The Eyes of a Familiar Compound Ghost: Locating the Body in Chris Burden’s Shoot.

This chapter explores the relationship between Chris Burden’s performance work and the forms of media used to document them. The chapter argues that Burden’s body becomes a mediatised body existing as a compound image across and between multiple formats and platforms. These liminal bodies stand in for what Hal Foster calls the “missed encounter with the real”; the lived event – performed in the form of a gunshot wound – that is too traumatic to account for in actuality. Instead, Burden becomes a spectator to himself and that this spectatorship of the self involves another kind of violence. The chapter is taken from a lecture originally given at the Jeu de Paume and has been translated into French as part of the book Corps et Images: Oeuvres, dispositifs et ecrans contemporains, alongside contributions from Mieke Bal, Aernout Mik, David Claerbout, Peter Campus and others.

• http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2016/02...