San Diego water torture

The death of Chris Burden last week of melanoma at the age of 69 merited an extensive obituary in the New York Times. He was, the paper wrote, “a conceptual artist who in the line of duty had himself shot, pierced, starved, crucified, electrocuted, cut by glass, kicked down stairs, locked up, dropped from heights and nearly drowned, though by no means all at once.” Images of those moments, the Times noted, “are in the collections of major museums worldwide.” Burden later turned to the production of “immense sculptural installations that, like his early work, explored the interplay of postmodern technology with postmodern anxiety.”

But one of the notable artist’s more ambitious undertakings, commissioned to adorn the city of San Diego’s North City water reclamation plant just east of Interstate 805 along Miramar Road, was never realized. “Since it was a water plant, they wanted me to use water, and I was challenged by the idea,” Burden told me in a 1999 interview for the Reader following cancellation of his city contract. “It was going to be a big pool, about 60 by 40 feet, 2 or 3 feet deep at one end, and an inch or two deep at the other.” The unique Burden twist: the pool was to be filled with recently recycled sewage water from the plant, certified only for watering golf courses and similar uses.

“There were going to be these little floodgates on one end of the pool,” Burden continued, “and they would open every 20 minutes or an hour or so and let the water out so it would flood across the sidewalk in front of the administration building.” Burden’s notion was for water to flow into the street and ultimately end up in the city’s storm drains, to be delivered to the ocean. “School kids could go on a field trip and watch the forces of nature, a physics demonstration or something to that effect. You could see a bunch of five-year-olds going to see something like that and it making a memorable impression. That’s what I was aiming for. A wall of water comes out of the floodgates and suddenly it’s everywhere and then it’s receding. You see that little three-inch wave hit the curb and splash up and hit the storm drains, like it was raining.” But the city rejected the idea, maintaining the treated sewage water couldn’t be used in such a manner. An alternative plan to use drinking water was considered; it proved too costly and was ultimately abandoned. The city finally agreed to pay Burden a $10,000 kill fee. Concluded the artist, “It felt like my job was to cover up a lie, to deal with a lie, the lie of their water-treatment plant. I couldn’t really use their water. I felt that their water was a bit of a lie. Spiritually and poetically, I felt like, ‘oooh, they are trying to use me to make their water seem better than it is.’”