Gray Zone: Watching Shoot

Question 1: While rationally I can understand that Burden’s work has a context of the Minimalism and the spectacle of war, I don’t think personally I can accept Shoot to be a piece of artwork. Emotionally, the question of why would anyone in his/her right mind would attempt something like this is what I thought of initially. I understand that assigning “a pathological state” (116) as Fraser described does not help to explain the work in question, is art really capable of transcending legality, rationality, etc that as long as it is piece of artwork expressing certain ideas, it is acceptable? Especially on pg 118, in an interview with Chris Burden, he claimed “Well, it’s something to experience. How do you know how it feels like to be shot if you don’t experience it? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing.” I can understand his artistic/intellectual curiosity to do with being shot, but actually creating a stage actively for it to happen seems outrageous and insane. How can the deliberate process of planning to be shot considered as an act of creating artwork?

Question 2: Fraser talked about how ethical individuals would attempt to stop the shooting from taking place. He said “the very violence of shoot seems to have called out for intervention on the part of the collaborators or audience members….Yet, once it was in train, some combination of the expectation of a specialist public, prurient fascination, an antimoralistic, antiauthoritarian historical milieu, even the brevity of the work, prevented any such intervention.” (117) What I think is interesting is that if someone actually did make a gesture to stop the shooting, how would it change the nature of the work?