Scott Burton’s stylish and sharp-witted sculptures of the 1980s double as chairs, benches or tables. When they appeared in civic plazas, college campuses, and corporate lobbies, they messed with the conventions of public art, provocatively and joyfully. Fresh air blew in stale places. But a stealth polemic lurked: Burton also wanted his work to make people more self-aware and, in particular, more watchful for each other—he wanted to promote, as he put it, “public values.” public recognition of”.
It turned out that the theft was also quite successful. After Britton’s death in 1989, aged 50, for AIDS-related causes, the meaning of objects and their identity as art gradually faded. Benches were just benches, tables, tables. Even more forgettable are the performances he did in the late 1960s and 1970s, exercises in slowing down, and thus illuminating, everyday gestures and behaviors.
An exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis through Feb. 2 contributes to the revival of Burton’s work in both disciplines. Among the sculptures on view are a glossy, ultra-luxe onyx table, and three variations — all with comically outstretched back legs — on the domestic, vernacular species of lawn furniture known as the Adirondack chair. Made of a friendly yellow formica. Another, in brushed aluminum, is ready for battle, his protruding limbs ending in wicked places.
A rock settee in Tadao Ando’s serene courtyard at Pulitzer is one of several Burton chairs made with just a flat base, seat and back cut into a craggy boulder. In contrast, a soft “two-part cheese longo” of pink granite, composed of two gently sloping triangles, suggests a rigidly prostrate body.
Although much of Burton’s work appears to be immutable, there are some instances of judicial instability. A sharp child-sized table and chair — the seat cushions are silver, the tabletop is mirrored — are set on casters. Burton said the long curved back of the wooden whistle was intended to cradle “little children in the father’s arms,” but the perch is suspiciously low. (Burton’s own father left when he was a child; born in 1939, Scott was raised by his mother, first in Alabama, then in Washington, D.C.) Even in the most forbidding hard sculpture, Burton’s assistant and friend, Nina Felsin’s observation, ironically, is suggestive. Sitting on his statue, she says, “You’re being made uncomfortable. That was the point, and that was the humor of it.
Art historian David J. Gatsey, who has been instrumental in raising Burton’s profile, has argued that a throughline in all of his work is a consideration of the ways in which people are separated from, and connected to, each other. Signals with coded signals. For gay men (like Burton), such behavior was once necessary, says Gatsey. In an essay for the exhibition’s forthcoming catalogue, he writes that Burton’s tables and chairs “perform As a sculpture.”
The show’s lead curator, Jess Wilcox, considers Burton’s “Two Part Chair” “an icon.” Its lower part is bent at a right angle to form a seat. Bend over it from the back, a straight part acts as a back. It is perfectly possible to miss sexual cues, but once noticed, it is inevitable.
Burton’s sculptural output was largely curtailed in his last decade, although he had begun thinking about furniture years earlier. The exhibit includes black-and-white photographs of “Furniture Landscape,” which Burton presented at the University of Iowa in 1970. For which he installed a sofa, a table and chair, and a vanity in an overgrown forest, where he also painted a landscape high up in a tree. Romanticized depictions of lost civilizations, their splendor grew, and, according to Burton, the painter Henri Rousseau’s dream of a woman sitting on a divan in a forest, the installation also suggested architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. is, which famously brings The scene inside Connecticut can be called residence efficiency.
The remarkable quality of art criticism that Burton wrote at the Pulitzer helps demonstrate the breadth of his talents and interests. Among them was Constantin Brancusi, whom Burton admired as much for the bases he built as for the art he placed above them. The exhibition includes a chapel-like gallery that combines the Romanian sculptor’s work with Burton’s, including a galvanized steel table inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Sadly, all but two sculptures in the show, titled “Shape Shift,” are forbidden to touch.
The work now seems historically distant too. It looks back not only to classic Americana or early modernism, but also to the broad-shouldered, boldly contoured glamor that reigned in the 1980s. The rising prestige of urban design, the rise of waterfront development, the elevation of pedestrians—even literally, as with New York’s High Line—are still ongoing phenomena. When Burton remarked of his Pearlstone Park in Baltimore, completed in 1985, “It’s what I call an esplanade. It’s not really useful for going anywhere,” he was referring not only to a form but a vocabulary. was also helping to introduce
Burton’s performances of the 1970s were intense, silent exercises in highly stylized body language. They included ensembles, ensembles and solo performers, initially women and later only men, plainly dressed or nude. Seating the audience too close together, but awkwardly distant from the action, heightens both social tension and self-consciousness.
A dirty color video of Burton’s 1980 “Individual Behavior Tableaux” projected on a small screen is the visually modest heart of the exhibition. The only known surviving recording of such a work shows a naked man with painfully slow postures and gestural movements. does, her long legs exaggerated by wedge-heeled shoes.
In his earliest performance works, in the late 1960s, Burton himself appeared – or disappeared. She cross-dressed to stroll through downtown Manhattan, almost unnoticed. In a deserted street ran naked at midnight; And fell into a deep sleep (with the help of pharmaceuticals) amid a multitude of blooms.
Paying homage to Burton’s numerous mannerist tableaux, artist Brandon Fernandez was invited to create a dance for the Pulitzer. Moving fluidly between the statues, two men and two women, dressed in matching jeans, T-shirts and thick-soled black shoes, part and recombine. They assume aspects of chairs and tables, and, less chastely, odalisques, singles seeking lovers and partners. At intervals, they repeat two gestures, one of tapping the heart with one hand, the other, bittersweet, of flipping the wrist.
While Fernandez’s quiet, measured and at times overtly sexual movements are scored by Burton, her dancing is full of gentleness, which Burton’s performance was not. Elizabeth Baker, the longtime editor-in-chief of Art in America who first worked with Burton in the mid-sixties, recalls that at the time sex was not a political tripwire, only the subject of the novel, “of danger.” Instead of curiosity.” There was no gentleness.
In a public talk after the performance I saw, Fernandez spoke of the importance of the coded behavior involved in Burton’s Cruising — “finding illicit desire and reciprocity in the masses.” Fernandes suggests that the obsolescence of these codes may have less to do with social tolerance than alternative methods of engagement such as dating apps. The curtains for this performance are lightly patterned — coded, one might say — with images of fingerprints from swipe marks on her phone screen.
Discussing the curtains, behind which the dancers would sometimes disappear and then reappear, Fernandes asked, “If I become invisible, does that mean I get my civil rights?”
I wish Burton was here to solve such puzzles. A master of compartmentalization, he could also be delightfully provocative and, as Becker remembers, impeccably professional. In the blink of an eye between Stonewall and AIDS, between the punk spirit of the 1970s and the backlash of the Reagan years, he was as comfortable in the city’s leather bars as in the uptown art world. When he became ill, he rejected the sympathy of most of his colleagues.
Thirty-five years later, in a distant cultural galaxy, an atmosphere of mourning surrounds Burton’s statue. The pseudonymous Darling Green writes in the forthcoming catalog that Burton, likely aware of his HIV/AIDS diagnosis by the mid-1980s, gave “a grave tone” to his last decade of work.
This beautiful sentiment prevails. Alvaro Urbano continues. An installation paying tribute to Burton at Long Island City’s Sculpture Center through March 24, where fake grass, dried leaves and half-eaten apples are scattered among salvaged elements of Burton’s lobby furnishings that once stood. Midtown used to be the equitable center in Manhattan. I am addressed. An article written by Julia Halperin for the Times). Another salvage-oriented project, this fixture Burton built for a pier in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, is scheduled to appear this fall at AIDS Memorial Park in Greenwich Village.
In another performance presented during “Shape Shift”. Gordon Hall offers a thoughtful meditation on the experience of waiting, and Burton’s arrangement of public seating for it. But Burton was not a patient man, and he knew in his last years that he had no time to be. His work favors more satisfying pleasures.
Scott Burton: Shapeshift
Through February 2, 2025, Pulitzer Art Foundation, 3716 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, MO, pulitzerarts.org. It is traveling to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago in the fall of 2025, wrightwood659.org.
Tableau Vivant
of Alvaro Urbano The installation runs through March 24 at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens, 718-361-1750, sculpture-center.org.