Los Angeles artist Chris Burden creates intricate kinetic art pieces that are basically Rube Goldberg raceways for Hot Wheels cars. Built with Erector Sets, Legos, and Lincoln Logs, his installations are fun to watch, but they also have serious artistic cred -- Burden is represented by the snooty Gagosian Gallery, and several museums are collecting his work.
Today the New York Times tells us about his latest project:
The California artist Chris Burden may be in his 60s, but he is still playing with toys. The thing is, the older he gets the more outrageously complicated the toys become.
Two years ago he created a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper that stood in Rockefeller Center, and in 2004 he made “Metropolis I,” composed of 80 Hot Wheels toy cars zooming around two single-lane highways along with monorail trains chugging on tracks of their own. The piece was snapped up by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.
“I was happy with ‘Metropolis I,’ but it kind of disappeared once it went to western Japan,” Mr. Burden said in a telephone interview from his studio in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County. So in 2006 he and a team of eight studio assistants, including an engineer, began “Metropolis II,” a far more ambitious version. It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation.
In Los Angeles, by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”
When Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art saw it in Mr. Burden’s studio at the outset of the project, he knew the museum had to have it. “I reserved it the day I saw it,” said Mr. Govan, who has been making regular studio visits to chart its progress. “It’s a portrait of L.A.”
The TImes has a wonderful video of Burden's work. It's a must-see.
Images: Screen grabs from the New York Times
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