Ward/Burden

Q1: Frazer Ward, in Gray Zone: Watching Shoot, includes several quotes from Chris Burden about his performance, Shoot. “I’d be telling a bunch of people, and that would make it happen.” “Often there were only two or three people there to see them, or maybe just the people who were helping me.” “All the audience cannot help but place themselves into my shoes.” “I’d convinced all the people around me so much no one even brought a first-aid kit.” “There would be this grey zone, like – was I shot? Or was I not?” Burden has a very down to earth way of describing these things. He seems almost artless. As if he can boil down his own performance to a few salient ideas without belaboring it or getting subatomic. Ward, on the other hand, falls on the other end of the rhetorical spectrum. He reads many things into Shoot. In light of this contrast…is he reading more than is there? Perhaps it was the novelty. These days, this sort of thing (violent/shocking performance) underwhelms us. For example, another performance artists: Genessis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle. As a “performance,” he and his wife had gender reassignment procedures and plastic surgery to turn into the same person. Most people never heard about it. The response of many who did? Meh. What would Ward have to say? Probably much less than he had to say about Shoot.

Q2: Are Burden’s performances mostly notable for their spectacular qualities? If NO ONE ever saw shoot, either in person or via media, and there was no shooter to witness it either, but just an auto trigger to do the firing….would we care?