Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965-1975

by Scott Burton, David Getsy

Before gaining widespread recognition for his sculpture and public art, Scott Burton produced a substantial body of art writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An eclectic and wide-ranging critic, he wrote such important texts as the introduction to the groundbreaking exhibition  Live in Your When Attitudes Become Form and served as an editor for both ARTnews and Art in America . In these same years, Burton became known as a performance artist, developing themes he pursued in his writing. Yet, his role as an artist-critic has rarely been discussed.
Edited by David Getsy, SCOTT COLLECTED WRITINGS ON ART AND PERFORMANCE, 1965-1975 brings together for the first time Burton's essays and unpublished manuscripts from these years, tracing his work as an art critic as well as his early statements on performance. In his writing, Burton championed positions that others held as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. He advocated for reductive abstract art while defending figuration, and he argued for the urgency of time-based and ephemeral art practices in the same years that he curated exhibitions of realist painting. Distinct in these diverse texts are Burton's increasing concerns with art's appeal to affects, empathies, and subjective responses; the early formulation of his desire to make art public and demotic; and his critical grasp on the implications and exclusions of mainstream narratives of art. This collection offers rich new context for Burton's sculptural work and reveals him as an important voice in the rapidly changing art world of the 1960s and 1970s.
Artists and movements examined include Minimalism and Postminimalism, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Willem de Kooning, Ralph Humphrey, Alex Katz, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, David Smith, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and performance art.
Art. Art History. Art Minimalism, Postminimalism, Realism, Performance Art. Art Criticism. Performance Studies. LGBT Studies. Literary Nonfiction. 

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2012

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I encountered Burton’s work and aesthetic recently on a trip to Chicago where I saw an exhibit of his work. I read a book that explained his odd transition from art critic to performance artist to sculptor without the book bringing all the pieces together. I looked to this book on his writings and thinking about other people’s art to clarify why his artistic creations are powerful for me.

Early on in his writings he summarizes his key ideas about art. He distinguishes a favorite sculptor, Tony Smith from a sculptor he likes less, David Smith, by how Tony connects function with form. In Tony’s vision a sculpture is treated as an object which can then relate cleanly to the human subject. He saw David’s sculptures as relating abstractly as to content but in form as a painting to be seen from the front rather than from all sides. His sculptures aren’t first objects but stand-ins for paintings which then muddies their relationship with people. (Do I take from this sculpture its painterly qualities even though it isn’t a painting?) This helps me make sense of Burton’s sculptures that retain their function as furniture. Burton allows in his work for form and function to be in relationship with humans and the environment even when the specific content of the sculptural furniture is less the focus.

When we relate to the world deeply immersed in the specific content of its objects we lose sight that these objects (whether human, animal, inanimate etc.) also have functions and that these functions relate to forms and context also. For people content can mesmerize and trigger which distracts us from other questions about how we interact with reality and the assumptions we make about what we call our reality.