Chris Burden: Beyond The Limits

Burden has a love-hate relationship with the machine: Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery or presented in glorious isolation, the toy-like machine becomes an object of fear and worship, however ironically, a mysterious idol to be propitiated and venerated, even if it no longer works. Thus art makes the machine benign by turning into a strange toy. It masters the machine in a playful, Machiavellian act of homage to it. Burden implicitly sets the cunning of the artist against the engineer who masterminded the machine, implying that the artist can magically undo the human damage the latter unwittingly did with his machine.