Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Scott Burton
American; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
84%
Mahogany Pedestal Table. 1982. Mahogany
All of Burton's sculptures are conceptual in that their furniture-physiognomy (and even practicality) forces you to consider the border between art and nonart; this considering itself becomes an aspect of your optical considerations of the actual objects before you. But since the conceptual dimension is constant, Burton's work really lives or dies by how handsome are the physical structures it presents; this piece is among his handsomest. It's two-thirds nothing, but in a way that affirms the solidity of its base, the downward force of its ziggurat lid, and the regularity of the four beams connecting them. Apart from the fact that this interaction between negative and positive space seems to wink at the higher-order interaction between idea and object, it moreover provides the sculpture with a distinctness that grounds the flight into contemplating where art ends and the stuff of life begins. (2024)
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
76%
Café Table. 1984-1985. Verde Fontaine granite
As with the excellent Mahogany Pedestal Table, this furniture-sculpture of Burton's begs the question, "What does the work gain from its conceptual dimension?" — its conceptual dimension being the sculpture/furniture (art/nonart) slippage. It begs the question because of how fully this piece's artistic quality seems to rely on (though not solely to consist of) its physical structure. Sure, once you begin relishing the poise with which that cap sits on and, just by a touch, extends out over the edges of its base, you start considering the object's usability, which in turn makes you wonder about the difference between the functionality of quotidian objects and the nonpurposiveness of art. But were this a regular-looking table rather than a stripped-down Brancusian obelisk wearing the mask of a table, pretty soon all your cogitating would run aground as so much conceptualist navel-gazing — Burton's schtick, when it works, starts and ends with traditional sculptural considerations, not with ideas. And besides, contemplating the bounds of art is something all good art makes us do, "conceptual" or no. I have a hunch, though, that using the table as a table would've clarified some things — and this is why Burton was interested in performance — but alas I saw this in a museum and I wasn't allowed to touch it, let alone to eat a bowl of cereal off the top. (2024)
St. Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
59%
Healing Chair (prototype). c1989. Steel
Apparently Burton made this chair while dying of AIDS. The posture it puts its sitter in is supposed to be salubrious for someone suffering from the disease. Had I been able to sit in it, I would have experienced it differently — perhaps as a better artwork — than I did. Use might have integrated (in terms of my experience) its medico-diaristic component with its physical structure. But as it was presented I only got to take it in optically, as a sculpture. As a sculpture, it's handsomely weighted but fails to make much of a structural argument. Perhaps this is because the four legs of its base are unenclosed, emphasizing its functional aspect (it's a chair) at the expense of unifying its positive-space rectangles with its negative-space triangles (it's also an arrangement of shapes). Burton's best sculptures twirl their functional and their "formal" dimensions around each other in a way that this piece fails to. At least, it fails to do so optically: again, use might have placed my sculptural gripes beside the point. (2024)