“A Good Guy with a Gun” is a digital collage that reconfigures two existing images: a generic photograph of the World Trade Center and documentation from Chris Burden’s 1973 performance 747, in which the artist aimed a firearm at a passing commercial airplane.
In Burden’s original piece, the gesture of pointing a gun toward the sky was a radical examination of power, violence, and spectacle — an ambiguous performance that blurred the boundary between threat and art. In this recontextualization, that gesture is relocated to the charged landscape of post-9/11 America. The airplane’s proximity to the Twin Towers transforms the act from conceptual provocation into an imagined act of desperate intervention — the “good guy with a gun” attempting, impossibly, to prevent catastrophe.
The title references a familiar refrain in U.S. gun culture: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Within the composite image, this ideology is exposed as both tragic and futile. The notion of armed heroism collapses under the weight of historical trauma, suggesting that the myth of defensive violence offers no real protection — only an illusion of control in the face of systemic danger.
“A Good Guy with a Gun” examines how images of violence circulate and accrue new meanings over time. It questions the limits of agency, the persistence of American mythologies, and the uneasy intersection of art, media, and national identity.