A Landmark Show Gives Scott Burton His Due

It is inevitable, in a time of prolonged market dominance, that artists begin to gravitate towards the practices of predecessors whose work defied simple commodification. To do so can be both an homage and a small act of resistance. Sometimes, it can feel as if a single artist has appeared in the minds of many with remarkable simultaneity. This is the case with the sculptor, choreographer, critic and curator Scott Burton who, over the span of several years, has inspired a constellation of new work, including art historian David J. Getsy’s book Queer Behavior (2022);  Álvaro Urbano’s 2024 exhibition ‘TABLEAU VIVANT’;  Gordon Hall’s experimental lecture 1 -2 pm (2024); and a new collage, Thirteen (Blue / Scott) (2024), from the 2024 ‘Journal’ series by Tom Burr, who has been producing work indebted to Burton for over a decade.

At the centre of all this activity is ‘Scott Burton: Shape Shift’ at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, where Brendan Fernandes is also debuting a performance series made in response to the show (‘In Two’, 2024). Organized by independent curator Jess Wilcox and Pulitzer curator Heather Alexis Smith, ‘Shape Shift’ is the first major exhibition of Burton’s work since his death of AIDS-related complications at the age of 50 in 1989. The exhibition – which combines nearly 40 of the artist’s sculptures with archival material and artworks from his personal collection – opens with his first original sculpture, a found armchair recast in bronze. Describing Bronze Chair (1972, cast 1975), which also served as a prop in an impromptu performance in 1977, Burton wrote (as quoted in the exhibition text): ‘It is an image of a chair […] It is also a chair.’ It is a good line and a fitting introduction to an approach to object-making that is fixated on the structural similarities between chairs and bodies as well as furniture’s potential to impact the way people position themselves in social spaces.

Burton’s Rock Settee (1988–90), a chair carved from five tonnes of rough grey granite, is permanently installed in the courtyard of the Pulitzer. In one of the exhibition’s best moments, Wilcox and Smith have placed the polished granite Two-Part Chair (1983, realized 1986) directly on the floor of the gallery facing Rock Settee. Visitors can interact with both works – sit on them, touch them – and they do.

Judged strictly as design, Burton’s furniture is not always masterful, and the largest gallery in the exhibition makes the mistake of separating object and viewer by presenting the work on low plinths. In contrast to the granite chairs, this installation feels too conventional for an artist so preoccupied with the relationship between object and support. (This concern is foregrounded in the following gallery, devoted to ‘Burton on Brâncuși’, the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural Artist’s Choice exhibition in 1989, in which Burton exhibited only the bases of iconic sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși.)

Outside of the building, Burton’s pink granite Two-Part Chaise (1989) is installed at the top of a staircase overlooking Richard Serra’s Joe (1999), a permanent fixture at the Pulitzer. Beside Serra’s hulking steel spiral, Burton’s chaise reclines like an irreverent sunbather. ‘You could say that people are like furniture,’ Burton wrote in 1979, as quoted by Getsy in Queer Behavior. ‘They take different poses and suggest different genders.’ The poses exchanged here between Burton and Serra speak volumes about the late 20th century’s sculptural discourse.

Many of Burton’s early works were performance-based. The most powerful room in the exhibition holds a single-channel video of Kent Hines performing Individual Behavior Tableaux (1980) at the Berkeley Art Museum that year. The only known existing video of a Burton performance, its 36 minutes of footage feels like a reasonable approximation of what it might have felt like to be there – seated, per Burton’s request, a minimum of 15 metres from the stage. Hines, wearing nothing but a pair of platform boots and sharing the stage with a geometric plywood bench, moves so slowly through a sequence of gestures that the progression is almost imperceptible. The inclusion of this footage alone makes ‘Shape Shift’ worth seeing.

More than any of the performances that preceded it, Individual Behavior Tableaux directly referenced the highly coded body language of queer culture in New York. It was the most explicit of Burton’s performances, but it was also the last. After 1980, Burton became more invested in making art accessible to the widest possible audience and shifted emphasis away from his personal narrative. (At the time, to win public sculpture commissions, his own queer experience could not be foregrounded.) Throughout his final decade, Burton made work that switched codes to speak to multiple audiences: public sculptures that hid in plain sight.

The resulting public environments were Burton’s best works. Impossible to move, much less contain within a museum, these projects are represented in a slide show in the exhibition’s final room. This mode of presentation, while not ideal, succeeds in focusing attention on these nearly anonymous, oddly familiar ‘environmental sculptures’ – and serves as a compelling invitation to seek them out.

When Burton died, he left his estate to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (This act had the unintended effect of making his work less accessible, an irony Julia Halperin thoughtfully explored in The New York Times in October). In lieu of an active estate, Burton’s legacy has been advocated for and safeguarded by those artists and thinkers invested in his work. In 2020, the curator Jeremy Johnston salvaged parts of Atrium Furnishment (1984–85), which was slated for removal from a midtown Manhattan lobby, and included components of it in a group show at Soft Network.

When Urbano learned of Johnston’s efforts, he incorporated larger fragments of Atrium Furnishment into his exhibition ‘TABLEAU VIVANT’, currently on view at SculptureCenter in New York. Next autumn, Oscar Tuazon will unveil Eternal Flame for Scott Burton, a public sculpture for the New York City AIDS Memorial featuring elements of another of Burton’s destroyed projects, in Sheepshead Bay. Such interventions are not a substitute for preservation but, under the circumstances, the unorthodox strategies devised by this unlikely cohort have succeeded in keeping the work in circulation and have recentred Burton’s ideas about public art.

I am reminded, in closing, of a comment Burton made in an interview with Edward Brooks DeCelle, published in The Advocate’s January 1981 issue (and referenced by Hall and Getsy): ‘Any chair is useful, but a very striking looking chair – something that isn’t like a usual chair – can make people perhaps more flexible in their attitudes to accept more things – to become more democratic about what a chair is. They may even become more democratic about what a person is.’

‘Scott Burton: Shape Shift’ is on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis until 2 February; the show will be on view at Wrightwood 659, Chicago from 3 October 2025 – 31 January 2026.

^{Main image: ‘Scott Burton: Shape Shift’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Estate of Scott Burton/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), © Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Alise O’Brien Photography; photograph: Alise O'Brien Photography}