Artists Space

Magic Episodes: The Letters of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa, 1970–1980
with David J. Getsy and Patrick Greaney

Wednesday, April 22
7pm
Free, no RSVP required

Please join us for the book launch of Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa, 1970–1980, published this spring by Ugly Duckling Presse. The volume's editors, David J. Getsy and Patrick Greaney will present the book and discuss Scott Burton’s and Eduardo Costa’s lives and works as well as the artists’ process and the processes of making this collection.

Purple text against a black-and-white photograph reads "Magic Episodes / The Letters of Scott Burton / and Eduardo Costa, 1970-1980 / a conversation with David J. Getsy / and Patrick Greaney."
[Purple text against a black-and-white photograph reads "Magic Episodes / The Letters of Scott Burton / and Eduardo Costa, 1970-1980 / a conversation with David J. Getsy / and Patrick Greaney."]

When Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa met in New York City in 1968, they developed an intimate friendship that lasted until Burton’s death in 1989. In letters from the 1970s, writing between New York, Argentina, and Brazil, Burton and Costa gossiped and theorized about the rapid changes taking place in the art world, queer life, politics, and their work as writers and artists. Burton and Costa’s letters show a vibrant transnational queer artistic friendship and offer a new perspective on the struggle to establish conceptual, critical artistic practices in the Americas. Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa, 1970–1980 represents the pair's most significant co-created work, gathering these letters alongside additional writings from Costa, Getsy, and Greaney.

David J. Getsy is a historian of art and performance. His latest book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art, received the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award. His previous books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender; Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture; Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975; and the anthology of artists writings, Queer. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.

Patrick Greaney is Professor of Humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder. He edited Conceptualism and Other Fictions: The Collected Writings of Eduardo Costa, 1965–2015 (Les Figues Press, 2016), and his translations include Heimrad Bäcker’s SEASCAPE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) and, as co-translator, Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Stephen Cheng, Allan Schwartzman, and David Zwirner.