It’s generally known that Chris Burden made a few commercials for television in the 1970s. But any pursuit of why, expanding meaningfully beyond the descriptive synopses Burden himself provides for most of his individual works, has been curiously rare. Burden—then living in Venice Beach—was concurrently making live performance work that deployed television monitors as critical signifiers of voyeurism. This link between his use of the television set as an object or prop in performances like Do You Believe in Television or Velvet Water and his works that actually took place on television is crucial to parsing why arguably the foremost performance artist of his generation began to resituate a live performance practice to a medium that seems antithetical to live art.

Director/producer Roger Corman titled his 1990 memoir “How I Made a Hundred Movies and Never Lost A Dime.” In Corman’s classic horror comedies A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960), his inimitable talent for lightning quick schedules, minuscule budgets, and uncanny storylines transcends all expectations.

The nervous breakdown will be televised: In the 1970’s, producer Norman Lear’s hit sitcoms tackled racism, feminism, and class struggle without losing the laugh track. His show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman aimed elsewhere: an ironic hybrid of soap opera and satire, the result was oddly real, unsettling, and sincere.