Queer Behavior

"The story of Scott Burton is a story about how fragile, mutable and, to some degree, arbitrary art history is. . . . Burton’s story, however, is far from over. Decades later, an unlikely band of curators, scholars, and artists—many of whom never knew Burton personally—have become so invested in him that they are refusing to let his work fade into obscurity." * New York Times *
"Art historian and curator Getsy has been observing how abstraction lends itself to often less obvious—though no less potent—ways of communicating aspects of queer experience and embodiment. . . . Getsy asks the public and its institutions to grasp new alternatives that embrace multiplicity. . . . A prime example can be found in the work of the genre-defying late Conceptualist Scott Burton, who is the subject [Queer Behavior]." * ArtNet *
"Getsy’s intelligent and compelling monograph Queer Behavior . . . is both an exhaustive analysis of the pieces Burton created during this period and a useful contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and aesthetics. Getsy’s previously published work, which includes an edited volume of Burton’s writings, published in 2012, has consistently labored to expand the frameworks that allow us to see the queerness of art, particularly when it doesn’t literalize the desire or identity of the artist creating it. . . . Getsy’s powers of description are strong, which is helpful given the dearth of visual material documenting Burton’s work, especially the Behavior Tableaux performances. This is often a challenge for performance analysis, and Getsy does an excellent job of using what he has to speculate past the contact sheet and offer a plausible account of what it might have been like to see the performance. . . . Burton was always interested foremost in activating behavior, and Getsy’s loving and comprehensive study grounds the artist’s unique, broad-ranging life and career in that fundamental investment in the human body – something that signifies differently, loves differently, wields power differently, builds community differently, all depending on how one makes and takes a pose." -- Michael Hunter * PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art *
"Getsy’s rigorous and readable monograph of post-Minimalist sculptor and performance pioneer Burton (US, 1939–1989), is the result of extensive archival research and interviews with the artist’s improvised network of collaborators, acquaintances, and friends. He posits that Burton’s work in the 1970s, which was mostly created in New York City, has both been acknowledged as pivotal for the artist’s trajectory but also understudied with regard to its queer thematics. . . . Getsy emphasizes not only the coded citations that Burton mobilized—the amount of archival material reprinted here is impressive—but also the broader, antihierarchical political impulse of his colloquial, demotic practice." -- Julia Bryan-Wilson * Art Bulletin *
"Queer Behavior . . . seek[s] to inject art objects, sculptures, and performances that we might not necessarily consider as heavy with queer politics, with a queer aesthetic that moves beyond the surfaces of identity and identity politics." * Art History *
“Getsy’s long-awaited, meticulously researched volume reads like a novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it as scholarship, history, ‘deep gossip,’ and prose. He has marshaled craft and discipline to produce an accessible, nuanced, and compelling account of Burton’s unconventional and uniquely queer development. It’s a tremendously important, insightful, and lucid contribution to the field. This book is necessary reading for performance art scholars and anybody—everybody—who needs a road map to navigate the constant challenges that lonely creatives face against the pressures of prejudice and conformity.” -- Gregg Bordowitz, author of General Idea: Imagevirus, Glenn Ligon: Untitled I Am a Man, and Some Styles of Masculinity
“Building on unprecedented research, Queer Behavior is the first substantial study of Scott Burton’s anti-hierarchical, eclectic, desire-oriented art of the 1970s. Getsy has written a masterful work—rigorous, encyclopedic, sympathetic, and inspired—toward a loving recuperation of an artist whose work has at times been eclipsed in histories of art and performance. Argument-driven and lushly narrated, Getsy’s writing hybridizes close analysis, critical biography, cultural history, and art historiography. The resulting book is unyieldingly good, at times breathtakingly so.” -- Dominic Johnson, author of Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s
“Getsy offers a rigorously researched and beautifully rendered account of Burton’s performance practice, focusing on the lesser-known arc of Burton’s work from the 1970’s and, in the process, establishing its importance for both the art historical record and for histories of queer life. This is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of performance art, queer performance, and the performance scene of 1970’s New York.” -- Joshua Chambers-Letson, author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life