Chris Burden created some of the most exciting and utterly deranged art I’ve ever seen

I once went out with a girl who jabbed me in the ribs every time I mouthed the phrase ‘conceptual art’. It hurt, but I got her point.

The C-word, you see, is a tricky one. All too often, it conjures up terrifying images of ‘explanatory’ texts that take 5,000 words to communicate precisely zilch. It implies student politics, gnomic utterances and an unhealthy dependence on the word ‘dialectic’. Too much critical dogma dictates that art must be oblique for its own sake, and utterly devoid of humour.

But it wasn’t always thus. In the 60s and 70s, a lot of the best artists took Marcel Duchamp’s prickly sense of humour as the starting point for their work: think of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, Baldessari’s droll plays on language or almost anything by Ian Hamilton Finlay. All were very different artists, riffing on very different jokes, from the scatological to the morbid. But none of them were ever quite as entertaining as Chris Burden.