Performance/Conceptual/Everything artist Chris Burden passed away on Sunday, reportedly of malignant melanoma. He went far too soon, but there’s a certain bleak poetry to Burden, arguably the least restrained artist of his generation, dying of a disease associated with being active and exposed.

What’s less fitting is that so many of the first-blush memorials to his passing feature images of "Urban Light," a 2008 installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The arrangement of 202 restored and blanched street lamps is beautiful, and its sentimentality wasn’t completely foreign to Burden’s later years. But it’s not what he should, or likely will, be remembered for.

Burden’s most notorious work was vastly less comfortable than "Urban Light." In his early performance pieces, he regularly threatened and challenged and abused his own body, submitting to shooting, starvation and crucifixion. He gave observers a vicarious thrill more powerful than anything provided by Hollywood, while also forcing them to consider their own status as observers. As he transitioned from performance to focus on sculpture, he continued to go big, in both a series of huge, intricate installations, and, my personal favorite, a 1996 piece titled "The Flying Steamroller," which is just that.

I became fascinated with Burden nearly 15 years ago. He seemed to fit into the pantheon of artistic white boys struggling to degrade their privilege into a kind of productive malevolence. For me, he stood alongside Burroughs and Bukowski, but also Anton LaVey, Coop, J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg and David Lynch, artists committed to subverting the norm ascribed to them by society.

Like these figures, his work seemed on the surface to trade in shock, and didn’t always escape the shadow of self-indulgence. Pieces like "Shoot" brought blood and danger into the gallery, following on the heels of Yoko Ono’s 1965 "Cut Piece." But Ono, as a woman surrendering control to her audience, was taking far a far greater psychic and physical risk than Burden.

Burden’s subtler pieces are far more deeply haunting, even if we can only read about them now. For White Light/White Heat, Burden spent 22 days isolated and invisible on a platform elevated near the ceiling of a gallery. Though he didn’t eat during that period, his invisibility was more important than his bodily risk — visitors couldn’t see him, couldn’t even be sure he was there.

In a vital 1975 writeup, Roger Ebert captures the mystical, almost religious feelings brought on by that total uncertainty.

Now, sadly, we know for sure – Chris Burden isn’t here.

This article appears in May 7-13, 2015.