Welcome to One Fine Show, where the Observer highlights an exhibit that just opened at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that’s already getting a lot of attention.
Scholars argue about which of the many brilliant writers from the great era of “The Simpsons” was the best, but a strong case can be made for John Swartzwelder, who said. The New Yorker he was once called “one of the greatest comedic minds of all time.” He wrote one of my favorite lines, though, from Mount Madness (season 8, episode 12), in the scene where Mr. Burns bonds with Homer, literally, over their shared love of sitting on the couch. “Oh, yes, I’m sitting,” agreed Mr. Burns. “A great producer. From the mighty Pharaoh to the lowly, who does not enjoy a place to live?
The late Scott Burton (1939-1989) would agree. Much of the artist’s practice involves chairs and sitting, and a new exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation aims to present the unknown vision—who died at the age of 50 from an AIDS-related illness—to the rest of the world. The study consists of approximately forty sculptures, most of which are chairs of some kind, as well as over seventy photographs, drawings and ephemera. Much of this comes to Missouri from the Museum of Modern Art, home of the Scott Burton Papers.
The show opens with a nice overview of his career, starting with one of his first performances in Bronze Chair (1972/75), a Queen Anne chair that Burton found in her house, was cast in bronze and placed on the street in SoHo, back when the area was still a wartime gallery district. This is paired with Two Sectional Chair (1986/2002), which can be read as two innocent pieces of granite coming together, although it doesn’t take a litter-bound imagination to see it as an abstract representation of two people in a particular situation.
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Burton seemed to be enjoying something, ahem, laughing. One of his last projects was the MoMA Artist’s Choice exhibition where he showed the bases of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures, seeing these as “table sculptures”: “an object as an object but with a (supporting) role that inactive works do not have. .” He made his own tables, and, of course, they are also as strong and sturdy as his chairs. Mahogany Pedestal Table (1982) looks a bit like a lamp without a flame and one wonders about balance problems.
But people were not supposed to use any of these. There is a working element to all of these templates, even though Burton stopped making actual plays in the 1980s Individual Behavior Tableauxwhich makes the cover of Artforum and illustrated at Pulitzer. That piece took cues from body language in the bathrooms and other places on the cruise, but you don’t need to see a naked man hanging from any of Burton’s sculptures to see the body building around him. It’s our furniture, ourselves.
“Scott Burton: Shape Shift” is on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation until February 2, 2025.
