Streetlamps

Gagosian's five-hundredth book takes the measure of the one Chris Burden project a mass audience knows by heart: the antique cast-iron streetlamps he stripped, restored and massed into forests of light, of which LACMA's Urban Light is only the most famous.

Published in September 2018, three years after Burden's death, the volume follows the streetlamps he began amassing in the early 2000s. Two hundred and two of them, restored from 1920s Los Angeles stock, became Urban Light (2008) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; four further streetlamp sculptures were realized for public and private sites. Each is documented across 172 pages from conception through restoration to installation, with texts by Russell Ferguson, Christopher Bedford and George Roberts, a contribution from LACMA director Michael Govan, and photographs by Ari Marcopoulos.

Chris Burden (1946–2015) built his reputation in the early 1970s on performances that put his own body at risk, among them Shoot and Trans-Fixed, then spent four decades converting that appetite for physical consequence into engineering: Erector-set bridges, Meccano skyscrapers, the thousand-car freeway of Metropolis II. The streetlamps belong to the same instinct for accumulation and civic scale, and are the works through which most people now meet him.