Driving in the endless city

If your Friday commute to work was a little bumper-to-bumper, fire up a coffee and take five minutes to watch this video of Chris Burden’s latest work, Metropolis II. We think it will have a strangely calming effect.

Burden is obviously infamous for his 1970s performance pieces in which he was shot in the arm by an assistant and nailed to the bonnet of a car in an apparent mock crucifixion. In each, the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was paramount.

Metropolis II, about to open at Los Angeles County Museum of Art is altogether different, a kinetic sculpture that in Burden’s words, tries “to evoke the energy of a city."

"The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city," he says. "It wasn’t about making a scale model!" 

Incidentally, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the people behind the wonderful and poignant social networking film Catfish, directed the video. Hope you like it as much as we do.