Dr. David Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History, University of Virginia
Scott Burton was one of the most well-known proponents of the new public art in the United
States in the 1980s, and his work involved making site-specific sculptures of furniture that
anonymously served the passerby. These seemingly innocuous functional artworks, however,
were based in Burton’s long- running investigation into the queer experiences of public
behavior, cruising, BDSM, and tactical dissemblance. Burton’s sculptures hide in plain sight, and
this talk will examine their undetectability in the context of the first decade of the on-going
AIDS crisis. Burton’s sculpture was both materially and conceptually tied up with the cultural
battles over representation and contagion, and his works allow for an alternate account of the
visibility politics that tend to dominate histories of AIDS and queer art in the 1980s. Burton’s
contribution, I will argue, was his reimagining of sculpture’s long-standing associations with
embodiment and the figure through his sculptures’ self-abnegation, practice of support, and
facilitation of contact—both physical and social.
David J. Getsy is an art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary
art. He has published widely on American and European art from the nineteenth century to the
present, and his current projects address queer methodologies, links between transgender
studies and art history, and archive-based recoveries of suppressed or lost histories of queer
and genderqueer performance. His books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and
Performance Art (2022) and Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
(2015, reissued 2023). He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the inaugural
Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.