RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Chris Burden's early career was all about the intersection of art and danger. The 1970s saw him lying crucified with nails on the roof of a Volkswagen Bug. In another piece, he was shot through the arm by an assistant - literally. Later, Burden made the transition from performance art to sculpture. Now, his work is filled with movement and children's toys. A new piece called "Metropolis II" is a scale model of Los Angeles with 1,200 colorful little cars zooming around it at lightning speed. Reporter Alex Schmidt went to the L.A. County Museum of Art to check it out.
CHRIS BURDEN: Should we go ahead and turn it on?
ALEX SCHMIDT, BYLINE: The piece is a 10-foot-tall model of a city - basically, it fills up a room. There are colored buildings here and there, and dozens of aluminum tracks sloping over, under it, around them at different levels. An operator steps under some tracks into the middle of the sculpture and flips a few switches. Then, the action: 1,200 toy cars slowly speed up and then start zooming around on the tracks.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARS MOVING ON TRACKS)
SCHMIDT: There is a balcony, so you can look down on it from above. The colorful cars whish past so fast that they make a kind of repetitive pattern. I don't know, I kind of find it sort of soothing.
BURDEN: Yeah, hypnotic like a white noise, like a river, like a brook or a stream or something, right? White water noise.
SCHMIDT: The cars aren't tethered to anything - they move by a central engine and magnetic pulls. So, there's a possibility of a real accident. The operator in the middle of the piece has to keep a close eye out for problems, and can press emergency stops if she has to.
BURDEN: It's like the real world. So, it's like, you know, one accident causes more and more and then, you know, it's a pile-up.
SCHMIDT: I guess, like, if you happen to catch one of those while you were here, it might be kind of cool.
BURDEN: Yeah.
SCHMIDT: Like I saw an accident.
BURDEN: Yeah.
SCHMIDT: This is the artist's second major installation for LACMA, and arguably just as cool as the first. That one is the now-iconic sculpture "Urban Lights," rows of antique streetlamps that look out on Wilshire Blvd in front of the museum. Burden feels his more recent works give the museum a little more mass appeal.
BURDEN: I think all these things help bring maybe a lay public that would not necessarily be interested in art necessarily. I don't think you need to have an art history background to understand this sculpture.
SCHMIDT: Yup. There's something just neat about hundreds of little cars zooming around superfast on metal tracks. No art history classes necessary. For NPR News, I'm Alex Schmidt.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This is NPR News.