Remembering Chris Burden, the artist who traded daredevil performances for daring engineering

Chris Burden, the radical performance artist who surprised himself and others by going on to create wildly popular public sculptures in his hometown of Los Angeles, died on Sunday of cancer at age 69. He was married to the artist Nancy Rubins.

Born in Boston, Burden moved to California to attend Pomona College, where he studied art and architecture. He then went to the University of California, Irvine, for his master’s. There he developed a vision of art as personal or experiential brinksmanship, testing his own body with bouts of pain, deprivation and endurance that seem like secular, strangely upd ated versions of saintly self-mortification.

For a now-celebrated student work in 1971, Five Day Locker Piece, Burden shut himself inside a small Irvine campus locker (less than three cubic feet) with access only to air and water. He graduated thanks in large part to Bob Irwin, one of his teachers, who argued that he was not crazy but very thoughtful and "completely controlled".

Later that year, Burden had an assistant shoot him in the left arm with a .22 long rifle. In 1974, for Trans-fixed, he posed spread eagle on the roof of a Volkswagen beetle and had his hands nailed to the car, creating a strange updating of a crucifix. In 1975, for a piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, he laid beneath a large sheet of plate glass like an art gallery insect specimen (with no food or water this time) for 45 hours.

Summarised in this manner, some of these stunts make Burden sound like the David Blaine of performance art. But his purpose was typically not mass entertainment as much as provocation and engagement of the self-selected audience present—even the locker piece had visitors who chatted him up. In one of the best accounts of his performances, film critic Roger Ebert touched on the power of his work to move other people—to empathy, curiosity and to action. He called the 1975 Chicago performance "a deceptively simple piece of conceptual art that would eventually involve the imaginations of thousands of Chicagoans who had never heard of Burden, would cause the museum to fear for Burden’s life, and would end at a time and in a way that Burden did not remotely anticipate." It ended when museum staff finally, concerned for the artist’s survival, placed a pitcher of water near him.

In pursuing such punishing performances, Burden had early company in Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh. But unlike Abramović, who has famously decided to restage her own and her colleagues’ works, Burden eventually stopped doing body-based art—and refused to let Abramović redo Trans-fixed. He essentially traded doing daredevil performances for building daring engineering structures, whether improbably strong erector-set bridges or the fulcrum for a "flying" steamroller.

His last project—a working dirigible that flies in perfect circles called Ode to Santos Dumont after the pioneering Brazilian aviator—was unveiled at a private Gagosian Gallery event outside of Los Angeles earlier this month. Over a decade in the making, it will go on view to the public on 18 May at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma).

Lacma is already home to two of his most popular works. Inside the museum: Metropolis II (2011) is a miniature city that sends countless Matchbox-type cars zipping past model buildings at speeds equivalent to 230 miles per hour in what the artist has called a "utopian" fantasy of a traffic-jam-free Los Angeles. The work is on long-term loan from trustee Nicolas Berggruen.

Outside the museum, along a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard originally earmarked for a massive locomotive sculpture by Jeff Koons, Burden’s Urban Light (2008) has easily become the museum’s most photographed work. Some 200 meticulously restored and rewired Art Deco lamps arranged to resemble “a temple of light”, to quote museum director Michael Govan, the installation quickly became a popular meeting spot for friends and a playground for children. It also started appearing in everything from fashion spreads and wedding pictures to Guinness beer commercials, Ashton Kutcher movies and mayoral portraits. In essence, the work has become a symbol of Los Angeles.

"I'd like to think it's because of my sculpture, but I think it also says something about Los Angeles," the artist once told me, with his usual touch of self-deprecation. "New York has plenty of landmarks, but here the field is wide open—it's easy hunting."