Burden of Accuracy: Shooting a Friend

These objects are, to me, both impressive and unnerving. I admire the range of creativity. I despair at the ultimate goal. Targets, then, are a reminder that “design” is merely an activity, a means to an end that may be wonderful, but may just as easily be grim.

All easy enough to say. But maybe this is an instance where it’s more useful to respond not with words about design, but with design itself.

I conferred with designer Tim Belonax. I assumed he’d have interesting things to say: I’ve admired his projects, from a clever collaboration with The Thing, the unique object-art quarterly, through his recent book of self-assignments, The Reward Is In The Process.

But I did not expect this: “My brother got into guns recently,” Belonax replied. “And I’ve been thinking about how to subvert the usual target graphic with something different — something that looked more like art than a cartoon of a robber. I find the shooting range in general to be a very scary/odd/interesting place.”

Ah ha. I tossed out my only line of thought: How thinking about targets and shooting skill had reminded me, indirectly, of Chris Burden’s famous 1971 performance, “Shoot.”

If you don’t know it, the piece involves … Burden getting shot. You can watch the wildly anticlimactic video on YouTube. “In ‘Shoot,’ I’m shot in the upper left-hand arm by a friend of mine,” Burden deadpans in a voiceover.

The artist was shot, by the by, with a .22 caliber rifle.

But who, I wondered, was this friend? Imagine the pressure on this shooter! If he proved inaccurate, he could kill a friend. To me, this shooter seemed like an unsung hero in the history of non-lethal shooting (and of art).

His name is Bruce Dunlap. These days he’s a partner in a regional CPA firm in Carmel, California. We conferred by email about his experience. Drafted into the Army in the mid 1960s, shortly after finishing his undergraduate degree as the Vietnam era was escalating, he learned to shoot as part of his basic training at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. He was never called overseas, and upon his discharge went to art school via the G.I. Bill — at the University of California, Irvine, where he became friends with Burden.

“I helped him with some of his projects, and when he developed the idea for the ‘Shoot’ piece he asked me if I would be the shooter,” Dunlap tells me. “I said sure, and we started to plan it out.”

That sounds pretty casual, but the process involved “many hours” of practice — using the same wall and location in a spot called F Space, in Southern California, where the actual piece took place. “F Space was the practice range,” he recalls. “ We put a 6-foot-long piece of 8x8 lumber behind the drywall, and then drew a vertical line about 6–8 inches long on the wall, where Chris’ upper arm would be if he was standing there. I practiced shooting that line until the drywall and lumber were totally destroyed. Then we would repair the wall and begin again. I did this for a number of weeks before the performance; Chris was often there watching.”

Dunlap was, of course, extremely concerned with hitting his mark as precisely as possible. “If I went too far to the right, I would miss him and we would have to do it over again … not a good performance!” he says. “(Maybe a bit more dramatic if I kept missing and we kept setting up and shooting over and over!) But if I went too far to the left, I could have destroyed his arm, or worse.”

Screen grab from “Shoot” documentation video.

Apart from his military stint, Dunlap wasn’t really a gun guy. He’d been duck hunting “once or twice,” but didn’t relate to it. “I found the Army experience and especially the weapons training to be distasteful,” he adds. “But I was very impressed with what a gun could do! There was a certain power and an adrenaline rush while practicing and shooting.”

So was he scared? “I was not scared of the piece so much as what could happen to me living in Orange County, California, in the early 70s if things went haywire and the police got involved,” he answers. And indeed, it was agreed that the identity of the shooter would be released only when Dunlap was comfortable.

“For many years as I worked as a CPA I left the ‘Shoot’ piece alone,” he tells me. “Then I began to disclose it to very selected individuals when the situation was right. From a distance, I saw it was becoming a very important piece in the art world (rightly so!).”