HOT WHEELS
May 1, 2011 
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Chris Burden, Shoot
Chris Burden’s Metropolis II is considered the most expansive Hot Wheels set-up ever conceived. This amazingly intricate installation using old Hot Wheels toy racing cars by Burden (a performance artist most famous for endurance pieces such as Trans-fixed, in which he nailed himself to the back of a Volkswagon Beetle and Shoot, in which an assistant shot him from five feet away, as well as being name-dropped in a David Bowie song and a Norman Mailer book) is truly a sight to behold. An expansion of Burden’s own Metropolis I, which saw 80 cars in action, Metropolis II – four years in the making – features 1200 cars circulating around 18 lanes of a giant steel freeway! Burden’s monumental piece currently resides at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
As Burden was starting his project, another duo – Osaka-based artists Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano, who go by the name Paramodel – were completing theirs: a sprawling, epic trail of plastic racing tracks that created a giant graffiti-like diorama. Their plastic racetracks have appeared in galleries all over Japan since 2005, as well as in natural outdoor locations as public art installations.
Paramodel's Plarail at Okazaki Mindscape Muzeum Achi 2007
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– Kier-La Janisse
About the author:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).
