Charles Burden

Shoot

1971

Performance Art

Shoot is perhaps Burden’s most famous piece. Burden wanted his audience to experience a person getting shot, not through their television screen, but right in front of them, in person. He had a friend shoot him. Originally, the bullet was supposed to nick Burdens arm, but the shooter’s aim was slightly off, and the bullet ended up going through his arm. Burden “wanted to portray the reality of pain to the audience at a time when people had become desensitized to the plethora of television images of injured and dead American soldiers in Vietnam and the general dominance of violence in media imagery”.