David J. Getsy and Tom Burr on Scott Burton

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This conversation highlights convergences and differences in queer understandings of artist Scott Burton’s (1939–1989) writing, performance, and sculpture from the late 1960s through the late 1980s.

Art historian David J. Getsy is author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022) and editor of Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 (2012). His scholarship has been instrumental in re-presenting the breadth of Burton’s work for contemporary audiences and in rigorously introducing queer lenses that were suppressed or unavailable during the height of the AIDS crisis and through the final decade of the artist’s life.

Artist Tom Burr has engaged with Scott Burton’s work for over a decade alongside his recurring invocation of figures like Jean Genet and Chick Austin. Burr’s art since the late 1980s continues to be formative in establishing how sculpture can assemble fleeting impressions, erotics, and antagonisms of queer thought, prodding at present experience with evocative objects, ambiguously personal effects, and images from the past. Further to this, Burr’s work has often dropped in on sites of queer public life through both demonstrative displays and discreet reframings of nature and the built environment. Burr was the subject of the solo exhibition Addict-Love at SculptureCenter in 2008.

Independently, Getsy and Burr have circled figures like Burton, and ideas like Queer Abstraction, for many years, developing frameworks ranging from phenomenology, to dynamics of site and publicness, to gay cruising, to archivally-inflected sculpture and collage that have helped readers and viewers to relocate queer strains running through minimal and post-minimal art and beyond. This is their first public conversation.

The program is presented in conjunction with Álvaro Urbano: TABLEAU VIVANT. For his exhibition at SculptureCenter, artist Álvaro Urbano focuses on a potential ruin, or a ruin in progress: Atrium Furnishment, a public artwork by the American sculptor Scott Burton (1939–1989) that was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future.

David J. Getsy
David J. Getsy writes to recover the queer and transgender capacities that have been lost or suppressed in histories of art and performance. His areas of research and teaching span modern and contemporary art and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on queer and transgender histories and methods. He has published eight books, including Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015; reissued in paperback 2023); and the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings Queer (MIT 2016; multiple reprintings). Getsy is the inaugural Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He studied at Oberlin College (B.A. Hons, 1995) and Northwestern University (M.A., Ph.D., 2002) and previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2005 to 2021. In addition, pedagogy has been the focus of two recent articles that hope to assist in bringing perspectives and methods from transgender studies into the art history classroom: “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies,” in Art History 45.2 (April 2022), based on a keynote for the 2021 Association for Art History conference, and (co-authored with Che Gossett) “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History.” Getsy is a member of the Museum of Modern Art’s Scott Burton Advisory Committee.

Tom Burr
Tom Burr lives and works in New York. He has shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States. He recently was the subject of a solo exhibition entitled Hinged Figures at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Burr’s 2017 project Body / Building took place in a Marcel Breuer-designed brutalist building owned by Ikea in the artist’s hometown of New Haven, CT, mapping his own artistic development onto the history of the city and the building. From 2021–24, Burr occupied an expansive former factory building in Torrington, Connecticut, where he arranged examples of all phases of his work in an evolving survey exhibition project, with special attention being given to works from his early history with American Fine Arts, CO. The final phase of the project is a book to be published in fall 2025 by Primary Information.

Burr’s work has been exhibited collected by major museums internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MuMOK, Vienna, Austria; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Sammlung Grasslin, Germany; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria; Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; FRAC, Champagne Ardenne, France; FRAC, Nord-Pas de Calais, France; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Burr attended the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.