Scott Burton - Collected Writings on Art & Performance 1965-1975

Scott Burton; David Getsy

ISBN 10: 0982409044 / ISBN 13: 9780982409046

Published by Soberscove Press, 2012

About this Item

Mild shelf wear to covers. Interior is clean.

Seller Inventory # 084623

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Scott Burton - Collected Writings on Art & Performance 1965-1975
• Publisher: Soberscove Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0982409044
• ISBN 13: 9780982409046
• Binding: Soft cover
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Before gaining widespread recognition for his sculpture and public art, Scott Burton produced a substantial body of art writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An eclectic and wide-ranging critic, he wrote such important texts as the introduction to the groundbreaking exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form and served as an editor for both ARTnews and Art in America. In these same years, Burton became known as a performance artist, developing themes he pursued in his writing. Yet, his role as an artist-critic has rarely been discussed.

Edited by David Getsy, SCOTT BURTON: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON ART AND PERFORMANCE, 1965-1975 brings together for the first time Burton's essays and unpublished manuscripts from these years, tracing his work as an art critic as well as his early statements on performance. In his writing, Burton championed positions that others held as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. He advocated for reductive abstract art while defending figuration, and he argued for the urgency of time-based and ephemeral art practices in the same years that he curated exhibitions of realist painting. Distinct in these diverse texts are Burton's increasing concerns with art's appeal to affects, empathies, and subjective responses; the early formulation of his desire to make art public and demotic; and his critical grasp on the implications and exclusions of mainstream narratives of art. This collection offers rich new context for Burton's sculptural work and reveals him as an important voice in the rapidly changing art world of the 1960s and 1970s.

Artists and movements examined include Minimalism and Postminimalism, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Willem de Kooning, Ralph Humphrey, Alex Katz, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, David Smith, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and performance art.

Art. Art History. Art Movements: Minimalism, Postminimalism, Realism, Performance Art. Art Criticism. Performance Studies. LGBT Studies. Literary Nonfiction. 

About the Author

Scott Burton (1939-1989) was an American artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures and public art. Recognized internationally as a preeminent figure in postwar American art, Scott Burton synthesized minimalism, performance art, and large-scale civic projects.

Editor David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015); Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2010); and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905 (Yale University Press, 2004) as well as the edited anthologies Queer (Documents of Contemporary Art) (MIT Press, 2016); From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (Penn State University Press, 2011); and Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c.1880-1930 (Ashgate, 2004). His research focuses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on histories of sculpture and performance.