Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

422 Pages·2023·13.228 MB·English

by  David J. Getsy

QUEER BEHAVIOR
Scott Burton, Kassel, June 1977. Photograph © documenta Archiv / Ingrid Fingerling.
Q U E E R
B E H A V I O R
Scott Burton and Performance Art
D AV I D J. G E T SY
The University of Chicago Press | Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2022
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81706- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81707- 1 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago/ 9780226817071 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Getsy, David, author.
Title: Queer behavior : Scott Burton and performance art / David J. Getsy.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022002173 | ISBN 9780226817064 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226817071 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Burton, Scott, 1939–1989. | Sculptors—United States—
Biography. | Sexual minorities in art.
Classification: LCC NB237.B78 G48 2022 | DDC 730.92 [B]—dc23/eng/20220304
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002173
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
C O N T E N T S
ACkNOwLeDGmeNtS vii
Introduction: Scott Burton’s Queer Postminimalism 1
Street and Stage: Early Experiments
1 Imitate Ordinary Life: Self- Works, Literalist Theater,
and Being Otherwise in Public, 1969– 70 45
2 Languages of the Body: Theatrical, Feminist, and
Scientific Foundations, 1970– 71 77
Performance and Its Uses
3 The Emotional Nature of the Number of Inches
between Them: Behavior Tableaux, 1972– 80 117
4 Acting Out: Queer Reactions and Reveals, 1973– 76 173
5 Pragmatic Structures: Sculpture and the Performance
of Furniture, 1972– 79 219
Conclusion: Homocentric and Demotic 259
Appendix: List of Performances and Additional
Artworks by Scott Burton, 1969– 80 275
NOteS 283
SeLeCteD BIBLIOGrApHy 367
GeNerAL INDex 387
INDex OF wOrkS By SCOtt BUrtON 399

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
My experience of writing this book has been wrapped up in the many in-
terviews and conversations that provided much of my primary research.
Scott Burton’s friends and collaborators were generous and patient, and
my inquiries have been met with enthusiasm, care, and a deep respect
for Burton and his project by just about everyone I have spoken to since I
started over fifteen years ago. In particular, my conversations with Eduardo
Costa have been inspirational, and I hope some of the love and ongoing ex-
citement of their lifelong friendship infuses these pages. Jane Kaufman’s
humor and candor, too, were transformative for me in thinking about Bur-
ton’s history and its stakes. Thomas Abate Marco, Burton’s longtime stu-
dio assistant and friend, opened new ways of seeing Burton’s works and
understanding his aims. Discussions with Nina Felshin were instrumen-
tal, and I am indebted to all the work she has done to preserve Burton’s
legacy. Betsy Baker’s encouragement and insight were also crucial. It was
through conversations with these close friends of his that I came to fully
appreciate Burton’s dynamism, mischief, expansiveness, and purpose.
As I tracked down others who knew or worked with Burton, I saw greater
complexity and lasting enthusiasm. Early on, an impromptu online search
of performers’ names from Burton’s 1972 Group Behavior Tableaux led me to
Michael Harwood, whose friendly and funny recollections helped me real-
ize how much work there was to do to understand Burton’s performances.
Mac McGinnes provided some of the best anecdotes in the book, and our
hours- long interview in his San Francisco home remains for me one of the
shining memories of my work on the project. One of my earliest (and most
formative) interviews was with Robert Pincus- Witten in 2005, setting me
on the path. It was an honor to speak to Elke Solomon about her work with
viii ACknowLedgmenTs
Burton. I learned a great deal from talking to curators of Burton’s work,
most importantly Michael Auping, Janet Kardon, and Burton’s close friend
Linda Shearer. Athena Tacha and Richard Spear have been supportive of
my work for a long time, and they have both spoken to me about their in-
teractions with Burton and his work. Brenda Richardson’s correspondence
was pivotal, and any research on Burton is indebted to her fantastic retro-
spective of his sculpture. I learned much and laughed not infrequently in
further interviews and conversations with Jane Rosenblum, Joyce Kozloff,
Marsha Pels, Jimmy Wright, A. A. Bronson, Nancy Grossman, Edmund
Cardoni, Greg Day, Larry Shopmaker, Charles Stuckey, James Rondeau,
James Saslow, Scott Pfaffman, Sid Sachs, Richard Huntington, Jeffrey
Deitch, Edwin Meulensteen, Richard Kalina, and (most of all) from swap-
ping gossip about the early 1970s with Thomas Lanigan- Schmidt. My un-
derstanding of Burton’s activities also benefited from correspondence with
Adrian Piper, Walter Robinson, Nancy Princenthal, Roger Welch, Jean- Noel
Herlin, Alan Rinzler, Jack Fritscher, and Wayne Dynes.
The Museum of Modern Art holds Burton’s archives and estate, and I
have found much encouragement there. I am very grateful to MoMA for
facilitating work with the estate and copyright permissions, and this book
would not have been possible without their careful stewardship of Bur-
ton’s legacy. Many thanks go to Ann Temkin for her support of the project
and of Burton. Conversations with Stuart Comer have been catalytic and
encouraging. MoMA opened access to Burton’s papers about fifteen years
ago, and I have since been a regular visitor to the archives. I cannot thank
Michelle Elligott enough for her assistance and for patiently listening to
my excited reports on archival finds. Jonathan Lill, who processed Burton’s
archive, has been very helpful, and I have relied on his careful work. I also
thank the many staff at the MoMA archives who have made this research
possible over the years.
Substantive work for this book was also done at the Archives of Ameri-
can Art of the Smithsonian Institution, and I am grateful to the staff there,
especially Marisa Bourgoin. The Fales Library at New York University was
also an important source, and I thank Marvin Taylor and Lisa Darms for
their help at an important juncture. The Jerome Robbins papers at the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts were eye- opening, and
I am grateful to Christopher Pennington of the Robbins Rights Trust for
allowing me to cite them in this book. Many staff at the other archives have
been important to this project, including those at the documenta Archiv,
the Adrian Piper Research Archive, the Leather Archives and Museum, the
Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Visual AIDS Archive,
the Tate Gallery Archive, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the
ACknowLedgmenTs ix
Pacific Film Archive, the National Gallery of Art Library, Hallwalls, the
Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, the Guggenheim Museum Ar-
chives and Library, the Wadsworth Atheneum Archives, the Getty Research
Institute, the Clark Art Library, the Ray Johnson Estate, and the Ryerson
Library at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Many individuals have aided the research and writing of this book.
I am especially thankful to Patrick Greaney for sharing his research on
Eduardo Costa and for our conversations about his work. Joseph Romano
went out of his way to help me find materials relating to Burton in the
records of the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) at Oberlin College.
Additional research leads and advice were generously provided by Susan
Richmond, Joseph Grigely, Anna Dezeuze, Daniel Quiles, Miriam Kienle,
Kirsten Olds, Joshua Lubin- Levy, Hallie Liberman, Brian Leahy, Liz Kotz,
Gillian Sneed, Alison Gingeras, Jess Wilcox, Maria Ilario, Julia Trotta, Tara
Hart, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nelson Santos, Noam Parness, David Platzker,
Aruna D’Souza, Adam Mack, Patrick Durgin, Billy Miller of Straight to Hell,
Edmund Cardoni of Hallwalls, Max Protetch, Beth Kleber of the School of
Visual Arts Archives, Sara MacDonald of the University of the Arts, Anna
Katz of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Amy Kilkenny
of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Eric Gleason of Kasmin Gallery has been a
friendly and helpful interlocutor about Burton’s work. I must thank the
staff of the Flaxman Library of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
who were nothing short of incredible in helping me find obscure materi-
als; I could not have done this research without their assistance. My work
finding images for the book has had much help along the way. In partic-
ular, I thank Lynda Benglis for allowing special permission to reproduce
her work. I am grateful to Rob Hugh Rosen and Harry Roseman for per-
mitting me to use their photographs, and I thank Barbara Moore for her
insights into Peter Moore’s photograph of Burton’s early performance.
Andrea Fisher and Andrea Mihalovic of Artists Rights Society have been
very helpful, as have all the staff I have worked with over the years at Art
Resource.
After arriving at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, I
returned to my early interest in Burton’s work (inspired by the presence of
the first Bronze Chair in the Art Institute’s collection), and began collect-
ing research, which I was fortunate to share with students and colleagues
on many occasions. The Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Chair in
Art History, which I held for over a decade at SAIC, directly supported the
research and publication of this book in its many phases. I sketched the
form of the present book during a residency at the Roger Brown House
of SAIC, and that very special place (designed by Brown’s partner George
x ACknowLedgmenTs
Veronda) was an ideal and emotionally rich context in which to contem-
plate the gravity and range of this book about a queer artist lost to the AIDS
crisis (like Brown and Veronda).
This book could not have happened without the additional research
support it received. Most importantly, a Senior Fellowship from the Deda-
lus Foundation helped make this book a reality, and I cannot thank them
enough. I did much foundational research and initial writing as an Ailsa
Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts at the National Gallery of Art (at the time thinking this research was
leading only to a chapter of my last book). The community of fellows and
research staff there provided much encouragement and feedback. A fel-
lowship from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, during which
time I focused on Burton’s art criticism and its stakes, was instrumental.
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts provided
an individual research grant to assist in studying Burton’s street perfor-
mances in a wider context. I am also grateful for additional publication
support provided by the Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art His-
tory at the University of Virginia.
Some of the earliest presentations of my research on Burton’s perfor-
mances were given during the time I was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow
in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University London and
Honorary Visiting Professor of History of Art at the University of York, and
I thank Dominic Johnson and Jason Edwards, respectively, not only for
inviting me to their institutions but also for their sharp and helpful com-
ments (then and after).
I have been talking about Burton and this book for a long time, and I
am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who have listened and who
have given their time, attention, and energy to provide feedback over the
years. Delinda Collier has been a smart and encouraging reader through-
out many stages of the project, and her support and suggestions have
helped shape this book. Ongoing conversations with Jennifer Doyle and
with Dominic Johnson helped me visualize the terms of this book; their
friendship, acumen, and generosity have, each in their own way, helped
me see what’s possible and how to write more frankly and with purpose.
Special thanks are due to Joshua Chambers-L etson and Ramzi Fawaz, both
of whom told me at crucial points things about the manuscript I needed
to hear. I have also learned much from the comments and responses of Ju-
lian B. Carter, Steven Nelson, Lisa Wainwright, Gavin Butt, Mechtild Wid-
rich, Sampade Aranke, Bess Williamson, Michael Golec, Shawn Michelle
Smith, Mary Jane Jacob, Sarah Betzer, Jenni Sorkin, James Meyer, Elise Ar-
chias, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Weinberg, and Jonathan D. Katz (not only
for his comments and encouragement but also for invitations to share this