Burton was most interested in the ways queer people, especially gay men, study and mimic others’ gestures as social camouflage while developing covert signaling choreographies only legible to those in the know. Bringing lessons from cruising, bathhouses, and bars into theaters and museums, Burton applied conceptual art’s interest in systems, repetition, and variation to how queer people really lived. Since his death from AIDS-related complications in 1989, Burton’s work has been relegated to the fringes of the art world — the kind of artist only other artists would reference. If Scott Burton: Shape Shift, a recent exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, is any indication, this is about to change.
Shape Shift was the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States since his death, and devoted an entire gallery to Burton’s pioneering performance practice, with photographs, notational sketches, and an unassuming wooden stool once used on stage. In his stagings, pieces of furniture weren’t mere props — they defined the actors’ social relations. He even transformed some into performers themselves, with lights coming up on chairs in different configurations to represent group dynamics — no actors required. The use of objects as performers is a heightened take on minimalism’s use of placement, form, and volume to activate one’s spatial awareness. Evoking the surfaces on and around which we live, like tables, chairs, and the floor, minimalist sculptures’ horizontal planes are often subject to unintended use (this year, I have seen a bag set down on a Jackie Winsor cube and a jacket slotted into the gap of a Donald Judd wall stack). Burton’s sculptures affirm this impulse, allowing themselves to be structures of support, fostering physical intimacy between sculpture and viewer.