"Some dismissed Mr. Burden as a mountebank, while others praised his explorations of masculinity, martyrdom and the Romantic ideal of suffering for one’s art."

The New York Times has an obituary for the artist Chris Burden, whose death I acknowledged yesterday, here. I don't normally double up on obituaries, but it took the NYT a while to get its obituary up and it's very substantial and says things in an interesting way. (I don't remember ever seeing the would "mountebank" in the newspaper.)

... Mr. Burden was perhaps the single best-known practitioner of the subgenre of body art. In that field, artists documented themselves in still or moving images as they gained or lost weight, underwent surgery or, in his case, courted genuine danger.

Yes, wasn't there an artist who sliced off parts of his body and actually died? Let me detour for a moment into a 2011 Guardian article titled "The 10 most shocking performance artworks ever/Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky's nailing of his scrotum to Red Square isn't as unique as you might think: artists have shot, burned, disfigured, and eaten themselves":

In attacking his own genitals, Pyotr Pavlensky may have been inspired by inaccurate stories about Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. When he died in 1969, it was widely believed he had killed himself by cutting off his own penis. The works of this Vienna actionist do include images of castration, but they were mocked up. So Schwarzkogler's reputation as the ultimate performance artist is somewhat exaggerated. He actually died after falling from a window.

Not on purpose, I take it. Anyway, Burden gets a mention in that article (as does Yoko Ono, for her "Cut Piece," in which she invited people to use scissors to cut pieces of her clothing off and they did).

Back to the NYT obituary on Burden:

To some observers, it recalled the gleeful tradition of American hucksterism à la P. T. Barnum. To others, it celebrated the ability of Mr. Burden, whose very surname seemed to foreordain a life of professional dolor, to inscribe himself indelibly into his own work, as artists from J.S. Bach to (Stuart Davis to Alfred Hitchcock had done before him.

The NYT needs to indelibly inscribe another parenthesis in that last sentence. Or (more likely) get "(Stuart Davis to" out of there. I'm having a bit of professional dolor trying to read this damned thing. Talk about burden!

“When I use pain or fear in a work, it seems to energize the situation,” Mr. Burden said in a 1975 interview with the film critic Roger Ebert. “In works with violent or unpredictable elements, the fear is really the worst part, worse than the pain. Getting nailed to the Volkswagen, for example, I had no idea what to expect. But the nails didn’t hurt much at all. It was the effect that was fulfilling.”...

Mr. Burden’s first marriage, to Barbara Burden, onto whose nude body he flicked tiny incendiary devices as part of “Match Piece,” a 1972 installation, ended in divorce...

Body art with somebody else's body... your naked wife's body... I'm glancing back up at the post heading to "explorations of masculinity." Anyway... more at the link. The obituary ends with a vivid description of a piece called "Doomed," which could have involved Burden lying on the floor until he died, but didn't, because someone offered him a drink of water.

But what I want to do is check the NYT archive to for that wonderful word "mountebank." Ah! It was used — recently! — and it was in another obituary that I know I read because I know I blogged it, just last March, "Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78":

Gary Dahl, the man behind that scheme — described variously as a marketing genius and a genial mountebank — died on March 23 at 78. A down-at-the-heels advertising copywriter when he hit on the idea, he originally meant it as a joke.