About the Book
The first book to chart Scott Burton’s performance art and sculpture of the 1970s.
Scott Burton (1939–89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space—most importantly, street cruising—as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton’s underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used.
With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton’s deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton’s life in New York’s art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Scott Burton’s Queer Postminimalism
Street and Stage: Early Experiments
1. Imitate Ordinary Life: Self-Works, Literalist Theater, and Being Otherwise in Public, 1969–70
2. Languages of the Body: Theatrical, Feminist, and Scientific Foundations, 1970–71
Performance and Its Uses
3. The Emotional Nature of the Number of Inches between Them: Behavior Tableaux, 1972–80
4. Acting Out: Queer Reactions and Reveals, 1973–76
5. Pragmatic Structures: Sculpture and the Performance of Furniture, 1972–79
Conclusion: Homocentric and Demotic
Appendix: List of Performances and Additional Artworks by Scott Burton, 1969–80
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender; Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture; and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905. His edited volumes include Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 and Queer, an anthology of artists’ writings.
Review :
"The story of Scott Burton is a story about how fragile, mutable and, to some degree, arbitrary art history is. . . . Burton’s story, however, is far from over. Decades later, an unlikely band of curators, scholars, and artists—many of whom never knew Burton personally—have become so invested in him that they are refusing to let his work fade into obscurity."
"Getsy’s intelligent and compelling monograph Queer Behavior . . . is both an exhaustive analysis of the pieces Burton created during this period and a useful contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and aesthetics. Getsy’s previously published work, which includes an edited volume of Burton’s writings, published in 2012, has consistently labored to expand the frameworks that allow us to see the queerness of art, particularly when it doesn’t literalize the desire or identity of the artist creating it. . . . Getsy’s powers of description are strong, which is helpful given the dearth of visual material documenting Burton’s work, especially the Behavior Tableaux performances. This is often a challenge for performance analysis, and Getsy does an excellent job of using what he has to speculate past the contact sheet and offer a plausible account of what it might have been like to see the performance. . . . Burton was always interested foremost in activating behavior, and Getsy’s loving and comprehensive study grounds the artist’s unique, broad-ranging life and career in that fundamental investment in the human body – something that signifies differently, loves differently, wields power differently, builds community differently, all depending on how one makes and takes a pose."
"Art historian and curator Getsy has been observing how abstraction lends itself to often less obvious—though no less potent—ways of communicating aspects of queer experience and embodiment. . . . Getsy asks the public and its institutions to grasp new alternatives that embrace multiplicity. . . . A prime example can be found in the work of the genre-defying late Conceptualist Scott Burton, who is the subject [Queer Behavior]."
"Getsy’s rigorous and readable monograph of post-Minimalist sculptor and performance pioneer Burton (US, 1939–1989), is the result of extensive archival research and interviews with the artist’s improvised network of collaborators, acquaintances, and friends. He posits that Burton’s work in the 1970s, which was mostly created in New York City, has both been acknowledged as pivotal for the artist’s trajectory but also understudied with regard to its queer thematics. . . . Getsy emphasizes not only the coded citations that Burton mobilized—the amount of archival material reprinted here is impressive—but also the broader, antihierarchical political impulse of his colloquial, demotic practice."
"Getsy’s scholarly monograph devoted to Burton’s queer 1970s performance work recuperated his radical, but neglected, contribution to that resurgent art form . . . indispensable."
"Queer Behavior . . . seek[s] to inject art objects, sculptures, and performances that we might not necessarily consider as heavy with queer politics, with a queer aesthetic that moves beyond the surfaces of identity and identity politics."
“Building on unprecedented research, Queer Behavior is the first substantial study of Scott Burton’s anti-hierarchical, eclectic, desire-oriented art of the 1970s. Getsy has written a masterful work—rigorous, encyclopedic, sympathetic, and inspired—toward a loving recuperation of an artist whose work has at times been eclipsed in histories of art and performance. Argument-driven and lushly narrated, Getsy’s writing hybridizes close analysis, critical biography, cultural history, and art historiography. The resulting book is unyieldingly good, at times breathtakingly so.”
“Getsy’s long-awaited, meticulously researched volume reads like a novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it as scholarship, history, ‘deep gossip,’ and prose. He has marshaled craft and discipline to produce an accessible, nuanced, and compelling account of Burton’s unconventional and uniquely queer development. It’s a tremendously important, insightful, and lucid contribution to the field. This book is necessary reading for performance art scholars and anybody—everybody—who needs a road map to navigate the constant challenges that lonely creatives face against the pressures of prejudice and conformity.”
“Getsy offers a rigorously researched and beautifully rendered account of Burton’s performance practice, focusing on the lesser-known arc of Burton’s work from the 1970’s and, in the process, establishing its importance for both the art historical record and for histories of queer life. This is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of performance art, queer performance, and the performance scene of 1970’s New York.”
