From the depths of my memory:
Museum installation/sculpture. The work features a chair with a (presumably?) loaded gun attached. Viewers are invited to sit in the chair and pull the trigger.
Back at uni, a philosophy profesor lent me a book that described this work and suggested its relation to the randomness of violence in our modern lives. I think the museum owning/exhibiting the work was in Europe…France, perhaps?
Any suggestions as to the title of the piece and/or the artist would be greatly appreciated.
Unless I’m mistaken, I think was Chris Burden, and that the idea was that the gun was automatically programmed to go off at a specific moment in the future, so sitting down was like playing a low-level Russian Roulette.
I am very familiar with the work of Chris Burden, I studied with him when he was a visiting artist at my art school. And this just does not sound like CB. I have a catalog of all CB’s artworks and performances up to 1987 and there is nothing like that in the book. CB doesn’t typically endanger viewers, just himself.
Ok, bzzzt. My bad. And I call myself a professional.
Second try: Howabout Ed Kienholz? I ask a few colleagues about this-- some had vague recollections that varied greatly and I think this piece has entered the art-urban-legend realm and the concept has been used and abused and transformed in vague reports in undergraduate lectures and local arts calendars. But one colleague sez that it’s Kienholz form the 70’s-- she reports that it showed at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in 78-9 as part of a retrospective. Colleague described it; Quote:
“Viewers are invited to sit in the chair after they have signed a release. The piece is set up like a living-room, surrounded with flashing lights and police tape. I seem
to recall that the gun is either not loaded or loaded with a blank. In either case, the feeling of sitting in the chair with a gun pointed at you is pretty unnerving.”
Does this sound like our piece?
Oh, I should add, the work is allegedly titled “Still Live” [sic] and was done in 1974. The only web site I could find that describes it is in Swedish.
