Art: Portrait of the Autist As a Young Man

Dear Little Sister,

Please excuse my silence. Ever since I, a fortunate exchange student, arrived in New York I have been absorbed in the comprehension of American art, beside which the hours we spent committing the Thousand Sutras to memory seem, as they say here, a “snap.” Last week I went to an exhibition by a young artist from California. His name is Chris Burden, and though he is only 29, many consider him a sadhu. It is at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, a known place of refuge for distinguished fakirs like Joseph Bueys, who, unlike our own sadhus in India, wears a magnificent fur coat and chants mantras about “revolution” in order to expunge his sorrow for having flown a German airplane 30 years ago. Burden, on the other hand, would appear a familiar figure to us. He is a body artist. He believes in transcending the entanglements of maya by mortifying his flesh. And though, thanks to drought and earthquakes, this has become routine for most of us at home, in America it is considered to be a great luxury and artists who practice it are esteemed on all sides—so much so that photographs of them sell for many hundreds of dollars, which has not happened to us since LIFE and Look folded.

Meditations and Kicks. Although this holy man has been doing penance only since 1971, when he was an art student, his catalogue of devotions is already longer than Mahatma Gandhi’s at twice his age. Burden has caused himself to be nailed through the hands to the roof of a Volkswagen while, in his words, “screaming for me, the engine was run at full speed for two minutes.” He has strewn broken glass on a street in Los Angeles and crawled naked through it; at the Basel Art Fair last year (a feast day, on which many priests and their temple dancers gather to exchange the images peculiar to their cult), he had himself kicked down two flights of concrete stairs in front of an admiring throng. He has been shot, though only by a .22 in the arm, by an assistant. All these penances are recorded with great care on video tape and Polaroid film by other assistants, as the deeds of Ramachandra were recorded in the Ramayana. It was explained to me that since most cultured Americans do nothing more strenuous than a little bluefishing from a boat purchased with their last foundation grant, they prize something called “gratuitous risk,” provided some other artist is taking it.

This brings me to Burden’s new “piece” (as such things are called). It consists of fasting. For one month he will lie on a triangular platform, built high up in a corner of the gallery, and take nothing but distilled water. You see, hunger is so rare in this land that it can be profitably exhibited. I should add that, doubtless to purify his meditations, the young sadhu is not actually on show. Nobody can talk to him, or even see him, because the platform is too high. In fact there is no way of being sure he is there at all, except by believing his announced word as a holy man—but then, Americans of our age are good at that. I can hardly express to you, small flower of our garden, with what pleasure this exhibition filled me. For years I had felt so provincial, so deprived of information. Now I realize that the most advanced forms of Western art are simply what the less fortunate of our countrymen do, in their millions, every day — spontaneously and without choice. Do you think I should approach Mr. Gupta, the fifth under secretary in charge of cultural exchange, to have Burden go to Calcutta? He would be so consoling. Your affectionate brother, Mohendra.

R.H.