Artists Space

Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

Lecture
December 15, 2023, 7pm

Black and white scan of a photograph featuring a figure, standing upright with their hand on their hips. Their face is starkly painted white with heavy makeup around the eyes and lips. They wear overalls and a strap-on around their hips.
Scott Burton, Modern American Artist, second version, early 1974. Photographic portrait of performance character shown at PersonA at Artists Space. Courtesy Estate of Scott Burton. [Black and white scan of a photograph featuring a figure, standing upright with their hand on their hips. Their face is starkly painted white with heavy makeup around the eyes and lips. They wear overalls and a strap-on around their hips.]

The Dedalus Foundation and Artists Space are pleased to present a lecture by David J. Getsy on his book Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art, which received the Dedalus Foundation’s 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award.

Before Scott Burton (1939-1989) came to prominence as a sculptor and public artist in the 1980s, he spent a decade as a performance artist. In this lecture, David Getsy will discuss the range of Burton’s performance art in the 1970s, and chart the ways in which queer experiences of public space fueled the artist’s experimentation with performance, body language, and cruising—and with sculptures that performed as furniture so they could hide in plain sight. This was a practice that began with Burton’s first one-person exhibition at Artists Space in 1975.

The evening will open with a brief talk by artist sair goetz, the winner of a 2017 Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

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 recoveries of suppressed or lost histories of queer and genderqueer performance.

sair goetz (they/them) endeavors to heal the world at the disciplinary intersections of structural film, instructional text, and creative code. They approach their work as embodied spell-casting; they believe that through the proper use of highly-honed language, carefully chosen material, and physical enactment, they can transmute what currently is and what has been into a more healthful vision of what currently is and what will become. Their work manifests in all time—and language—based media: experimental films, artists books, essays, performances, software, and signage. They will discuss their recent work on modular typography systems as transgender ally and nonbinary lifeline.

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Stephen Cheng, Lonti Ebers, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Allan Schwartzman, and David Zwirner.

    Black and white scan of a photograph of a figure standing on a tall square plinth in a gallery space, in front of an obscured crowd of viewers. The figure poses like a statue with their hands on their hips, wearing a pair of overalls and high, blocky heels, and a phallic strap-on around their waist.
    Scott Burton, Performance Portrait of the Artist with Cothurni and Ithyphallus, 25 April 1974. Documentation of performance at Artists Space. Courtesy Estate of Scott Burton. [Black and white scan of a photograph of a figure standing on a tall square plinth in a gallery space, in front of an obscured crowd of viewers. The figure poses like a statue with their hands on their hips, wearing a pair of overalls and high, blocky heels, and a phallic strap-on around their waist.]