Art historian David J. Getsy has a new essay out, a long-brewing consideration of Scott Burton’s public sculpture practice in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and as a subtle, determined resistance to the silencing and erasure of people with AIDS. Everything was going down at once in the 1980s, and Getsy argues that Burton’s furniture-like public installations, readily overlooked, were an early example of an artist grappling with the communal and individual experience of AIDS.
What somehow caught me off guard was how at odds Burton’s public project was to the rest of the art world he was so enmeshed in, a world where the fearless artist’s place in public culture was being thrashed out in the battle over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.
In 1985, while speaking from within “this minority culture that is avant-garde art,” Burton told Richard Francis that, though he supported Serra’s effort, he saw things differently: “I feel the world is now in such bad shape that the interior liberty of the artist is a pretty trivial area. Communal and social values are now more important. What office workers do in their lunch hour is more important than my pushing the limits of my self-expression.”
This difference is central to Getsy’s analysis: “Burton relinquished the recognizability of his role as artist and creator—a role that was so central to Serra’s project and the art world’s defense of it.
This position of passivity (however critically engaged) clashed with the masculinist presumptions of sculpture as a space-dominating occupation.”
“Appearing Asymptomatic: Scott Burton’s Public Art and the Knowledge of AIDS,” American Art 39, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 54–83 [via davidgetsy.com]
[later today update] Getsy’s October 2025 talk in Chicago about Burton’s sculpture incorporates parts of the essay. It was posted three weeks ago.
Previously, related: Scott Burton Estate Planning
Getsy on Burton’s performance art
Scott Burton Marble Armchair [made, ironically, from the same marble used on the redesigned, Tilted Arc-less Federal Plaza]