One Fine Show: “Scott Burton, Shape Shift” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

Scholars debate which of the many brilliant writers from the good era of “The Simpsons” was the best, but a strong case could be made for John Swartzwelder, whom The New Yorker once called “one of the greatest comedy minds of all time.” He did write one of my favorite lines, anyway, from Mountain of Madness (season 8, episode 12), for a scene in which Mr. Burns bonds with Homer, genuinely, over their shared love of sitting in a chair. “Oh, yes, sitting,” Mr. Burns agrees. “The great leveler. From the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?”

The late Scott Burton (1939-1989) would agree. Much of the artist’s practice engaged with chairs and sitting, and a new show at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation aims to introduce the underknown visionary—who died at 50 from an AIDS-related illness—to the wider world. The survey features nearly forty sculptures, most of which are chairs of some kind, plus more than seventy photographs, drawings and ephemera. Much of this comes to Missouri from the Museum of Modern Art, which is home to the Scott Burton Papers.

The exhibition opens with a good overview of his oeuvre, starting out with one of his first performances in Bronze Chair (1972/75), a Queen Anne-style armchair that Burton found in his apartment, cast in bronze and then placed on a street in SoHo, back when the area was still a war-zone/burgeoning gallery district. This is paired with Two-Part Chair (1986/2002), which might be read as two innocent interlocking pieces of granite, though it doesn’t take the most gutter-bound imagination to see it as an abstract representation of two people in a certain position.

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Burton seemed to revel in a certain, ahem, cheekiness. One of his last projects was a MoMA Artist’s Choice exhibition in which he exhibited the bases of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, seeing these as “sculptures of tables”: “the object as object but with a (supportive) role the nonfunctional works do not have.” He made his own tables, too, of course, and they’re as dynamic and minimalist as his chairs. Mahogany Pedestal Table (1982) looks a little more like a lantern without a flame and one wonders about balance issues.

But people weren’t necessarily supposed to use any of this. There’s a performative aspect to all of these sculptures, even if Burton stopped doing literal performances in 1980 with Individual Behavior Tableaux, which made the cover of Artforum and is documented with photographs at the Pulitzer. That piece took its cues from body language at bathhouses and other cruising spots, but you don’t have to see a nude man hanging around any of Burton’s sculptures to see the body that forms around them. It’s our furniture, ourselves.

“Scott Burton: Shape Shift” is on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation through February 2, 2025.