Scott Burton’s Civic Engagement and Eroticism Merge at the Pulitzer

Stylish and sharp-witted, Scott Burton’s sculptures of the 1980s doubled as chairs, benches or tables. When they appeared in urban plazas, college campuses and corporate lobbies, they messed with conventions for public art, provokingly and delightfully. A fresh wind blew in stale places. But a stealth polemic lurked: Burton also wanted his work to make people more self-aware and, especially, more alert to each other — he wanted to promote, as he put it, “public recognition of public values.”

It turned out the stealthiness succeeded too well. After Burton’s death in 1989, at the age of 50 from AIDS-related causes, the objects’ meaning, and their identity as art, slowly faded. The benches were just benches, the tables, tables. Even more forgotten were the performances he made in the late 1960s and 1970s, exercises in slowing down, and thereby illuminating, everyday gestures and behaviors.

An exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, through Feb. 2, contributes substantially to a revival of Burton’s work in both disciplines. Among the sculptures on view is a luminous, ultra-luxe onyx table, and also three variations — all with comically extended rear legs — on the homey, vernacular species of lawn furniture known as the Adirondack chair. One is made of amiable yellow Formica. Another, in brushed aluminum, is combat-ready, its out-thrust limbs terminating in wicked points.

A rock settee, positioned in Tadao Ando’s serene courtyard at the Pulitzer, is one of several chairs Burton fashioned by simply slicing a flat base, seat and back into a craggy boulder. By contrast, a suave “Two-Part Chaise Longue” of pinkish granite, composed of two gently sloping triangles, strongly suggests a languidly prostrate body.

While much of Burton’s work seems immutable, some examples court instability. A frisky child-size table and chair — the seat cushion is silvery, the tabletop is mirrored — are set on casters. The long curving back of a wooden settee is meant, Burton said, to evoke the embrace of “little children in the father’s arms,” but this perch is suspiciously skimpy. (Burton’s own father departed in his infancy; born in 1939, Scott was raised by his mother, first in Alabama, then Washington D.C.) Even in the most forbiddingly stern sculpture, observes Nina Felshin, Burton’s assistant and friend, irony beckons. Sitting on his sculpture, she says, “you’re being made uncomfortable. That was intended, and that was the humor of it.”