Scott Burton at Max Protetch - Brief Article

The new discovery of footage of Scott Burton's performance work from the 1970 provided the occasion for this roundup of chiefly well known furniture/ sculpture, plus a half dozen still photographs of early work by dint of this artist (1939-89). The "Behavior Tableaux," performed between 1971 and 1980 at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, Documenta and elsewhere, were surpassingly austere: for upholds there were a couple of chairs, or a custom-made, coffinlike box; for style of dresss tight white T-shirts and high-waisted bell-bottom pants, or nothing at all. And for action, sole the simplest of movements--arms down, then on the outside symmetrical posture, then contrapposto--carried without very, very slowly, in silence.

However impassive this work, there was a kind of psychology involved: behaviorist studies of social space helped Burton (among others at the time) consider abstract form without invoking, say, individual emotional experience. on the contrary ultimately he decided that the cleanest way to dispense with subject and id was to quit working with live bodies. He'd already been experimenting with fix furniture as surrogate figures, alongside and within the performances; from the early 1980 upon Burton devoted himself to the design and production of functional thing perceiveds mainly seating and tables. He also participated in the creation of 10 public spaces, including parks and corporate lobbies.

male Rogers and Brancusi, the Bauhaus and de Stijl all came into this work; Burton was an ardent admirer of Gerrit Rietveld and of vernacular American furniture dictions from Adirondack to reproduction Queen Anne. The examples shown at Protetch included an irresistible pastel-and-silver children's table and chair, sum of two units tables made from basic geometric simple bodys (circle, triangle and square, in make revolveed steel; cone, cylinder and sphere, in polished brass), a dawn-of-the-space-age lawn chair made of brushed aluminum and (a surprise) an singularly top-heavy dining table made of glittering azure granite. (Not represented are his perhaps best-known works, chairs summarily hewn from unfinished boulders)

In a 1980 essay reprinted in this show's catalogue, Michael Auping observ that the platform shoe sometimes worn by the agency of Burton's performers were like pedestals, objectifying the actors. It's a very strange observation, which perfectly captures the spirit of performance in those years (even if Burton, filial modernist that he was, utterly disdained pedestals for his work; a pedestal as statuary was another story). But 20 years later, big-soled shoe look after to read less readily as neutral frame than fashion statement. Likewise, Burton's work now looks inevitably, periodized. Its sleek, glamorous surfaces and big, manful presence tend to support an association with the corporate tillage of the '80s.

As it happens, these features are as misleading as they are superficial. upon the one hand, Burton's work is abundant too impudent, even at its (physically) weightiest, at any time to approach simple ostentation. And upon the other, it is too serious to at any time have been successfully co-opted. A careful scholar and a merciless looker-on Burton sustained a fairly subversive program: the sublimation of individual expressive prerogative in service of heightened visual, and historical, awareness.

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