Scott Burton

Scott Burton
Born	(1939-06-23)June 23, 1939 Greensboro, Alabama
Died	December 29, 1989(1989-12-29) (aged 50) New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	Washington Workshop Center, Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts
Alma mater	Columbia University (BA) New York University (MFA)
Known for	Public Sculpture

Scott Burton (June 23, 1939 – December 29, 1989) was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze.

Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Burton was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.

Burton began his artistic career at the Washington Workshop Center in Washington D.C. in the mid-1950s under Leon Berkowitz,^[1] before progressing to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Between 1959 and 1962 Burton took classes at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Harvard University, and Columbia University, where he finally received his bachelor's degree.^[2]

In 1963, Burton was awarded a Master's degree in literature from New York University in New York City.^[3]

During his decade-long relationship with the painter John Button in the 1960s, Burton was introduced to the social networks of the art, dance, and theater communities of New York. He came to meet, among others, Edward Albee, Jerome Robbins, Lincoln Kirstein, and Alex Katz.

Throughout the 1960s, Burton attempted to be a playwright and librettist, but in 1965 started writing art criticism. In 1966, he began as an editorial associate at ARTnews, eventually becoming an editor. He wrote a substantial amount of art criticism in the late 1960s in this role, including the introduction to the pivotal exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Berne.^[4]

Starting in 1969, he began to make performance art, first contributing to the "Street Works" events held in 1969 (and featuring such artists as Vito Acconci and Eduardo Costa). In the late 1960s Burton's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde journal which experimented with language and meaning-making. Throughout the 1970s, Burton was known mostly as an art critic and performance artist. In 1972, he showed his Group Behavior Tableaux performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and went on to stage other tableaux performances at such venues as the Guggenheim, Documenta, and the Berkeley Art Museum. These performances explored nonverbal communication, interpersonal power dynamics, and body language. They were informed by his study of behavioral psychology as well as his participation in the nonverbal signaling of desire in street cruising.^[5] During the 1970s, Burton also made other performance works and installations that were explicit in their commitments to gay liberation. For example, in the 1976 exhibition Rooms at P.S.1 in New York, Burton exhibited an installation featuring a fisting dildo and dedicated to "homosexual liberation."^[6]

Burton began incorporating furniture into his work as early as 1970, and it would grow from being an active participant in his performances to his main area of output in the 1980s. He first began making sculptures in 1972, but would not exhibit them until his appearance in the Whitney Biennial in 1975 and, later that year, in a solo exhibition at Artists Space, NYC. Much of his earliest work involved subtly modified found furniture. He made his first sculpture by painting a found Queen Anne revival style chair the color of bronze in 1972, and with the help of a grant was able to have it cast in bronze in 1975, when Bronze Chair was shown across the street from Artists Space during his December 1975 exhibition.

Through the remaining 1970s, Burton would continue to create performance art pieces and, increasingly, sculpture. It was public art that caught his imagination, and starting in 1979 he began to reconsider his role as an artist by making works of functional furniture-as-sculpture (pragmatic sculpture, he called it) that were meant to be largely anonymous, invisible, and woven into the fabric of the everyday.

In the 1980s, he became known primarily as a sculptor of refined sculptures of furniture and ambitious and useful interventions in public space.^[7] His "tables" and "chairs" challenge the distinction between furniture and sculpture. Two-Part Chairs, Right Angle Version (a Pair), (1983–87), represents this concept aptly. The interlocking granite chairs can found at the Western Washington University Public Sculpture Collection. One version, Two-Part Chair (1986) embeds hidden queer experiences, while also serving as a functional chair. The two parts of the chair are mutually supportive, neither part can stand without the other. As David Getsy has discussed, its two interlocking granite pieces represent two highly abstracted figures, posed in a sexual position.^[8] Copper Pedestal Table from 1981 to 1983, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of such a "table". It is as much a minimalist sculpture as it is a table.

One of Burton's primary artistic concerns was the dissolution of aesthetic boundaries, especially the traditional boundary between fine art and utilitarian design. The art historian Robert Rosenblum described Burton as "...singular and unique as a person as he was as an artist. His fiercely laconic work destroyed the boundaries between furniture and sculpture, between private delectation and public use and radically altered the way we see many 20th-century masters, including Gerrit Rietveld and Brâncuși."^[9]

Many of Burton's most important public site-specific works are endangered, and some have been destroyed through removal, including the Atrium Furnishment that was designed for the interior of the AXA Equitable Center, 1281 Sixth Avenue, New York.^[10] At present, only the exterior elements of the major site-specific work remain. Some components have been re-imagined in other exhibitions as a means to bring attention to the loss of Burton's work.^[11]

Burton died of complications due to AIDS on December 29, 1989, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was survived by his partner, Jonathan Erlitz, who died in 1998.^[9]

Burton's influence declined after his death, which The New York Times reported was due in large part to his decision to leave his estate to the Museum of Modern Art, which was poorly equipped to market and promote his work.^[12]

• Six-Part Seating

• Scott Burton's Obituary, New York Times, January 1, 1990
• Scott Burton Papers in The MoMA Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• David J. Getsy, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
• David J. Getsy, ed., Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975 (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2012 Archived 2020-03-25 at the Wayback Machine
• Scott Burton Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
• Scott Burton Biography, Tate Modern, London
• Scott Burton at Artcyclopedia