The Brooklyn Rail

Scott Burton: Shape Shift is full of chairs, but it doesn’t want you to get comfortable. To relax would be to miss the tautness of this exhibition and of Burton’s practice. As installed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation by curators Jess Wilcox and Heather Alexis Smith (the show will travel to Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 in 2025), Shape Shift is a retrospective that does not trade in nostalgia; rather, it is propulsive and purposeful, much like Burton’s intelligent pursuit of architectures that cause us to think, and think again, about art, its forms, and its communities.

The exhibition begins with a shape-worn old chair that happens to be bronze. Bronze Chair (1972), cast from a discarded chair that Burton found in an apartment, serves as an index of its former occupants, its thin cushion—though now hard as metal—rumpled from the bodies that once sat on it. The suppleness of bronze in its molten state permits such verisimilitude, and the material’s burnish, a deep chocolatey brown, references both the wood and leather of the original; if it had remained outside, the chair would have developed patina and mellowed further. Burton placed the chair outside Artists Space for a 1975 performance called Bronze Chair (Street Furniture). Undoubtedly, some passersby tried to carry away this heavy now-sculpture in an unknowing reenactment of Burton’s adoption of it, the installation returning to the chair its street value, precious metal or no. Burton commented that what resulted was “an image of a chair” and “also a chair,” a real-life testing of the assertion made in Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965).

Turning away from Bronze Chair, viewers can see Rock Settee (1988–90) installed on a platform overlooking one of Tadao Ando’s (the architect behind the museum) signature reflecting pools. From behind, this piece—in the Pulitzer’s permanent collection—looks like the massive boulder it once was. As we move around the settee, though, the gouging, right-angled intervention required to make the stone “sittable” becomes clear. With the light rippling across the pool and the subtle lapping sounds, Rock Settee is the picturesque landscape and rustic bench from which to gaze upon it.

Rock Settee might remind us of Isamu Noguchi’s stonework, while works like Table IV (“Spattered Table”) (1977) mimics Jackson Pollock and Inlaid Table (“Mother-of-Pearl Table”) (1977–78) references the Minimalism of Burton’s contemporaries married to the humor of Richard Artschwager’s Description of Table (1964). The modernist Burton seemed most connected with, though, was Constantin Brancusi. In a series of essays, exhibitions, and sculptures, Burton investigated the heritage he felt he inherited from Brancusi, and especially the older artist’s pedestals and tables meant to support his works in the round. In 1989, Burton was invited by the Museum of Modern Art to install its inaugural Artist’s Choice exhibition. In the essay he wrote to accompany the show, “My Brancusi,” Burton noted that, “Brancusi's best pieces of furniture are not only functional objects but also representations of functional objects. We have here sculptures of tables, close in character to Brancusi's other sculptures. They are both object and subject.” The Pulitzer thoughtfully brings together an example of a Brancusi pedestal-dependent construction, Mademoiselle Pogany III (1933), with Burton’s sculptural tables and pedestals. While the granite Café Table (1984–85), with its inverted pyramid resting on top of a rectangular base, most closely reflects Brancusi’s influence, I found myself drawn to the serene plywood Tripod Table (1984). The table’s top is a circle that is supported by three, upright, slightly billowing semi-circles. In its simple materiality, Tripod Table responds to Donald Judd furniture as well as that of the Bauhaus, but the way the parabolas glance off one another and visually intersect suggests the dancing silhouettes of the Three Graces, the table’s allusiveness permitting it to be “both object and subject” at once.

The exhibition continues throughout the first floor and on the lower levels to reveal Burton playing with materials, geometries, color, and seating vernaculars. Two-Curve Chair (1989), fabricated from rolled steel, recalls both the groovy Verner Panton molded plastic chairs of the fifties and sixties (1959, mass production in 1967) while also looking even further back to Michael Thonet’s bentwood chairs of the nineteenth century. Aluminum Chair (1980–81) borrows its form from Adirondack chairs—a crisscrossing structure with which Burton experimented throughout his career (the Pulitzer display includes several examples)—but is crafted in razor-sharp brushed aluminum. What softness there is comes in the form of large circular cutouts through the metal. Other investigations in curves include the outdoor furniture suite Perforated Metal Settee and Perforated Metal Chairs (1988–89), more Pantonesque shapes that whiplash forward and back on themselves to form seats and backs in a single piece of aluminum. They are perforated with tiny holes to permit water to fall through them.

But of course, if we sat on them long enough, our skin would also be marked by tiny, raised bumps, not only on our backs but across our thighs and buttocks, the seats’ shapes now also suggesting an ecstatic writhing and arching. The Pulitzer display, while discreet, does not shy away from the sexual metaphors that Burton played with in his work. A gallery devoted to Burton’s performances illustrates how the furniture sculptures were manipulated and used as props. In some, Burton directed his collaborators to “try and get the poses I see in the bars and baths and street corners I frequent” as a gay man; in these, the performers, often dressed only in wedge heels or platform boots, manipulated the furniture and each other on the furniture in positions tender and more insistent. Burton himself appeared in an early performance for a series of “Street Works” (1969) that were published in the periodical 0 to 9, founded by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. John Perrarult wrote in The Village Voice, “Perhaps the most invisible and most sensational work was ‘performed’ by Scott Burton. The ghost of Rose [sic] Selavy made her appearance. Burton walked the area [around a bus stop] in disguise and went completely unnoticed.” Dressed in drag as a middle-aged woman, Burton was (poignantly, to this middle-aged woman) “completely invisible.”

Burton’s career ended too early. He died from HIV/AIDS-related complications in 1989 when he was only fifty years old. Shape Shift includes his last work, the prototype for his Healing Chair (ca. 1989), which was designed to support the body in upright, symmetrical alignment. But it’s not the last thing we see. The curators have installed Healing Chair so that it frames Two-Part Chair (1986, designed 1983). Made of heavy, polished granite, Two-Part Chair’s elements hover over one another, their mutual gravity pulling them together while simultaneously keeping them separate in a sexual-yet-chaste embrace. It is one of the only chairs we’re permitted to sit on in the exhibition, and if there are enough people trying it out, then we feel the reminiscence of their bodies warming the cool stone in a beguiling example of the infra-thin. “When the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it,” Duchamp wrote, “the two odors marry by infra-thin. Fire without smoke, the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk, iridescent, the people who go through [subway gates] at the very last moment, velvet trousers, their whistling sound, is an infra-thin separation signaled.” Just between the two blocks, in a crevice barely wide enough to slide a piece of paper, there is a glimmer of light.