Beginning in 1971 with the padlock that locked him in a locker for five days, Chris Burden marked his early performances with a relic. [There is no bullet.] But by 1978, with more explicitly sculptural interests developing, Chris Burden made his last relic.
Coals To Newcastle was the title given to a preciously transgressive performance in which Burden smuggled drugs across an international border by flying a rubberband-powered plane with two joints on it across the fence to Mexico.
The relic was not just one plane, or even two, but a whole vitrine that included a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED label for the missing third plane [actually, “Plane 1”], and a narrative statement:
Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico are actually the same city separated by a tall steel and barbed wire fence demarcating the international border between the U.S.A. and Mexico. On the morning of December 17, standing on the American side of the border, I flew a small rubber band powered model airplane over the fence into Mexicali, Mexico. From each wing of the plane, like a miniature bomb, hung a cigarette of the finest seedless marijuana, ‘sinsemilla’ grown in California.The plane bore the following inscriptions: Hecho en U.S.A. (‘Made in U.S.A.’), Fumenlos Muchachos (‘Smoke it, kids’) and Topanga Typica (‘typical Topanga’).
Plane 2 is “armed” with what Christie’s euphemistically calls “paper rollups.” As to the contents of these decades-old joints, we could ask Josh Baer, who sold this work to Berkeley collectors in 1993, when it was already fifteen years old. Did Burden himself roll these fatties? Did he grow the Topanga Typica inside? Perhaps in the spirit of one of the collectors’ other favorite artists, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the joints are replenished in an endless supply.