Metropolis II

The images of Chris Burden that continue to resonate in public mind is of a young man who had himself shot, impaled, cut, kidnapped, locked up. But his latest work, Metropolis II, is an intense and a complex kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings. Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman spent three days with Burden filming his incredibly cinematic sculpture before it was moved to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).