AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

Los Angeles artist Chris Burden's anti-war diorama "A Tale of Two Cities" was originally assembled 32 years ago - a collection of five thousand models and toys glued to slabs of cardboard. “Two Cities” was designed to be exhibited on a panoramic landscape of 26 tons of sculpted sand, with 2.4 tons of rocks and 60 potted plants. Over the course of multiple exhibitions, the exhibit’s cardboard substrate had become warped, delaminated and encrusted with mold. By 2013, the installation had become sufficiently dilapidated that Burden eliminated this seminal piece from his up-coming exhibition “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum in New York in the fall of 2013. Burden also publicly expressed the intent to exercise his contractual right to alter the work via the "nuclear option" of blowing it up - a logical conclusion to this broad depiction of futuristic feudal warring states. "The work would still exist," said the artist, "but as rubble." In response to reviews of treatment mockups at the WAC studio, however, Burden agreed instead to consider the alternative option of an extensive conservation campaign. Over the course of several months, the toys and model components were cleaned, repaired, and re-fabricated or replaced, and remounted on lightweight, interlocking sheets of honey-comb aluminum panel. Following conservation, Burden made the decision to include "A Tale of Two Cities" in the New York exhibition. The artwork was loaded into 16 custom-made crates, fabricated for both travel and storage, and shipped across the country, where it occupied a major place in the artist's one-man survey show at the New Museum.