When he first attained notoriety, the artist Chris Burden found himself being compared to Evel Knievel, the showman who liked to leap over buses and into canyons on his motorcycle. It wasn’t a comparison he craved. Burden was described as an art martyr, a daredevil. But Knievel was a trickster, the artist said, “I’m not a trickster. Everything I do is for real.”

For real: "crucified” on a Volkswagen Beetle; being shot; crawling through broken glass; living in a locker for five days

Burden was certainly uncompromising, and his exploits were celebrated in David Bowie’s song Joe The Lion, with its refrain of ‘Nail me to my car and I’ll tell you who you are,” a reference to the time Burden was “crucified” on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Burden explained that work to Roger Ebert in 1975. “I was standing on the rear bumper of a VW bug, nailed to the roof of the car through the palms of my hands. The car was inside a garage, and the spectators were outside. The garage doors opened, and the VW was pushed halfway out, with the engine in neutral. It ran at full blast, making a screaming noise. Then the ignition was turned off, the car was pulled back into the garage and the doors were closed. To the spectators, it was well, sort of an apparition.”

On one level, the Boston-born artist’s work seems to be an argument about the nature of art. Among the other things he did for real: being shot; lying for days in a gallery beneath a sheet of glass; and - perhaps the least Knievel-like stunt possible, his 1971 work, Disappearing, in which he did just that, but with no fanfare, no magic cabinet, no conscious audience.

The piece lasted three days, during which time Burden checked into a motel and did nothing. “I didn't feel I could do anything,” he told Ebert. “I didn’t read, or eat or even watch television. How could I, when I’d disappeared?”