Mention the name Chris Burden and you are likely to be asked, "Is he still shooting himself?" In the 1970s, when artists such as Burden, Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman broke free from societal restrictions, they attempted to shock the art world out of it’s commercial intransigence. In the tradition evoked by earlier Dadaists, they made the artist/spectator relationship crucial.

But in pushing the boundaries of concept over form to the extreme, they outdid their predecessors. Burden, for instance, executed a series of self-punishing physical ordeals that included having himself shot in the arm.

After 30 odd years, shock waves from those stunts continue to reverberate. But Burden didn’t remain ideologically frozen. In the ensuing years he has strayed far afield from acts of self-mutilation. That is not to say that he ceased to be a provocative artist. Although his approach has been subtler, his creativity continues to evolve out of social and political contexts.

Identification with the past notwithstanding, he manages to maintain a sense of relevance. For instance, using war toys to create a city/state at war, a recent installation evoked the connections between money, power, technology and the military.

At times, he leaps from the topical to the futuristic, a tendency that goes as far back as 1975, when he engineered a utopian car. In Small Skyscraper, his latest work, Burden reconnects with the utopian tradition of transforming people’s needs through the design of physical space. The Skyscraper was a concept that grew out of his frustration with L.A.’s building codes, encountered in the course of building a studio on his property.

Described as a sculpture disguised as a house disguised as a skyscraper, the dimensions exploit a loophole that allows small outbuildings, like sheds and greenhouses, to be built without a permit if they stay within 400 square feet and under 35 feet high.

Still adhering to the principles of artist/audience participation, Burden elicits project related cross-disciplinary collaborations and discussions.

In the utopian tradition, art, life and architecture are relevant to urban issues. Form follows function not only in the physical sense, but in the emotional sense as well. By narrowing the gulf between fine art and practical use, as well as between art and industry, Burden’s vision for a humanistic restructuring of the future exposes the disjunction between the values of financial and property groups and the needs of society.

Few artists occupy so legendary a position in the annals of recent art history as Chris Burden. Beginning with his 1971 MFA show, Five Day Locker Piece, in which he confined himself in a tiny student locker for five days solid, Burden spent his early career staging performances that explored a potentially fatal bringing together of art and life.

He nailed himself to the roof of a Volkswagen Bug in Trans-fixed (1974), lay under a tarp on La Cienega Boulevard for Deadman (1972), and most infamous of all, had himself shot with a rifle for Shoot (1971). To generations of younger performance artists, these events established a ne plus ultra of art and risk. To their detractors, they seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with avant-garde art practice.

The Chris Burden of later years seems an utterly different artist, fascinated by engineering, scientific logic, and toys. He has made devices like Samson (1985), a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and turnstile, which, if enough people passed through the turnstile, would theoretically expand enough to demolish the gallery in which it was displayed; flown a toy airplane inside a Concorde aircraft flying over the Atlantic, so that the toy achieved a speed just beyond Mach 2; and designed and launched Ghost Ship (2005), a crewless, self-navigating sea vessel.

Even beyond his art, Burden consistently challenges and perplexes spectators. In 2005, a student in one of his classes at UCLA, which was being led by Ron Athey in his absence, allegedly produced a revolver and staged a Russian roulette–style suicide attempt. Despite Burden’s infamy as the patron saint of risk, he insisted that the student be disciplined, and he and his wife, artist Nancy Rubins, resigned their teaching positions when the student was not.