Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II” is pretty wonderful – the vision and the kinetic-sculptured reality. Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, the directors of Catfish, made a short documentary about the artists’s newest work, a kinetic sculpture that took four years to build, a scale model city in which toy cars move rapidly and in sync. It’s a reminder of what the city is, when you step back and really look at it: a giant machine, the most intricate kinetic sculpture humans have ever designed.“It’s a little bit like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and you’re modeling horse buggies everywhere, and the automobile is about to arrive,” he says. “Something else is about to arrive.”Burden is famous for his particularly physical performance pieces, which have called for, among other things, being shot in the left arm by an assistant and being nailed in crucifiction to the back of a Volkswagen. Cars are clearly a point of concern for the LA resident. In “B-Car,” from 1975, he created a fully operational, lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being “able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon”:“Metropolis II” will appear this season at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA).
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