Scott Burton: Collected writings on art and performance 1965-1975
David J. Getsy

Before gaining widespread recognition for sculptural work that sought to dissolve aesthetic boundaries, most notably between sculpture and furniture, Scott Burton produced a substantial body of art writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 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Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 brings together for the first time Burton's essays and unpublished manuscripts from these years, tracing his work as an art critic as well as his early statements on performance.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. 

Soberscove Press
2012
Softcover
14 x 20 cm

£18

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