Scott Burton was one of the most well-known proponents of the new public art in the United States in the 1980s, and his work involved making site-specific sculptures of furniture that anonymously served the passerby. These seemingly innocuous functional artworks, however, were based in Burton’s long-running investigation into the queer experiences of public behavior, cruising, BDSM, and tactical dissemblance. Burton’s sculptures hide in plain sight, and this talk will examine their undetectability in the context of the first decade of the on-going AIDS crisis. Burton’s sculpture was both materially and conceptually tied up with the cultural battles over representation and contagion, and his works allow for an alternate account of the visibility politics that tend to dominate histories of AIDS and queer art in the 1980s. Burton’s contribution, Getsy will argue, was his reimagining of sculpture’s long-standing associations with embodiment and the figure through his sculptures’ self-abnegation, practice of support, and facilitation of contact—both physical and social.

David J. Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015; paperback 2023), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010), Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Yale 2004), and Queer, an anthology of artist’s writings for the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” book series (MIT Press, 2016). His newest book—Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art—will be published University of Chicago Press in late 2022.

This special lecture is generously funded by the June and Simon Li Foundation.