Chris Burden is leading me up the muddy path to the summit behind his studio. I'd spied an odd-looking sculpture at the top of the hill and asked him what the hell it was. It looked to be nothing less than a medieval Genoese watchtower. As we huff and puff, I begin to feel guilty for dragging him along to get a closer look, and fear that at any moment he and his roly-poly frame will begin a slick and dangerous descent.
The piece turns out to be an actual bunker, made of layered bags of cement left out in the rain. Burden gives me a boost to scale its slippery surface — it's been pouring for days in not-so-sunny California — so I can have a look at the manhole cover he incorporated as its roof. When lowered, it offers absolute protection from marauders or, for that matter, from the coyotes you can hear off in the hills.
"I sold one of these to a collector in Brazil," Burden tells me. "He also owns Samson." I'm confused for a second because I've only just met his three dogs and isn't Samson the yellow Lab? Then I realize he's referring to another sculpture, one that rigs a 100-ton jack to a gear and a turnstile that visitors have to pass through. If enough of them participate, the giant timbers extruding from the jack will, like the sculpture's biblical namesake, bring down the gallery walls. Samson the sculpture is a neat coupling of engineering precision and intimations of violence — a dynamic that's also unmistakable in his stark hilltop bunker.
Through its slits I get a sentinel view of the mountains that separate Los Angeles from Burden's Topanga Canyon home and studio complex. (He shares the grounds with his wife, Nancy Rubins, a sculptor who also shows at the Gagosian Gallery and whose specialty is assembling cataclysmic-seeming bursts of boats or airplane parts.) The canyon's remoteness is a matter of psychological rather than physical fact, and though it is a ruggedly beatific spot, it somehow never leaves my mind that its woods were once filled with FBI agents peering through their binoculars at blacklisted actors and Red folksingers like Woody Guthrie, who retreated here in the fifties, or that it was an early home to the Manson family. That overtone of the illicit, of potential violence, is almost cinematic.
In his studio, Burden is like a kid running amok with giant toys. He's short and stocky, with his hair styled like a monk's tonsure. In sneakers and chinos, he walks and speaks fast and wired like some early Scorsese character. The property is strewn with junk — a rusting steamroller is the first thing visitors see. After we come down the scraggy hill, Burden, now 62, proudly points out and then fires up his mining locomotive, which sits on real tracks next to a burned-out trolley and a small boxcar. He's planning to build a rail tunnel through the mountains a couple of hundred yards from his studio. The thing is, he's serious, and given how he has tested the limits of what an artist can do — even what art can be — for almost 40 years, you have to believe he'll figure out a way to pull it off.
