Scott Burton
Walter Scott Burton III was an American artist and writer who primarily worked in sculpture and performance art. He was best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in materials like granite and bronze, often made as public art.
Born in Alabama, Burton moved as a child to Washington, D.C., and began studying under a series of notable painters while still in high school. After graduating from university in New York City, Burton began his career as a writer, primarily making works for the stage. He moved on to art criticism in the mid-1960s, working for the magazines ARTnews and Art in America as an editor and critic. At the end of the decade, Burton started making performance pieces, often focusing on the relationships between performers' bodies, and he quickly integrated furniture and sculptures into his performances. Sculpture, particularly sculptures that functioned as furniture objects, became his primary focus by the mid-late 1970s. His late career was defined by furniture sculptures and landscapes built as public art, including for public parks, plazas, and government spaces, as well as for corporate buildings.
Early life and education
Walter Scott Burton III was born on June 23, 1939, in Greensboro, Alabama, the son of Walter Scott Burton Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. Burton was born premature and underweight, facing significant health challenges as an infant. His father was an oil well driller whom Burton called a "roughneck" and was largely absent from his life, and his mother was a social and legal secretary. His parents separated early in his childhood and Burton relocated to Washington, D.C., with his mother in 1952, where his uncle was working as a correspondent for Knight Newspapers. Burton's mother raised him as a single parent while working several administrative jobs for the federal government. Around the time they moved to Washington, at age twelve, Burton came out to his mother as gay. The family lived at first in Burton's uncle's home in Georgetown before moving into their own house in Washington's Glover Park neighborhood. Of his time in Alabama, Burton said as an adult that "I'm a Southerner, but I don't identify with it."Burton attended high school in Washington. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, he began taking art classes after school at both the Corcoran School and the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, his first experiences making art. Among his teachers at the Workshop Center was painter Morris Louis, and Burton felt the classes were too advanced or sophisticated for him at first. The director of the Workshop Center, painter Leon Berkowitz, soon became Burton's high school art teacher, and Burton became very close with Berkowitz and his wife, poet Ida Fox. In addition to teaching Burton in school, Berkowitz introduced him to important movements and figures from recent art history, including the Washington Color School, artist Willem de Kooning, and critic Clement Greenberg. Burton often spent time visiting the National Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington and he expressed a love of the Neoclassical architecture in the city.
Berkowitz also arranged for Burton to travel to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to study under painter Hans Hofmann three summers in a row, beginning in 1957. Burton's first summer in Massachusetts was also his first time being away from home. Although he was in Provincetown to learn art from Hofmann, Burton later said that the town itself, which was becoming known for tolerating and welcoming gay visitors, had taught him "a great deal more about life—and about art", than his teacher had. Also in 1957, at eighteen, Burton began his first long-term romantic relationship with the dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who was twenty-one years older than Burton; their relationship was primarily long–distance at first.
After his first summer in Provincetown, Burton enrolled at the experimental Goddard College in Vermont, where he took advantage of the school's open curriculum to study writing about the gay experience. Finding the school too small, he left after two years to return home to Washington, taking classes at George Washington University. Some time after returning home, he sent a series of his poems to professor Lionel Trilling at Columbia University in New York, who was so impressed he insisted the school admit Burton on a scholarship. He spent a portion of the summer of 1959 taking literature classes at Harvard Summer School before enrolling at Columbia in the fall, intending to follow the path of his uncle by studying literature. After his last summer in Massachusetts studying under Hofmann, Burton gave up drawing and painting completely, focusing his energy entirely on writing. Burton and Robbins briefly moved in together in New York in 1961. They ended their partnership that fall when Burton met artist John Button and began a relationship with him.
Burton graduated magna cum laude from Columbia in 1962. He completed a master's degree in English literature at New York University in 1963, funded by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for dramatic literature. He stayed in the city after graduation in order to begin a writing career.
Life and career
1963–1969: Early writing career, art criticism, first performances
Beginning his career as a writer, Burton first wanted to be a playwright and poet. Through his relationship with Button, he was connected to the social networks of the creative community in New York, including the city's theater scene. He came to meet, among others, Edward Albee, Alex Katz, Lincoln Kirstein, and Frank O'Hara, and Button introduced him to a number of other gay artists and writers working in the city. He also held a number of jobs in New York to support himself after finishing his graduate degree, including at the reception desk and bookstore of the Museum of Modern Art beginning in 1963 and as a reader at Sterling Lord's literary agency from 1964 to 1965.Burton wrote several plays in the early 1960s, including The Eagle and the Lamb, based on the myth of Ganymede, and Saint George, a play commissioned by Kirstein in 1964 for the American Shakespeare Theatre, though he was largely unsuccessful. Burton later called his early plays and poems "terrible". His most important early theater work from this time period was the libretto for Shadow'd Ground, an experimental ballet choreographed by John Taras and set to a composition by Aaron Copland. Burton was tasked with writing the story for the ballet and chose 140 still images to project onto screens behind the dancers, creating a visual narrative during the piece. Burton's work in Shadow'd Ground received sharply negative reviews; critic Allen Hughes called it "naively derivative, sentimental and pretentious." Despite the negative feedback, Burton said the experience was extremely important: "It was the first entrance of story without words into my life, and it changed everything."
In spring 1965, Burton published his first substantial work of art criticism, in the magazine Art and Literature. In November 1965, Burton joined ARTnews magazine as an editorial associate under Thomas B. Hess, writing short, often unsigned reviews for the publication, his first foray into art criticism. His first feature-length article for the magazine, in 1966, focused on the work of sculptor Tony Smith. He wrote a substantial amount of criticism in the late 1960s both in his role at the magazine and in other publications, including the introduction text for the postminimalism-focused exhibition Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.
In 1968, Button began an affair with a student and broke up with Burton, leading Burton to build more of his own connections and relationships through his art criticism. Burton began exploring the leather and BDSM communities in New York in the late 1960s, increasingly so after his relationship ended with Button.
During this period, Burton built relationships with performance artists and poets like John Perreault, assisting with poetry events at artist Robert Rauschenberg's home in 1968. Burton first began making performance art himself in 1969 as part of the event series Street Works, organized by Perreault, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Weiner, and others. The organizers invited artists to perform works in a designated location in Manhattan during a specific time period, the first of which was 24 hours. Burton was one of the only art critics invited to participate in the first event and his contribution involved viewers picking up a random piece of trash from the street that Burton would put in a plastic bag with a piece of paper that read "Schwitters", a reference to the German Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, whose own work was often made from found trash. Burton also assisted with his friend Eduardo Costa's performance Useful Art Works at the first event.
Burton participated in each of the first four Street Works events held in Manhattan in 1969. Some of his other performances for Street Works that year involved, variously: cross-dressing as a woman to disguise himself from the viewers; walking naked on Lispenard Street in Soho at midnight; and drugging himself to fall asleep at a reception for the event. Written documentation of Street Works, including Burton's work, was published in 1969 in 0 to 9, an avant-garde magazine focused on experimentation with language and image-making published by artists Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, participants in the events. Burton eventually came to refer to his performances for Street Works, along with other related performances, as his Self-Works.
While he was not present on the first night of the Stonewall riots in New York in June 1969, Burton saw the aftermath of the police response early the next morning and joined the second night of demonstrations against police violence toward LGBT people.