Anticipating the Museum (Chris Burden)

Recently, in the context of a class discussion on expectations in museum contexts, I returned to an earlier paper I wrote on alternative spaces for a performance art theory class. The topic of our conversation was what a Museum Goer anticipates of the viewing space, and what alternative iterations of art spaces can do to illuminate the substructure of our expectation.

Performance art is a revealing lens in museology because it constructs a pocket of liminal space around itself, especially when presented in an art institution. It is through physical contact with the work, thus approaching the threshold of liminal/institutional, that we become aware of the responsibilities we take on as Museum Goer and the ones that we defer.

Chris Burden’s “Doomed,” performed in 1975 in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, is one illumination of the suspense/dispense of responsibility in the museum setting. Burden’s intention was to lay beneath a sheet of glass, next to which he had set up a clock, and to remain there until someone interfered with his performance. He lay for forty-five hours and ten minutes, to the dangerous neglect of his body’s needs, before a museum employee set a pitcher of water beside him. He then got up, smashed the clock and left, concluding the performance.

It is painful to note the absence of the audience’s responsibility towards another human being in “Doomed,” (Burden had soiled himself, and looked on the brink of passing out from dehydration during the performance), but I would argue they were behaving in an alternate mode of responsibility that eclipsed this. Because of the ubiquity of the Do-Not-Touch signs in museum spaces, such that they are no longer even necessary, the Museum Goer is most immediately aware of the sanctity of the art object which must not be interfered with. The status of the performance as an institutional art object obscured its legibility as a person suffering.

Furthermore the role of the Museum as mediator between the audience and the work creates a gap between the the two, diluting whatever empathetic connections might exist. The Museum Goer could then defer the responsibility of Burden’s wellbeing to the institution; it becomes easy to assume that someone in the museum wouldn’t let Burden be harmed.

Perhaps there is also something left over of the structuralism of museum practice that distanced the viewers from Burden’s pain. Burden became a man who represented suffering, rather than a man who was suffering, connected more to a meta-narrative than a biological one.