Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015. Early life and career Burden was born in Boston in 1946 to Robert Burden, an engineer, and Rhoda Burden, a biologist. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, France and Italy. At the age of 12, Burden had emergency surgery, performed without anesthesia, on his left foot after he was severely injured in a motor-scooter crash on the island of Elba. During the long convalescence that followed, he became deeply interested in visual art, particularly photography. He studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College in 1965–1969 and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine—where his teachers included Robert Irwin—from 1969 to 1971. Work Early performance art Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece (1971), was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, and involved his being locked in a locker for five days. His 1973 work 747 involved the artist firing several pistol shots directly at a Boeing 747 passenger jet plane while it took off from Los Angeles International Airport. The piece had a single witness, photographer Terry McDonnell, who filmed the act. His best-known work from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about with a .22 rifle. Other performances from the 1970s included Deadman (1972), in which Burden lay on the ground covered with a canvas sheet and a set of road flares until bystanders assumed he was dead and called emergency services (leading to his arrest); Match Piece (1972) (also known as Match), in which Burden launched lit matches at a naked woman lying between him and a set of two televisions in a room covered with butcher paper (1972); B.C. Mexico (1973), in which he kayaked