Chris Burden, Carp TV Ad, 1975
Chris Burden used television as a platform for his radical performance pieces – crawling over broken glass, almost getting electrocuted, etc. One of his most interesting pieces to me was his financial disclosure, where he stated that he would be the first artist to make a full financial disclosure and proceeded to list his income and all of his business incomes, finally ending on his total profit for the year. Unsurprisingly, it was not very high, given that he was routinely paying for airtime for these bizarre pieces. This is something I have always wondered about – can anyone put an advertisement on television as long as they can pay for the airtime? How carefully are these ads vetted by the station? Can they include disturbing content? The reason that I would consider Chris Burden as “subverting” the medium of television is that doing what he did seems to come close to “breaking the system.” Almost everyone does the same thing on television – they pay for advertisements only if they think that the exposure gained from the ad will be more beneficial than the money spent. However, when someone suddenly doesn’t care about making a profit, they could completely ruin television – what if someone bought every advertisement spot and turned the ad time into an entire personal show? What if someone were to buy every advertisement spot and just leave it blank? When the advertiser has no product to advertise and doesn’t care about turning a profit, the normal “rules” of television are off. This, to me, is what makes Chris Burden’s performances so interesting.