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Chris Burden – Porsche with Meteorite, 2013, restored 1974 Porsche 914, 390 pound meteorite, steel structure installation, New Museum, New York City, USA, 2013
Photo: Benoit Pailley, New Museum

About Chris Burden’s Porsche with Meteorite

Chris Burden was not exactly an everyday artist. While his previous work usually involved a form of danger (see Shoot), his last works have still been about performance, but mostly involved creating very much advanced models of working machines. One of such of his works was sitting in the New Museum, NYC in 2013. At the New Museum, there was a large chunk of meteorite which weighed 365 pounds hanging from one end of a massive steel frame while a Canary yellow 1974 Porsche 914 hung from the other end.

Burden went to great lengths to make his machines come to live and a great deal of energy and intelligence is required. According to the story of how the meteorite machine came to be, Burden spotted the huge meteorite on eBay and it was available on free shipping too. He had never seen a meteorite that big and he went ahead to buy it without actually having any inkling whatsoever about what he would do with it.

Chris Burden whose most well-known work is Shoot, an art performance in which he had his own arm shot by a friend in 1971, had over the years grown into a stocky, vigorous 67 years old man. His works were usually huge and they always took very long time to bring to life but there is a clean elegance about them which Mr. Burden said he imbibed from the University of California.

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