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Stylish and sharp-witted, Scott Burton\u2019s sculptures of the 1980s doubled as chairs, benches or tables. When they appeared in urban plazas, college campuses and corporate lobbies, they messed with conventions for public art, provokingly and delightfully. A fresh wind blew in stale places. But a stealth polemic lurked: Burton also wanted his work to make people more self-aware and, especially, more alert to each other \u2014 he wanted to promote, as he put it, \u201cpublic recognition of public values.\u201d<\/p>\n
It turned out the stealthiness succeeded too well. After Burton\u2019s death in 1989, at the age of 50 from AIDS-related causes, the objects\u2019 meaning, and their identity as art, slowly faded. The benches were just benches, the tables, tables. Even more forgotten were the performances he made in the late 1960s and 1970s, exercises in slowing down, and thereby illuminating, everyday gestures and behaviors.<\/p>\n
An exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, through Feb. 2, contributes substantially to a revival of Burton\u2019s work in both disciplines. Among the sculptures on view is a luminous, ultra-luxe onyx table, and also three variations \u2014 all with comically extended rear legs \u2014 on the homey, vernacular species of lawn furniture known as the Adirondack chair. One is made of amiable yellow Formica. Another, in brushed aluminum, is combat-ready, its out-thrust limbs terminating in wicked points.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A rock settee, positioned in Tadao Ando\u2019s serene courtyard at the Pulitzer, is one of several chairs Burton fashioned by simply slicing a flat base, seat and back into a craggy boulder. By contrast, a suave \u201cTwo-Part Chaise Longue\u201d of pinkish granite, composed of two gently sloping triangles, strongly suggests a languidly prostrate body.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
While much of Burton\u2019s work seems immutable, some examples court instability. A frisky child-size table and chair \u2014 the seat cushion is silvery, the tabletop is mirrored \u2014 are set on casters. The long curving back of a wooden settee is meant, Burton said, to evoke the embrace of \u201clittle children in the father\u2019s arms,\u201d but this perch is suspiciously skimpy. (Burton\u2019s own father departed in his infancy; born in 1939, Scott was raised by his mother, first in Alabama, then Washington D.C.) Even in the most forbiddingly stern sculpture, observes Nina Felshin, Burton\u2019s assistant and friend, irony beckons. Sitting on his sculpture, she says, \u201cyou\u2019re being made uncomfortable. That was intended, and that was the humor of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The art historian David J. Getsy, who has been instrumental in lifting Burton\u2019s profile, has argued that a through line in all his work is a consideration of the ways people dissemble, and signal each other with coded gestures. For gay men (like Burton), Getsy says, such behavior was once a necessity. In an essay for the exhibition\u2019s forthcoming catalog, he writes that Burton\u2019s tables and chairs \u201cperform<\/em> as sculptures.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show\u2019s lead curator, Jess Wilcox, deems Burton\u2019s \u201cTwo-Part Chair\u201d a \u201cqueer icon.\u201d Its lower component is bent over at a right angle to form a seat; leaning above it from behind, an upright component serves as a back. It is perfectly possible to miss the sexual allusion, but inescapable once noted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Burton\u2019s sculpture output was largely compressed into his final decade, although he began thinking about furniture years earlier. This exhibition includes black-and-white photographs of \u201cFurniture Landscape,\u201d a performance Burton staged at the University of Iowa in 1970, <\/span>for which he planted an upholstered sofa, a desk and chair and a vanity in a heavily wooded glade, where he also mounted a landscape painting high on a tree. Evoking Romantic imagery of lost civilizations, their glories overgrown, and, according to Burton, the painter Henri Rousseau\u2019s fauve dream of a woman lounging on a divan in the jungle, this installation also suggests the architect Philip Johnson\u2019s glass house in Connecticut, which famously brings the Connecticut landscape inside what could be called the performance of a residence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The considerable quality of art criticism Burton wrote, sampled at the Pulitzer, helps demonstrate the breadth of his abilities and interests. They included Constantin Brancusi, whom Burton admired as much for the bases he crafted as for the art he placed atop them. This exhibition includes a chapel-like gallery in which the Romanian sculptor\u2019s work is paired with Burton\u2019s, including a galvanized steel table inlaid with mother-of-pearl.<\/p>\n Regrettably, the show, titled \u201cShape Shift,\u201d prohibits touch for all but two sculptures.<\/p>\n The work now seems historically distant as well. It looks back not only to classic Americana or early Modernism but also to the wide-shouldered, bold-contoured glamour that reigned in the 1980s. The rising prestige of urban design, the surge of waterfront development, the elevation of pedestrians \u2014 even literally, as with New York\u2019s High Line \u2014 were phenomena still in the making. When Burton remarked about his Pearlstone Park in Baltimore, completed in 1985, \u201cThis is what I call the esplanade. It\u2019s not really functional for going anywhere,\u201d he was helping to introduce not just a form but also a vocabulary.<\/p>\n Burton\u2019s performances of the 1970s were strenuous, silent exercises in highly stylized body language. They involved grouped, paired and solo performers, including women early on and later only men, simply clothed or nude. Seating audiences very close together, but weirdly far from the action, heightened both social tension and self-consciousness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A murky color video, shown on a small screen, of Burton\u2019s 1980 \u201cIndividual Behavior Tableaux\u201d is this exhibition\u2019s visually modest heart. The only known recording of such work to have survived, it features a naked man enacting painfully slow postural and gestural movements, his long legs exaggerated by wedge-heeled shoes. <\/p>\n In his earliest performance works, beginning in the late 1960s, Burton himself appeared \u2014 or, disappeared. He cross-dressed for a downtown Manhattan stroll, nearly unnoticed; made a brief naked midnight run on a deserted street; and slept deeply (with the help of pharmaceuticals) amid a crowded opening.<\/p>\n In homage to Burton\u2019s several Behavioral Tableaux, the artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to create a dance for the Pulitzer. Circulating fluidly among the sculptures, two men and two women, identically dressed in jeans, T-shirts and thick-soled black shoes, part and recombine. They assume the aspects of chairs and tables, and, less chastely, of odalisques, lovers and singles looking for partners. Intermittently, they repeat two gestures, one of tapping hand to heart, the other, bittersweet, of wrist flipping.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While Fernandes honors the silent, measured and sometimes explicitly sexual movements Burton scored, his dance is tenderly sensual, which Burton\u2019s performances were not. Elizabeth Baker, longtime chief editor at Art in America who first worked with Burton in the mid-sixties, recalls that at the time, sex was not a political tripwire, just novel subject matter, \u201ca curiosity rather than a danger.\u201d Tenderness was not the point.<\/p>\n In a public conversation after the performance I saw, Fernandes spoke about the importance to Burton\u2019s work of the coded behaviors involved in cruising \u2014 of \u201cfinding outlaw desire and mutual connection in public.\u201d The obsolescence of those codes, Fernandes proposed, may have less to do with social tolerance than with alternative ways of connecting, such as dating apps. Curtains commissioned for this performance are very lightly patterned \u2014 coded, one could say \u2014 with photos of fingerprints from swipe marks on his phone screen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Discussing these curtains, behind which the dancers at times disappeared and then re-emerged, Fernandes asked, \u201cIf I become invisible, does that mean I gain my civil rights?\u201d <\/p>\n If only Burton was here to address such puzzles. A master of compartmentalization, he could be happily outrageous and also, as Baker remembers, impeccably professional. In the blink between Stonewall and AIDS, between the punk spirit of the 1970s and the backlash of the Reagan years, he was as comfortable in downtown leather bars as in the uptown art world. When he became ill, he mostly spurned sympathy from his peers.<\/p>\n Thirty-five years later, in a distant cultural galaxy, an atmosphere of mourning drifts around Burton\u2019s sculpture. The pseudonymous Darling Green writes in the forthcoming catalog that Burton, likely aware of his H.I.V.\/AIDS diagnosis by the mid 1980s, lent the work of his last decade \u201ca sepulchral tone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This elegiac sentiment prevails in \u00c1lvaro Urbano\u2019s ongoing<\/a> installation in homage to Burton at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City through March 24, where faux weeds, dried leaves and half-eaten apples are strewed among salvaged elements of Burton\u2019s lobby furnishings for what was once the Equitable Center in midtown Manhattan (the dismantling is addressed in an article Julia Halperin wrote for the Times). Another salvage-based project, this of fixtures that Burton created for a pier in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, is to appear this fall at the AIDS Memorial Park in Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n In a second performance presented during \u201cShape Shift,\u201d Gordon Hall<\/a> delivered a thought-provoking meditation on the experience of waiting, and the provision Burton\u2019s public seating made for it. But Burton wasn\u2019t a patient man, and he knew during his final years that he didn\u2019t have time to be. His work supports more bracing pleasures.<\/p>\n Scott Burton: Shape Shift<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Feb. 2, 2025, Pulitzer Art Foundation, 3716 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Mo., pulitzerarts.org. It is traveling in fall 2025 to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, wrightwood659.org.<\/p>\n Tableau Vivant<\/strong><\/p>\n