero; the alter ego of the biblical Samson; a helpless, passive victim; a heroic victim; an anthropologist; someone inclined toward the scientist, engineer, inventor, tinkerer; a victim-by-request; the hero of an impossible quest (a modern Don Quixote); a voluntary scapegoat; and a survivalist.3 The very proliferation of these categories indicates the failure of the attempt to explain Shoot in terms of what kind of person would do such a thing. That failure leaves the work unexplained in terms able to be appropriated by the mass media, and the enigmatic status that results may be one of the reasons that Burden remains closely identified with Shoot. By mid-1973, almost two years after the performance, it had become fodder for sensational journalism. In an inter- view at that time in Avalanche, Burden commented on the way his public was being shifted away from "art people":

After that little number in Esquire, this guy called from Texas, I'd hear the bleeps on the phone: "Bleep. Hi! This is Don Steel on WKEP in Texas, are you Chris Burden?" "Yeah." "Are you the artist?" "Yeah." "What are you going to do next?"4

Exposed to tabloid publicity that most artists never have to deal with, Burden was saddled with a public identity as "the artist who shot himself." The attempt to explain what kind of person would do such a thing is in any case misguided. Shoot was constitutively a collaborative event; Burden did not shoot himself, he was shot by a friend, and the audience gathered to see it hap- pen. When this is emphasized, different questions emerge. How could someone be persuaded to shoot his friend? Why were audience members prepared to let it

3. The first reference is to Kathy O'Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). More convincingly than is done in the other accounts listed here, O'Dell elaborates relations between a "masochistic contract" and historical moments of social uncertainty and upheaval. The idea of this contract is grounded largely in Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of masochism in Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989). The other descriptions are given by: Peter Plagens, "He Got Shot-For His Art," New York Times, September 2, 1973, D3; Donald Kuspit, "Man For and Against Machine," in Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits, pp. 59, 63, 71, 73; Peter Noever, "Assault on Art," in Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits, p. 11; Johannes Lothar Schr6der, "Science, Heat and Time: Minimalism and Body Art in the Work of Chris Burden," in Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits, pp. 197, 201; Paul Schimmel, "Other Worlds: Interview with Chris Burden," p. 34; Frank Perrin, "An Administration of Extreme Urgency," in Chris Burden (Paris: Blocnotes, 1995), n.p.; Stuart Morgan, "Survival Kit," Frieze 28 (May 1996), p. 54. 4. Burden in Sharp and Bi6ar, "The Church of Human Energy," p. 58.

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 117

happen? Questions like these suggest that what remains compelling in Shoot is not its physical violence, but its violently negative inference of an ideal public realm.

Shoot is characteristic of Burden's early performance work in that its combi- nation of physical violence and passivity (Burden's and the audience's) held out the possibility of the public as a realm of, or opportunity for, judgment and deci- sion, but then largely forestalled that possibility.5 The very violence of Shoot seems to have called out for intervention on the part of collaborators or audience mem- bers. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine the marksman calling it off at the last moment, or someone in the audience trying to talk everyone out of it. Yet once it was in train, some combination of the expectation of a specialist public (and Burden's manipulation of that), prurient fascination, an antimoralistic, anti- authoritarian historical milieu, even the brevity of the work, prevented any such intervention. As a result, Shoot, however tendentiously, negatively or repellently, limned the public as an arena of responsibility, of dilemma and decision-as an ethical realm. From this viewpoint, Shoot remains important as a signal example, among a body of more or less violent performances of the 1960s and '70s, the implications of which, in terms of their having posed ethical questions as they con- stituted their own publics, have yet to be fully considered.6 In the case of Burden, at least, this approach shifts the discourse away from endless refinements in the stereotyping of artistic subjectivity.

After Minimalism: spectacle, participation, and passivity

The violence of Shoot is often, perhaps intuitively, taken to be connected with an emphatic artistic presence.7 Of course, Shoot draws some of its "authority" from Burden's physical experience; but this can be overemphasized at the expense of the roles of marksman, photographer, and audience members. To read Burden's presence in Shoot as self-evident is to allow the apparent extremity of the perfor- mance to supercede the ways in which his presence was actually complicated and qualified. Without examining the mediation of presence in Shoot, there may be a tendency not to see the ethical questions the work poses. These questions are tied

5. This can be seen as a negative reference to that realm of public debate and reasoning described byJfirgen Habermas as the public sphere. 6. Performances by other artists, including Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Yoko Ono, and Barbara Smith, may productively be examined in this framework. 7. If we recall Rosalind Krauss's critical account of modernist relations between medium and sub- jectivity, in which everything about a painting, for instance, was taken to express the interior life of the artist, then the apparent substitution of the artist's body for another medium might seem to conform to Mary Kelly's argument that in performance art we see the return of a (modernist) legitimating artis- tic presence, by other means. See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 71, and Kelly, "Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 94-95.

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to a critical engagement with Minimalism, at the same time that they connect the work to broader than strictly art-historical or art-world concerns; the Vietnam War, and its mass-media representations, provide one unavoidable context for the vio- lence of Shoot. So in broad strokes, there is a double context (at least) for Shoot: one element is Minimalism; the bloodier element is the spectacle of the war. Shoot's relation to Minimalism is implicit in Burden's emphasis on the experi-

ence of being shot as "interesting":

Willoughby Sharp: So it doesn't much matter to you whether it's a nick or it goes through your arm? Chris Burden: No. It's the idea of being shot at to be hit. WS: Mmmmm. Why is that interesting? CB: Well, it's something to experience. How do you know what it feels like to be shot if you don't experience it? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing.

WS: Most people don't want to be shot. CB: Yeah, but everybody watches it on TV every day. America is the big shoot-out country. About fifty per cent of American folklore is about people getting shot.8

Burden's account resonates with Donald Judd's single requirement that a work of art be interesting, and extends it in relation to media culture. Shoot also translated Judd's Minimal order, in a manner consistent with other postminimalist turns away from the art object, so that it was the experience involved in the production of the art (in this case, the performance) that needed to be interesting, instead of any object itself.

It was in part the stolid simplicity of Minimalism's objects (in Robert Morris' term, their quality as "gestalts") that deflected viewers' attention onto their own experience of art and its contexts. Burden's "clinical"9 passivity in the face of the particular experience of being shot at appears as an embodied extension or exag- geration of the passivity of Minimalist objects. Yet the simultaneously dangerous, spectacular aspect of that experience-far from the highly refined experiences proffered by Minimalist objects-also provided for self-reflection on the part of viewers, at least potentially, along the lines of whether or not they should have participated. In this case, Shoot offered a comment on the bloodlessness of Minimalism's phenomenological investigations, introducing instead questions of consequences, and both artists' and viewers' participation and responsibility. It explicitly involved not only viewers' bodies but the artist's as well. In relation to

8. Sharp and B&ar, "The Church of Human Energy," p. 54, emphasis added. 9. Jon Bewley, "Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley," in Talking Art 1, ed. Adrian Searle (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), p. 20.

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 119

Minimalist versions of repetition, while Shoot was in principle repeatable-each bullet in the gun was a potential instance-this potential in fact marked a further departure from Minimalism, in that the differences between one experience and the next must be bound to more than the viewer's physical orientation in space (the experience and effect of any repetition, for instance, would be affected by chance).o10 So Shoot dealt with terms derived from or inflected by Minimalism, cen- trally interest and experience and, more tangentially, repetition. However, none of this quite answers the question of why Burden (or for that matter anyone else) would choose to engage with or critique Minimalism by being shot. Consciously, at least, outside the realm of fantasy, to echo Willoughby Sharp's dry remark, most people still do not want to be shot.

Twenty years after the interview in Avalanche, Burden referred again to tele- vision and films ("actually being shot is quite different"), and continued:

I think everyone subconsciously has thought about what it's like to be shot. Being shot, at least in America, is as American as apple pie, it's sort of an American tradition almost. To do it in this clinical way, to do something that most people would go out of their way to avoid, to turn around and face the monster and say, "Well, let's find out what it's about," I think that touches on some cord, that's why the piece works, that's why a man twenty years later is calling me up with a crank call from Tennessee and is irate about it.11

Repeating the gist of this in 1996, Burden added, "all the audience cannot help but place themselves into my shoes."12 Now, Burden is American, and, clearly, so is his "everyone." The body and the subjectivity in question in Shoot have a national context that may have fed a temptation to see (or look for) the work as a direct commentary on the Vietnam War. As a result, we get Burden as heroic victim, as a kind of martyr, whose self-victimization mimics, in protest, the brutality of the war. Such a reading, however, not only repeats the colonial asymmetry of broader his- torical circumstances-presenting Shoot as a homegrown version of Buddhist self-immolations, as seen on television, perhaps-but ignores the art-historical and

10. In 1973 Burden allowed that Shoot might physically be repeated, but that to do so would be too theatrical: "Getting shot is something you could do for a circus over and over and over." But he has dis- tanced himself from that potential, saying, "The unknown's gone. I mean, there's no point in ever get- ting shot again" ("The Church of Human Energy," pp. 58, 61). Twenty years later he again distin- guished the work from theater by his desire not to repeat it: "I never saw myself as an actor. I'd never stand in front of an audience and do Shoot over again, for example" (Sharp and B&ar, "Chris Burden in conversation with Jon Bewley," p. 23). 11. Ibid., pp.20-21. 12. Jose Antonio Sarmiento, "Chris Burden: Interview with Jose Antonio Sarmiento; 'Hacer arte es verdaderamenta una actividad subversiva,'" Sin Titulo 3 (September 1996), p. 56.

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art-institutional issues to which Burden's performances were also tied. With regard to the Vietnam War, Burden himself was sensibly careful not to equate his own (nonetheless real) wound with the wounds of soldiers, as Peter Plagens recounted in 1973:

I asked Burden about that-comparing his bullet wound to a real one, suffered by a Vietnam vet or a street-gang member. "Isn't it small pota- toes?" I said. "Yes," he said.13

Burden's wound was "small potatoes" in part because its consequences were differ- ent. The shot that caused it was not fired in anger but in collaboration, and if Burden's death was unlikely to have occurred, it was nonetheless conceivable (Burden or his friend the marksman might have slipped, panicked, etc.). But as the sarcastic title of Plagens's newspaper commentary puts it, "He Got Shot-For His Art." No national interest was affected by this danger or this wound, and no mission was compromised, no troop (or gang) was endangered, let down, or dis- honored. To the extent that it was a life-and-death situation, if it is possible to speak relatively, little was at stake. If Burden had been killed, or more seriously wounded, he would not have become a hero of the antiwar movement (or a mar- tyr to art), but would have been subject to more intense disapproval and ridicule. His friend the marksman, and the invited audience, would have found themselves

with even more serious ethical questions to answer, let alone evidentiary and legal ones.

Us and ours: the collective and the media

Even if the bullet had missed altogether, Shoot's invocation of gunshot wounds and death, in the historical moment in which it occurred, has to be con- sidered in relation to a backdrop of representations of violence, and particularly representations of the Vietnam War. Hence, for instance, Plagens's discomfort with the work, which might reflect the suspicion that the war provided a too-easy or ethically slack context for the work, lending its one shot too much import. Here we are returned to questions of consequence and responsibility. If the iden- tifications that Shoot attracted emerged from a specifically American cultural subconscious, that realm of fantasy and projection must also be seen in relation to the same historical context. For Burden, ostensibly, audience members could (or must) "place themselves into my shoes," because, as far as it was relevant to Shoot, the public-"everyone"-was constituted in relation to a history of representa-

13. Plagens, "He Got Shot-For His Art," D3. Plagens continued: "But-so it came to me later-so is all art: yours, mine, Burden's or Wegman's" (work by William Wegman was also discussed in the text). Conceivably, it might be possible to argue that, as far as its relation to its historical context goes, enabling this recognition was the point of Shoot.

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 121

tions of violence. But that history (that "tradition" and "folklore") was bound to the mass media and therefore to programming (repeats, reruns, etc.), which means that it was a history without sequence, a swirl of westerns and science fic- tion, war and noir and news, such that six-guns, lasers, and napalm might come to share a generic quality. And "everyone" might come to share that, too. In relation to Shoot, "everyone" (us) is the collective that forms around the violent event. As such, it must be suspect. For "our" interest in, or fascination with, representations of violence belongs to-or is assigned to-an imagined, statistical community of moviegoers, television watchers, and tabloid readers, defined by ticket sales, rat- ings points, and circulation figures.

Burden's own accounts suggest that his experience was defined by distinc- tion from this society of the statistical.14 Crucially, however, his own experience must have emerged from it as well; Burden is one of us, too, and if "us" and "we" and "our" are under the gun, if "everyone" is, then "I" and "my" must be, as well. So the identifications arcing toward Shoot, especially in its photographic form, incorporated or reincorporated it into an amorphous cultural field. This is another way of thinking about Burden's "facing the monster," in which the mon- ster is not necessarily the bullet and being shot, but the problem of distinguishing oneself from the shapeless entity-in this case a national, cultural entity-that nonetheless shapes that self. In this context, the equation that Shoot sets up, between self-distinction and self-effacement, becomes the ground for a very lit- eral, perhaps nihilistic, gesture of negation.

The crucial aspect of representations of the Vietnam War, as far as their relevance to Shoot is concerned, is that their meaning was contested. As much as gun violence is part of American folklore, so is the idea that television images from Vietnam helped to galvanize the antiwar movement, specifically by creating a constituency among middle-class voters not expected, by the government, at least, to have opposed the war. It can be described as folklore because of the way it con- denses elements of the historical situation. Of course, conditions for the growth of the antiwar movement were more complex. Like Shoot, images of the war in and of themselves did not necessarily establish anything more than the fact that the war was happening and that it was brutal. But there had been active opposition to the war for years before television images took their much-vaunted effect, which is to say that other interpretations of those images were already available than those

14. Here I refer to Mark Seltzer's account of a public sphere that turns pathological as the self is experienced as a typicality within. Seltzer quotes Gilles Deleuze and F'lix Guattari to the effect that there is "always something statistical in our loves, and something belonging to the laws of large num- bers." See "Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere," Critical Inquiry 22, no.1 (Autumn 1995), p. 124. Burden's work may represent an attempt to resist seeing the self, in its most intimate connec- tions, in this way.

15. As Susan Sontag argues, "A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude,"

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offered by the government.15 And at a certain point, popular, mainstream media figures began to take editorial positions against the war.16 This is the merest sketch, but it is enough to make the point that within and between segments of the government, the media, and the population, images of the war in Vietnam were subject to radically different interpretations and put to very different purposes. Such contests mean that if the public was constituted around representations of violence, in the period in which Shoot was performed, then "everyone" was often bitterly fragmented. One context for Shoot, then, was a public realm, whether empirical or imag- ined, that was shapeless and/or fragmented: a realm that provided no stable ethical vantage point. Yet Burden has called his early performances "very private acts."17 On the one hand, his definition of private seems to be quantitative: "often there were only two or three people there to see them, or maybe just the people who were there helping me."18 On the other hand, he has also spoken of the audi- ence, however small, as having been a crucial catalyst in the execution of the works: "I'd set it up by telling a bunch of people, and that would make it hap- pen."19 These private acts, that is, depended in part for their realization on their informal circulation in the form of invitation and expectation, even before their documentation (and before they were picked up by the mass media). So their pri- vate character cannot be separated easily, if at all, from a public orientation.20 Further, this interdependence of private and public was implicitly ethical: Burden established an obligation, or at least an expectation, that he would do something, for or with a group of people. He would therefore have broken his word, had he not gone through with it. The somewhat fragile formality of this obligation means that the affective dimension of the work was to some extent derived, before the fact, from its virtual public existence, and was not simply a private matter. Intuitively or otherwise, Burden cannily manipulated the roles that shared interest and mutual obligation play in the formation of a public. Ideally, a public is to be

and, "Americans did have access to photographs of the suffering of the Vietnamese (many of which came from military sources and were taken with quite a different use in mind) because journalists felt backed in their efforts to obtain those photographs, the event having been defined by a significant num- ber of people as a savage colonialist war" (On Photography [New York: Anchor Books, 1990], pp. 17-18). 16. The newsreader Walter Cronkite is the signal example. 17. "Chris Burden in conversation with Jon Bewley," p. 22. 18. Jim Moisan, "Border Crossing: Interview with Chris Burden," High Performance 2, no. 1 (March 1979), p. 9. 19. Ibid.

20. This may recall, if at some distance, Jfirgen Habermas's account of the ideal type of bourgeois subjectivity as it emerged from the bourgeois family (nowhere, perhaps, is Habermas's idealism clearer, however accurate the insight into the structure of subjectivity): "Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience" (Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989], p. 49).

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 123

distinguished from an audience, which would simply be the people who were there, but the necessary passivity of the people who were present to watch Shoot (not including the marksman), casts that distinction in doubt. It's as though Shoot required a public, in the sense of an interested, participant group, but not too much of one.

Innocent bystanders

Robin White: Well, what kinds of insights do you think you have gained from doing these-these things, you know, these endurance tests? These risk situations? These isolations?

Chris Burden: What kind of insights?21

Referring to the dispassionate nature of his work's documentation, Burden has said that "there would be no explanation as to why these things had hap- pened, or what it meant."22 He has nevertheless offered a series of consistent if partial explanations of Shoot over the years. These may suggest directions in which to begin to interpret the work.

Burden's claim is that Shoot functions as a kind of lightning rod for inescapable identifications ("all the audience cannot help but place themselves into my shoes") that arc from a specifically American cultural "subconscious." Burden's conception of his performances as private was quantifiable ("often there were only two or three people there to see them"), and his version of the public ("everyone," "all the audience") risked the level of generality of political sloga- neering ("the American people," etc.), the effect of which is to efface differences. The subconscious that his work calls upon operates in relation to "tradition" and "folklore," but these are tied to mass media, and hence to the generic forms of gun violence, fictional or otherwise; westerns, war movies, crime genres, and also, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the television news. (In this context, the news, of course, remains the most banal and insidious provider of "atrocity exhibitions."23) Burden seems to have set in play an unstable relation between a too-empirical ver- sion of what is private and a too-general version of the public. Yet his concern with

21. Robin White, "Chris Burden: Interview with Robin White," View 1, no. 8 (January 1979), pp. 6-7. 22. "Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley," p. 17. 23. The phrase is the novelist J. G. Ballard's, from The Atrocity Exhibition (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990). He writes, "As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else," p. 77. Quoting this, Mark Seltzer has added, "The body, one might say, always becomes visible as a model for something else. The something else for which the body increasingly appears as a model is the public sphere . . . The spectacular public representation of violated bodies"'-not just via Hollywood, but more daily via the news---"has come to function as a way of imagining and situating, albeit in violently pathologized form, the very idea of 'the public'" (Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture [New York: Routledge, 1998], pp. 34-35).

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the documentation of his performances speaks of a decidedly post-Minimalist understanding that the relations between what he has called "primary and sec- ondary audiences" (the people who were there and the people who read about it later)24 were integral to his work. Nonetheless, Shoot's primary audience, its constitutive little public, was in a position analogous to that of witnesses who see but do not intervene in a violent street crime.25 Regarding the danger or otherwise of Shoot, Burden later said, "I'd convinced all the people around me so much that no one even brought a first-aid kit."26 Afterward, however, he had to go to the hospital, and because doctors are required by law to report gunshot wounds, a story had to be fabricated for the police (according to Burden, they were "sure my wife had shot me over a domestic quarrel").27 Burden's domestic fiction, "about going hunting and the gun being on the table and a bottle of vinegar falling on it,"28 protected the marksman from possible prosecution. An additional effect of the story was to suspend the status of the act, in terms of relations between private and public. The event was either pri- vate (a domestic dispute, unrevealed), or acceptably public (a hunting accident, a matter of public record). One implicit after-effect of Shoot, then, was to reveal the instability of the legal definitions or limits of those categories. Given the impor- tance of the private/public distinction to the organization of behavior, then subjectivity, by extension, must also have legal limits; another effect of Shoot, true to the spirit of the times, was to flout them. Further, again implicitly, it seems that questions not only of legality but of responsibility-ethical questions-were to be evaded by the positing of the act as art. The people around Burden, necessarily including the marksman, were appar- ently convinced by Burden's somewhat aesthetic, red-on-gray vision of a single drop of blood, "so there would be this gray zone like-was I shot? or was I not?"29 As Burden put it later, perhaps with a hint of art-historical irony, "as art connois- seurs and having some understanding of my intentions," audience members "had to suppress their normal instincts and participate in the violence."30 So the authority of the event was not bound so tightly to Burden's physical presence, as is often assumed, as much as it derived from the transposition of the illegal act into

24. Author's notes from conversation between Chris Burden and David Ross, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 8, 1997. 25. Here one might refer to the infamous Kitty Genovese case in New York in 1964, in which thirty- eight witnesses watched Ms. Genovese being attacked and killed. One sociological response to that case, which became a national media symbol for the failure of public responsibility, argued for a "bystander effect" and "diffusion of responsibility," such that an individual was less likely to intervene as the number of bystanders increased. See B. Latan6 and J. M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1970). 26. "Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley," p. 19. 27. Ibid., p. 20. 28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. 19. 30. "Interview with Jos6 Antonio Sarmiento," p. 56.

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 125

the context of art (so that he was shot by art, as much as for it). Burden's pres- ence-in danger, in front of the rifle-was in a sense rendered unrecognizable, by art. And the photographer's parallel shot did not quite clarify the situation.

Empiricism and self-distinction

Willoughby Sharp: Why is your work art? Chris Burden: What else is it?31

The brute fact that a young man was shot in the arm by his friend is, unfortu- nately, in a general sense unremarkable (or, in Burden's terms, "traditional"), as are the dilemmas of responsibility of participants and passersby. It is in the con- text of art that this event became so charged, so resistant to explication, and attracted so many subjective designations. And it is in the context of art that the question is posed, why, or whether, in fact, even in the absence of death or serious injury, questions of responsibility were evaded. Significantly, Burden's friend and the members of the audience go forever publicly unnamed. Shoot, that is, pressed the question of the consequences of artists' and viewers' activities (or passivities), and their responsibilities.

As against the Minimalists' phenomenological spaces, Burden set Shoot up as an empirical situation, designed to find out what it is actually like to be shot. The fact that his friend remains anonymous indicates that for Burden there was no pretense that this was not his own responsibility, although reference to the friend at all points to the collaborative aspect of the work. First the event itself, and sub- sequently its documentation, provided for an empathetic (if also repulsed) response, that is, a moment of fantasized viscerality: they "place themselves into my shoes." It's not clear whether it occurred to Burden that they might also have placed themselves, for instance, in the marksman's shoes. As Jon Bewley remarked, "I'd feel shocked at being implicated in the act of someone being shot."32 Neither is it clear whether or not one reason that people occasionally do intervene in violent events is not because of an identification with the victim, but a sense of horror at the idea of someone who could, for instance, shoot someone else. Despite Burden's certainty, a wider and less stable range of possible identifi- cations was made available by Shoot (down to "wouldn't it be cool to see that?").

All of the possible identifications made available by Shoot, however, were very different from either Minimalist viewers' self-reflexive role in the realization of the work, or the modernist divining of authentic presence via medium. The iden- tification courted by Shoot depended, instead, on voyeurism and passivity. But it was

31. Sharp and B&ar, "The Church of Human Energy," p. 58. 32. "Chris Burden in conversation with Jon Bewley," p. 20.

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a flawed or unstable identification, too, to the extent that Burden could not con-

trol the range of possible identifications, and because, while he may now know what it is actually like to be shot, the work could not transmit that. In fact, the voyeurism involved in watching Shoot, especially in the first instance, relied on pas- sivity: in exacerbating the role of viewers by taking the provocative event to an extreme, Shoot made the case that identification is always necessarily unstable. The use of gun violence is particularly apt, because it may always already register in relation to its representation as media spectacle. This is crucial, as identification is the everyday ground for ethical judgment: "What would I do, in this situation?"

Burden, however, assumed that he was the identificatory focal point of the work. He appears to have sought to reserve for himself a singular, private experi- ence. In this regard, his experience would be defined as singular, first, by contrast with that of the initial audience, and afterward, by contrast with the experiences of the readers of the various publications in which the documentation appeared. And the fact that the work was public, in the first place in the sense that it was per- formed with or in front of people, and subsequently public in another sense as it circulated in the form of its documentation, does not necessarily negate Burden's assumption. Such a reading would conform to the approach that says that in per- formance art, the authenticity of the work-its continuity with the being of the artist-is guaranteed by presence, an approach that sees modernist imperatives revived in performance art.33 Such a reading, however, disregards the very insta- bility of identification to which Shoot pointed, and ignores the possibilities of identification with audience-members, photographer, or marksman (and friend), or of identification shifting between focal points. It ignores, as well, the depen- dence of Burden's experience on a kind of ethical misidentification: marksman and audience-members remain unnamed, undifferentiated, with the ironic effect of generating the media avatar, "Chris Burden, the artist who shot himself."

Rather than reserving a private interior for Burden, the effect of Shoot was to empty out that possibility. Critics who have tried to allocate to Burden a subjective position or to read one against a preexisting category have failed to take seriously, or have attempted to override, his work's characteristic impersonality. If Burden's refusal to reveal any affective dimensions to Shoot betokens the work's defense of itself as a private act, there is a paradoxical aspect to this impersonality that lends itself to diametrically opposed interpretations. In the case of Shoot, we are better served by attending to the metaphorical resonance of the performance's physical result, Burden's wound. For the wound (even the intended graze) implies the opening out of Burden's body, without revealing any distinctive interiority (hence the blank affect of the work, and the proliferating attempts to stereotype

33. Perversely, Burden restaged the private-experience-in-public that is usually the preserve of the modernist museum-goer.

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Chris Burden. Shoot. 1971. (Photo courtesy Chris Burden.)

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Burden).34 Here the bullet appears as the medium that established the continuity between interior and exterior, in a manner reminiscent of Burden's earlier stag- ing of the body as an essentially empty conduit in Five Day Locker Piece.35 But a single piece of empirical "evidence," in the absence of an explicit hypothesis or other framework in terms of which it might be generalized, or a series of repeti- tions that allow variations to be measured, does not necessarily prove anything. It certainly does not authenticate the experimental subject's experience. Just such a piece of evidence, Burden's wound does not establish anything more than the brute fact of the shooting.36 And the inconclusive identifications of viewers and readers do not construct a framework in which that fact becomes meaningful.

Vietnam: violence and the constitution of the public

As we have seen, Burden's experience in Shoot was to be distinguished from identifications that emerged from an amorphous, generic collective, and/or from a fragmented one. Given the role of the mass media in either case, the effect of this alternation was to destabilize the opposition between the private and pub- lic aspects of the performance, where "public" refers not only to performance before an audience, and subsequent publication, but to the very fantasies that informed the work (traditions, folklores). That is, Burden's experience, which relied on the passivity or permission of its own little public, could not be neatly extricated from the fantasies and projections of a larger public constituted around representations of violence. Shoot cut from the herd of the supposedly spe- cialized, art-world audience its own public, one constituted around a dilemma, or suspension, of responsibility. In doing so, against the unavoidable backdrop of the Vietnam War and opposition to it, Shoot implicated that specialized art-world audi- ence in a much broader public concern-and/or fascination-with violence. This may provide an answer to Plagens's question at the time (What has this to do with

34. Here Burden's wound resonates with Mark Seltzer's account of contemporary "wound culture," in which the wound "is by now no longer the mark, the stigmata, of the sacred or heroic: it is the icon, or stigma, of the everyday openness of every body" (Selzer, Serial Killers, p. 2). 35. Burden's own description of Five Day Locker Piece (April 26-30, 1971) suggests this: "I was locked in locker number 5 for five consecutive days and did not leave the locker during this time. The locker measured two feet high, two feet wide, and three feet deep. I stopped eating several days prior to entry. The locker directly above me contained five gallons of bottled water; the locker below me contained an empty five gallon bottle" (Burden, "Chris Burden: Original Texts 1971-1995," n.p.). 36. This seems to have been the point of the later work, Show the Hole (March 4, 1980), in which Burden received viewers at an Italian performance festival, one at a time, in a velvet-curtained booth (a fortune-teller in reverse, perhaps). He greeted them and asked them to sit, "Then, looking at them, I said, 'In 1971 I did a performance in which I was shot in the arm.' Finally, I would roll up my sleeve and as I pointed with my finger at the scar in my arm, I would say 'The bullet went in here and came out there'" (Burden, "Original Texts 1971-1995," n.p).

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Gray Zone: Watching Shoot 129

the real violence of the Vietnam War?); Shoot refused to exempt its public from its acquiescence in spectacular representations of violence.37

Of course, many people beyond but also within the art world were opposed to the Vietnam War-and acquiescence to it-in ways that raised ques- tions of political legitimation. Advanced industrial democracies require that the governed agree to be governed; those who step outside of this agreement are sometimes cast as pathological.38 Shoot generated a negative public-in-miniature around a potentially dangerous, violent event (one that might have been seen by many people as pointless). Its part in a broader reflection on the effects of the spectacularization of violence may have been to suggest, alternately, that it was pathological to continue to agree to be governed.

Either way, pathology connotes a destabilization of the self. Shoot, then, cast the public in a role that poses a series of questions pressing the distinction between the self as the idea of an essential self-knowledge bound to an interior, and the self as a position in a system. Where does the self come from, that seeks to differentiate itself from the collective that formed it? And can that self be sepa- rated from the inhabitation of and by a position-even a demographic-within the ordering of the collective? Can the Burden of Shoot be separated from the masochist, existentialist, survivalist, etc.? Or, what is the self's relation to its "own"

experiences, when those experiences are informed by public fascinations? In terms of Shoot's relation to the overdetermining violent and public event of the period, the Vietnam War, the posing of such questions might have called attention to integral relations between representations of violence and the public, and pointed to a central problem of self-distinction in this context. That is, what are the parameters of individual and collective, or private and public, responsibility? Perhaps the farthest-reaching interpretation of Shoot, in this context, is that it posits the self as an ethical category.

Burden, again, has said, "what I do is separate from me as a person."39 Nevertheless, the importance of Shoot emerges largely against the grain of his self- interpretations. Shoot reenacted in miniature, and in the context of art, the

37. Like other artists, including Andrea Fraser, the Guerrilla Girls, and Hans Haacke, Burden demonstrated the continuity of social attitudes inside and outside the specialized public of art. 38. In the terms of Habermas's later work, influenced by systems theory, "a progressively rational- ized lifeworld is both uncoupled from and made dependent upon increasingly complex, formally orga- nized domains of action, like the economy and the state administration. This dependency, resulting from the mediatization of the lifeworld by system imperatives, assumes the sociopathological form of an internal colonization when critical disequilibria in material reproduction-that is, systemic crises amenable to systems-theoretical analysis-can be avoided only at the cost of disturbances in the sym- bolic reproduction of the lifeworld, that is, of 'subjectively' experienced, identity-threatening crises or pathologies" (Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989], 305). 39. "Interview with Robin White," p. 17. Though he has also said, "I always see myself as Chris Burden" (Sharp and B&ar, "The Church of Human Energy," p. 58).

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constitution of a public around a violent event and its representations. The inconclusive identifications of the initial, live audience, and subsequently those who received the work as documentation, do not provide a framework in which Shoot takes on meaning. But the very fact that a group formed, answered invita- tions, came, and participated (in their very passivity), does provide such a framework. For as the performer of Shoot, Burden became subject of and to that public ("I'd set it up by telling a bunch of people, and that would make it hap- pen"). Specifically, the violent event, and therefore its representation, depended on the acquiescence and, in fact, the expectations of that group: "everyone" let it happen, no one tried to stop it. Under cover of art, they could not see it for what else it might have been. Minimalism's objects in phenomenological spaces had posed the question of where the responsibility lay for their realization. Shoot introduced into an empiri- cal space considerations entirely absent from the spaces of Minimalism. At base, it introduced the issue of the relations between art and its subjects (artists and view- ers) and fantasies of violence informed by the mass media. The realization of Shoot depended on public acquiescence in such fantasies, and this acquiescence in the first instance allowed the work its extended temporal dimension in the form of documentation. Public acquiescence, that is, transformed an empirical space, and moment-F Space, Santa Ana, California, November 19, 1971, 7:45 p.m.- into the virtual space of representation. There, in turn, still on the basis of that first public permission, virtual publics could and did form. They rest, perhaps, on the effacement of a guilty knowledge, or else a secretly shared recognition ("wouldn't it have been cool to see that?"). So Shoot's own nagging empiricism in the end revealed the public, not as an empirical category, but as a gray zone, defined by the suspension ofjudgment and choice. What should I do, in this situa- tion? Watch.

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