I suppose Failing him could also have been a performance...

;)

CULTURE: Russian Roulette Artist Speaks: "On November 29, 2004, Joseph Deutch, a graduate student in art at UCLA, created a piece of performance art. He stood in front of a group of his student peers and his teacher, performance artist Ron Athey, held what appeared to be a .357 Magnum to his head, and pulled the trigger, producing a clicking noise but no bullet. Immediately thereafter, Deutch fled the room. The students in the classroom heard a loud bang from the room's adjoining hallway. Then, Deutch returned to the classroom. As it turned out, according to Deutch, who speaks for the first time to the LA Times, the gun was a fake, one he had carved from wood--but, the fallout from his artwork was real. Ultimately, two art professors, Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, suddenly retired after the University refused to suspend Deutch, deeming Deutch's performance art 'domestic terrorism.'

'The thing I hadn't counted on was Chris and Nancy freaking out to the extent they did.'



Deutch said that he did not know Rubins and that he'd had only one substantial conversation with Burden, who oversaw instruction in new genres, the branch of the art department that includes performance art. Burden stopped doing performance art by the 1980s, having made a lasting mark with trailblazing work such as his 1971 piece 'Shoot,' in which an assistant, standing 15 feet away in a Santa Ana gallery, shot him in the upper arm with a .22-caliber rifle.



In 1972, Phyllis Lutjeans, a friend who hosted a cable TV show, invited Burden on the program. Without warning — in a performance he dubbed 'TV Hijack' — he held her at knifepoint for several minutes.



'When Chris put the knife at my throat, I was absolutely terrified,' Lutjeans recalled for The Times 20 years later. 'I thought, 'This guy's psychotic.' '



Deutch said that although he was familiar with the history of performance art and Burden's place in it, his untitled Russian roulette piece was not intended as a response or allusion to the professor's early work.

(Written by: susannah_breslin)

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(Via SuicideGirls: News Wire.)