American Artist. Burden was one of the foremost performance artists of the 1970s. He was perhaps the single best-known practitioner of the subgenre of body art who had himself shot, pierced, starved, crucified, electrocuted, cut by glass, kicked down stairs, locked up, dropped from heights and nearly drowned. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College, where he studied art, architecture and physics, he enrolled in the master of fine arts program at the University of California, Irvine. His first significant performance work, 'Five Day Locker Piece' (1971), was created for his master’s thesis there. In that work, he locked himself into a 2-by-2-by-3-foot student locker. Above him was a five-gallon jug of water, from which he could drink through a hose. Below him was a five-gallon bottle for the water’s inevitable outcome. He emerged five days later, and got his degree. Among his most famous early works were 'Shoot' (1971), in which a colleague shot him in the arm with a .22 rifle from about 15 feet away; 'Through the Night Softly' (1973), in which he crawled, nearly naked, over a field of broken glass; 'Doorway to Heaven' (1973), in which he attacked his chest with live electrical wires; 'Movie on the Way Down' (1973), in which he was suspended, upside-down and naked, some six feet off the floor and swiftly chopped free; 'Trans-fixed' (1974), in which he had himself nailed, Christlike, over the hump of a Volkswagen Beetle; 'Kunst Kick' (1974), in which he was kicked down a flight of stairs; and 'White Light/White Heat' (1975), in which he inhabited a platform for 3 weeks without eating. By the end of the ’70s, he had largely abandoned body art and turned instead to vast engineered sculptural installations. They included 'Urban Light' (2008), an illuminated forest of more than 200 cast-iron street lamps in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; 'What My Dad Gave Me' (2008), a 65-foot skyscraper fashioned from a Brobdingnagian Erector set, exhibited at Rockefeller Center; and 'Ghost Ship' (2005), a self-navigating crewless sailboat that made its voyage, between Fair Isle, Scotland, and England. Burden died from complications of melanoma, which was diagnosed 18 months before his passing.