David Getsy discusses Scott Burton's postminimalist theories of performance art in the 1970s and examines his strategic use of cybernetics, art history, and queer culture in his performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1977.
Getsy is Goldabelle McComb Finn Professor of Art History at SAIC, and his books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010), Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance 1965-1975 (Soberscove 2012), and the anthology of artists writings, Queer, for the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” book series (MIT 2016). His current research projects undertake archive-based recoveries of forgotten queer and genderqueer performance and sculptural practices in late-twentieth-century America. For 2018, he is curating the first retrospective of performance artist Stephen Varble (Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York), and he is also completing a book on Scott Burton’s queer postminimalism and performance in the 1970s, from which this lecture is drawn. http://davidgetsy.academia.edu
