Right. Here is some information on two of my favorite weird artists, Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys. You don't hear much about these guys in normal life, so I figure I'm doing the world a service by spreading their names around.

This is Joseph Beuys, one of the least heard of, but most influential artists of the 20th century. He is German, and unfortunately was a stuka pilot during The War, but he spent the rest of his life apologizing through his art for being a German. Anyway, according to his own (in all likelihood apocryphal) personal history, his fighter plane was shot down over the Crimea and he crashed, only to be rescued by Tartars, and kept alive by being packed in fat and wrapped in felt. After The War (which Beuys' participation in was ended after his crash, which actually did happen--we all just wonder about the Tartars and all of that, but it isn't really important), Beuys became a sculptor and action artist. Most of his work involved both fat and felt (in Beuys' personal artistic lexicon, fat represented sustenance and felt represented shelter/protection), and he created a great deal of deeply weird art. He fancied himself some sort of shaman/healer, and put a great deal of effort into trying to "heal" himself and his people.

Some of Beuys' more memorable pieces included I Like America and America Likes Me a lengthy performance where he lived in a gallery in New York with a coyote for a couple days, and How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, where he sat, his head covered in gold leaf and honey, silently explaining pictures to a dead hare.

Beuys was a really weird guy, but he made a lot of really cool stuff while he was with us. In the 60's, he was involved with the Fluxus group, a bunch of international avant garde types (including Yoko Ono...) and died at some point in the late 80's.

All those Dieter ("And now we dance!") skits on Saturday Night Live suddenly make a lot more sense now, don't they...

I recently discovered the existance of the super cool web comic, Cat and Girl, in which gags about Joseph Beuys seem to be a running theme. For instance, in the comic called Cat and Girl vs. Modern Art, Cat accidentally sits in Beuys' piece Fat Chair. Fantastic stuff, that.

Now this unassuming looking fellow is Chris Burden, one of the most notorious body artists in history, but he was mostly misunderstood. He did the bulk of his performance work in California in the 70's. What he is most well known for is being the guy who had himself shot for art, and consequently gained the reputation as sort of the Evil Knievil of the art world. While he did do a whole bunch of apparently self destructive stuff, he wasn't either trying to kill himself or mutilate himself (while he was actually shot in the arm for one of his pieces, it was an accident--he just wanted to get shot *at*, not actually shot). Most of Burden's early body art involved exploring his relationship with the audience (making them active participants in something generally horrible, rather than just passive viewers). If I were willing to be really artistically savvy, I'd point out how Burden was doing all of this at the height of the Vietnam war, when the entire American public spent an awful lot of time passively watching the the war pan out on TV, and I'd make some sort of clever connection, but I'm not that savvy.

This here is a picture of Doorway to Heaven, where Burden stood in a doorway and plunged live electrical wires into his chest. While this certainly isn't a good idea, it made for a really cool picture.

Other than getting shot and electrocuted, Burden's early worked involved things like being shut in a locker for a week, being strapped to the floor of a gallery right next to a bucket of water with live electrical wires submerged in it (so if someone tipped over the water, he'd have been killed), and lying under a plate of glass in a gallery until someone told him to stop doing it (sadly, no one did for a few days...).

One of the more hysterical things that Burden did was take out advertisement time on local TV, and show little Chris Burden--Artist commercials. This is a picture of Through the Night Softly, a piece where he crawled through a parking lot full of broken glass with his hands held behind his back. He used this footage for a 10 second TV ad spot, which was shown at around 11:30 pm every night for a few weeks. You'd be sitting there watching ads for shampoo and soda, and suddenly there would be this completely unexplained spot involving a man crawling through glass in black and white. Then you'd see more ads for juice. Things like this just make me happy existing.

Eventually, Burden stopped doing his body performances (mostly because his reputation got out of control), and turned his attentions to less destructive performance pieces (like The Artist at Work, where he moved his office into a gallery for a week) and installations (such as Sampson, a vast contraption in the entrance to a museum set up in such a way that whenever anyone entered the museum, they would walk through a turnstile, which would separate a large pair of beams that were pressing against the museum's retaining walls. If enough people passed through the turnstile, the museum would theoretically be destroyed), and is still doing installations to this day.

While I certainly do not advocate having one's self shot, electrocuted, maimed, or being an ex Nazi, these two guys did a lot of very influential stuff, in terms of contemporary art, and are certainly worth looking at (if you are in to that sort of thing).