Scott Burton’s Retrospective Offers Quality People Watching

A fun thing to do at “Scott Burton: Shape Shift,” a judiciously curated if unavoidably diffuse retrospective of the late artist at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, is to watch people maneuver themselves into Two-Part Chaise (1989), a low granite lounger installed on the concrete outside the museum. It’s one of the few furniture sculptures in the show that visitors are invited to sample, and they do—warily. They size up the chaise’s whipsaw ergonomics and debate whether the lark of reclining there is worth the spectacle of getting into or out of it. Some people straddle it and then abruptly plunge down, equating speed with grace. Others ease into it by slow degrees, as if into a hot bath. Those wearing dresses proceed gingerly, lest they flash a bystander.

Two-Part Chaise is useful for thinking through the tensions in Burton’s work: form versus function, art versus utility, and public versus private behavior. The frisson of his art derives from literalizing these oppositions without seeking to resolve them. As the exhibition title hints, Burton’s primary theme is irreconcilability: of materials, selfhood, communication, and even meaning itself. Burton too was a shapeshifter: an economical post-minimalist who championed expressive representational art, and a gay man whose work encodes queer semiotics even as it operates in plain sight.

He was from the South—born in Alabama in 1939, the only son of a single mother—but spent most of his life in New York, among an avant-garde coterie that included figures as disparate as John Ashbery, Vito Acconci, and Marjorie Strider. Although now best-known as an artist, Burton first made a name for himself as an art critic (and later as an editor at this magazine) in the 1960s. He wrote incisively and rigorously about the aesthetic ferment of his time, indulging an eye that ranged from what he described as the “methodical cerebrations” of Donald Judd and Kenneth Noland to the “heraldic images” of Alex Katz.

In the late ’60s, Burton remade himself into a performance artist whose early works included such capers as drugging himself to sleep during an art opening and promenading naked down a nighttime street in Manhattan. Later works were a kind of ritualized theater. In Individual Behavior Tableaux (1980), a nude actor in platform heels à la David Bowie enacts a choreography of psychosexual poses. In the first version of the lecture-cum-photograph Modern American Artist (1973), Burton sports paint-splotched overalls and a jutting dildo to lampoon the hetero-machismo of contemporaries such as Carl Andre. By the mid-’70s, Burton had turned to producing what he called “sculpture in love with furniture”—in particular, chairs that pervert traditional design or trouble their own functionality. In his final years, he was commissioned to make public artworks, often in the form of inconspicuous granite seating. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1989 at age 50.

Shape Shift presents a representative sampling of Burton’s protean output, distilled into eight themed sections, including an interlude related to “Burton on Brancusi,” a show he curated at MoMA in 1989, and other vignettes that survey thematic dichotomies (public and private, inside and out) that characterize his work. These sections can feel overly compartmentalized at times and don’t proceed chronologically; in the exhibition’s first room, Burton’s earliest sculpture, Bronze Chair (1972, cast 1975), mingles with Healing Chair (ca. 1989), his final work. The former is an unremarkable Queen Anne seat that Burton found in his apartment (abandoned by a previous tenant) and then bronzed; the latter is a terse steel perch based on the Alexander technique, which promoted healing through disciplined posture. For the uninitiated, this disjointed timeline won’t clarify Burton’s development or chart the continuities of his work, but it does frontload the show with some of his most arresting art. Aluminum Chair (1980–81) looks like a sci-fi sidecar, all lacquered metal and knife-blade angles. The anomalous Onyx Table (1978–81), a sturdy marble behemoth lit from within by fluorescent lights, seems to smolder orangely in the middle of the room, its veined surfaces efflorescing in a decent approximation of magma.

The critic Robert Pincus-Witten once remarked that “masochism was the real clue to Burton’s art.” Nowhere is that more apparent than at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The building, designed in 2001 by Tadao Ando, is a rhythmic hive of glass and concrete that flexes into long concourses of bare white wall. (Next October the show will travel to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, another aloof Tando structure.) Burton’s inhospitable materials—stainless steel, aluminum, bronze, granite—feel native to such austere spaces. Descend to the comparatively warmer second floor, though, and the works become cheekier, introducing another (often uncelebrated) side of Burton: his sense of humor.

Child’s Table and Chair (1978) is as advertised: playroom furniture, only here corrupted by a disco sensibility of mirrored desktop and silver chair cushion. (One imagines diminutive lines of cocaine spread across that desktop.) The nearby Five-Part Storage Cubes (1982) is a freestanding hulk of interlocking cubes painted in primary colors. It’s a nod to Constructivism and de Stijl—or, perhaps more covertly, to the Memphis Group. The wittiest piece in the room is Formica Lawn Chair (1979), a riff on the Adirondack chair, covered in pale lemon Formica that sentences the seat to a life indoors. Burton created several variations on the Adirondack, a symbol of leisure shadowed by its association with tuberculosis sanitariums. For those attuned to such discrepancies, Burton’s work code-switches between playfulness and a kind of discomfiting allusiveness. (Such dissonance recurs in the unassuming Cafe Chair, from 1987, whose open steel back is the inverted triangle with which Nazis branded queers.)

The exhibition also features footnotes to Burton’s practice that usually get short shrift. Photographs of everyday furniture from his archive—patio chairs with clamshell backs, rustic wooden settees, cement armchairs—cite the vernacular idiom that he recontextualized. Meanwhile, simply patterned window curtains made during a residency at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia in 1978 show his frugal style adapted for another medium.

But the exhibition also affirms the inevitable limitations of staging a Burton retrospective. His performances and public art can be experienced only via archival documentation (or scale models), while the furniture sculptures are vividly tangible. Even now, some 35 years after Burton’s death, these pieces remain his most potent—more emotionally forthright than his public art, more formally satisfying than his performances. “A piece of furniture … refers to human presence,” Burton once said, and that’s what I saw in St. Louis: objects of singular character.