14 Art World “Bad Boys” Whose Macho Work Was Impossible to Ignore

At the height of Performance Art, University of California Irvine student Chris Burden asked a friend to shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle. He titled the action Shoot (1971). The friend was supposed to just graze the artist’s skin. Instead, the bullet passed straight through. (Two years later, Burden would stage a second gun-related art outing; he went to LAX and shot at a plane flying overhead, calling the performance 747.)