The Brooklyn Rail

For more than three decades, Tom Burr has worked within a recursive idiom, using Minimalist and Conceptualist strategies to dissect the graying anatomies of Post-War art. As Burr put it for Bomb in 2009, “I’m continually retracting from and returning to the moment when certain hard forms or movements or gestures or attitudes become ‘soft.”At Bortolami, Burr tugs on his objects as though stress-testing their suppleness. Burr spins out self-reflexive threads that he uses to stitch together fragments of autobiography, yielding the “Journal Works,” a series of bulletins coextensive with the intimate, perambulatory staging of his archives in the Torrington Project (2021–2024).

The “Journal Works” identify, distill, and rearrange the clustered network of references that Burr has spent much of his career untangling. An ongoing intervention into his own artistic practice, Burr began development of his “Journal Works” in Torrington, Connecticut, where he took over a former sports equipment factory to assemble a redux of his past works. The Torrington Project was a cross between studio, museum, and “a conceptual loading dock,” as Burr framed it. Meant as a challenge to the sanctioned prestige of an institution and the romanticized alienation of an artist’s studio, Torrington Project brought together interlocutors like George Baker, Jordan Carter, Aria Dean, Jody Graf, and Renée Green, Maria Hassabi, and Nick Mauss who contributed writings and insights into Burr’s labyrinth of signification.

The frisson that artworks generate when they brush against each other was the catalyst for Burr’s “Journal Works.” Functioning somewhere between deconstructed scrapbook, oblique visual cosmology, allusion, and authorial gesture, the “Journals” map the complex, multi-dimensional strata of Burr’s corpus onto a legible planarity. Drawing from Ellsworth Kelly’s aluminum work Sculpture For a Large Wall (1957), Burr places brightly colored metal sheathes together. Kelly, like Burr, was a queer artist working within and against the linear precepts of minimalism. These irregular blocks of color also conceal some of the materials on each “Journal,” as though Burr is contending with his own epistemic stoppages along with the viewer’s perceptual limits.

Burr disperses the objects and elements of his practice and his life across fifteen “Journal Works” at Bortolami. In Thirteen (Brutal Purple), Burr revisits his sculpture Deep Purple (2000), itself a painted wooden replica of Richard Serra’s now-removed Tilted Arc (1981). Burr juxtaposes Deep Purple with pages from the American Correctional Association’s Riots and Disturbances in Correctional Institutions (1981). Images of chicken wire fencing unspool next to Burr’s presentation of Deep Purple in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer courtyard. Such inclusions imbue both Burr’s and Serra’s works with new implications about carcerality, access, and the austere site of institutional display.

The title “Journal Works” implies a diaristic quality that Burr toys with in his own recognizable post-minimal vernacular. Collaging the disparate webs that he has threaded throughout his career, the works are dense with the local and the global, Burr’s personal and professional perspectives and experiences. Luckily, the materials listed for each bulletin helps viewers decode these overlapping compendiums of visual history, though even on their own the “Journal Works” are sleek, angular personal statements. In Seventeen (Dries Sleeve) (2024), a Dries Van Noten suit jacket curls its arm as though latching onto the yellow oblong bisecting the collage, with a press release from Burr’s 2008 exhibition “Moods” at the Vienna Secession. Across the gallery, pants from the same suit lay folded under another bright yellow rhomboid next to pages from Martin Kippenberger’s book Old Vienna Posters (1991). Burr wore this suit to his opening at Vienna Secession, triangulating his career with the influence of Kippenberger and Vienna as a shared artistic locale.

Tom Burr’s “Journal Works” crystallizes and eschews the artist-as-corpus. Here, the slippage between archive and ongoing creation creates its own generative space where Burr plays meanings and contexts against each other, loosing forth a new set of works that give viewers a glimpse into his nested worlds of meaning. Often what results is a richly personal diffusion of inspiration, locality, and affect, making one feel like they’re reading a secret language—diary entries that glimmer with hidden meaning in a sparsely arrayed visual prose.