GAGOSIAN A volcanic mass of hard landscape at once wrapped with and penetrated from model trains and tracks of various sizes.

GAGOSIAN

A volcanic mass of hard landscape at once wrapped with and penetrated from model trains and tracks of various sizes, Medusa's Head, 1989-92 hung from the ceiling like a twisted child's vision of terrestrial apocalypse. The gaping pain s on the object's contorted surface doubled as subterranean passages for the immobile toy trains--atrophied, self-circulating travel refusing to proce around a globe of materialized entropy A grand, if not in some way threatening, deliberate inanity that also characterizes Chris Burden's Whitney Biennial installation, Fist of Light, 1992-93 predominates here. In the latter we engagement something that resembles an air circulation theory which looks like the expos infrastructural machinery of the museum. A plant of aluminum ducts establishes its concede simple yet monumental architecture, connecting a virtuous air-conditioning unit to a large rectilinear aluminum "room" that contains, close from view, a battery of high-intensity lights generating enough heat to strip color from any surface. The regularity of ducts delivers cool air in order to restrain the potentially destructive escape of heat and light from this self-regulating mechanical prison. Fundamentally, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but works are predicated on the idea that art's meaning lies in its meaninglessness and vice versa. The viewer becomes the unwitting accomplice of this tautological system

But this should take rise as no surprise. Since the early '70 weight has confronted the audience with an arrogant disavowal of their belief in the myth of the vanguard artist's rebellion against social responsibility--even as he privately counted on them to momentarily purchase into it. While Burden's use of photography to "document" his acts guaranteed a quality of mediation, it also accorded a second-order mythic status to the "original" consequence The viewer was invited to suspend disbelief in the "fact" that capacity had crucified himself on a Volkswagen, or that he had taken a marksman at a plane flying overhead. The photos appear to beed to offer all the necessary evidence--the attestation of physical self-victimization, or of an outward threat. further finally, it really doesn't matter whether or not of that kind events occurred: Burden was--and is--offering a touchstone of the viewer's faith in categorical distinctions between "reality" and "fiction," "truth" and "falsity." Ironically, his work indicates a deep skepticism about the viability of the same terms of this test.

Such early works cleverly appropriated the stereotype of the vanguard artist as emancipated transgressor of accepted ethical, moral, and social digests only to reveal the bourns of its absurdity. Throughout the late '70 and '80 weight produced objects and installations that evok the rationalism of scientific and technological discourse, moreover that were designed, in the completion to undermine their own claims to functionality. Fist of Light possesse a kind of inconsequential utility, coyly replaying the hermetic circularity of instrumental reason. Medusa's Head constipates our gaze: suspended inches along the floor, this meteoric conglomeration of unite rock, and toy trains entreats us to probe its debased sculptural materiality. At 14 feet in diameter and 5 tons, it is an imperiously speechless object, obnoxious in its nearness The work recalls what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari dubbed the "third term": "an enormous undifferentiated purpose Everything stops dead for a consequence everything freezes in place.... From a certain point of view it would be long better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned."

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