''747'' is a 1973

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

piece by American artist

Chris Burden Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including ''Shoot'' (1971), where he arranged ...

. The piece is one of a number of photographs of Burden's work that is in the collection of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

in New York City.

Background

In ''747'', Burden was photographed firing shots with a pistol at a

Boeing 747 The Boeing 747 is a large, long-range wide-body airliner designed and manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in the United States between 1968 and 2022. After introducing the 707 in October 1958, Pan Am wanted a jet times its size, t ...

passenger airplane while it took off from

Los Angeles International Airport Los Angeles International Airport , commonly referred to as LAX (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary international airport serving Los Angeles, California and its surrounding metropolitan area. LAX is located in the W ...

at about 8am on January 5, 1973. It had a single witness, photographer Terry McDonnell, who filmed the act. Burden was later interviewed by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

after a photograph of the piece was published in a magazine; a calling card was left by the FBI at his studio. A meeting subsequently took place at his lawyer's house, where he explained the nature of Burden's work in performance art to a FBI agent who conclusively agreed to call off any further investigation. Burden said of the piece that "the plane wasn't in any danger. I went down to the beach and fired a few shots at a plane flying over head. I wasn't trying to shoot the plane down, it was more a gestural thing, trying to get it photographed — to make an image". Burden said in a 1980 interview with David Robbins that he additionally explained to the FBI that the piece was "about the goodness of man — the idea that you can't regulate everybody. At the airport everybody's being searched for guns, and here I am on the beach and it looks like I'm plucking planes out of the sky. You can't regulate the world".

Analysis

''747'' was analyzed by Daniel Cottom in his 2002 essay "To Love to Hate". Cottom identifies the piece as belonging to the Western European artistic tradition of "misanthropy", feeling that Burden "committed an artwork of terrific suggestiveness" when he fired the gun at the airplane. English critic Dominic Johnson wrote of the piece, in his 2018 book ''Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s'', that the "threat of criminal damage, mass death and personal ignominy ground the formal challenge that confirms the action as a performance ..Uncertainty, notoriety and doubt form part of a work's existential charm".

References

{{Boeing 747 family 1970s photographs 1973 works Black-and-white photographs Boeing 747 Los Angeles International Airport Performance art in Los Angeles Works by Chris Burden