Gravity’s Volkswagen

Fifteen

The Beetle’s Burden

These days everybody seems to know Chris Burden as a big-deal, big-time, serious artist with an international reputation. And he is. But for a long time, as far as I knew, he was just some obscure performance artist who once had himself crucified to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. The ‘piece’ was called Trans-fixed.

It was created, or at least took place, on 23 April 1974 in a garage on Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. Burden stood on the Beetle’s rear bumper and had nails driven through the palms of his hands into the roof of the car.

The Beetle was then pushed halfway into the road and the engine was revved hard for two minutes, so that it ‘screamed in pain’ at Burden’s suffering. Then they turned the engine off and pushed the car back into the garage and decrucified the artist. It was all about the relationship between technology and the body, apparently, though I suspect there may also have been some Vietnam War subtext.

It’s one of those pieces that for entirely obvious reasons is far more talked about than seen, and for all the ‘documentation’ that accompanies the work, art history, unsurprisingly, is a bit vague about the specifications of the Beetle used.

From looking at colour photographs of the event we can definitely see the car was pale blue, a standard Volkswagen colour. Its rear bumpers have overriders, which means it couldn’t be earlier than a 1957 model, and the tail-lights tell us that it’s definitely pre-1961, which was when the design changed. In other words, Burden was nailed to a car that was at least fourteen years old, possibly a little older. I suppose that’s understandable. Nobody’s going to hammer nails into their shiny new car. I’ve not been able to find any information about what subsequently happened to Burden’s Beetle.

Actually, it’s always struck me that a Beetle is less than the ideal vehicle for a crucifixion. It’s too narrow and too curved. You’d be much better off using something like an E type Jag with its long flat bonnet, or even the side of a Volkswagen camper.

And I’ve always thought it would have been so much more resonant if Burden had been driven around the LA freeways for a few hours, bleeding, in pain, wondering whether he’d been forsaken, getting the backs of his legs burned on the engine lid, and possibly being speared by a Roman soldier and given vinegar to drink. Still, what do I know? And I suppose that’s how it always is with performance art; everybody’s a critic.