Scott Burton's Signaling of Desire: Gay Cruising, Phenomenology and Permanence
- Grace Miskovsky
- Mar 30
- 6 min read
The Sculpture Center inaugurated its exhibition by forty-two year old Spanish, Berlin-based conceptual artist Álvaro Urbano titled Tableau Vivant in September of 2024. Urbano’s work re-imagines the rescued remains of Scott Burton’s 1985 Atrium Furnishment, a forty-foot semi-circular bench of green marble surrounding a fountain in the former Equitable Center Seventh Avenue lobby, now designated as an LGBT Historical Site. Tableau Vivant appropriates Atrium Furnishment and serves a retrospective purpose in narrating the iconic late career of Scott Burton, who died of AIDS in 1989. Urbano’s working of Burton’s furnishment is littered with vegetative and casual elements such as artificial cigarette butts, apples, magnolia leaves, and “rain” puddles, referencing the natural ecology of the Ramble, a popular gay cruising spot in Central Park in the early twentieth century. In Tableau Vivant’s press release, the Sculpture Center writes, “Unscripted sexual encounters arise with the passing of the seasons and are framed by the changing landscape, defying the hegemonic use of urban space. These furtive areas of the park become a backdrop for togetherness and queer sensibilities, where identity and ecological concerns converge.” Scott Burton was highly interested and involved, not just in cruising but in codified social interactions, the phenomenology of queer bodies, and the relation of bodies to public and private spaces. He studied behavioral psychology and the nonverbal signals of desire present in street cruising, at the Ramble and beyond (Atrium Furnishment brings the unsaid social systems of public landscapes to the private sphere, as well). These interests were translated into his furniture work, which encouraged intimacy and bodily engagement through spatial politics. Burton’s furniture pieces are sites in which queerness happens. They are places to watch and be watched.
In exploring Scott Burton’s work’s relationship with gay street cruising, art historian David Getsy, author of “Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art,” explains that the marriage of the two were a culmination of previous performance work. Burton’s early performances actively engaged viewers and encouraged interaction between them, referencing the coded and mystical body language present in street cruising and gay male culture of the 1960s – however, due to the ephemeral nature of performance art, a tangible product failed to exist after the work ended. Towards the end of Scott Burton’s life, as he grappled with his AIDS diagnosis, the need for a more permanent product of this queer-ly coded human interactivity, one which could endure the test of time, became clear, hence his move towards marble, stone, and public monuments. Thus, the possibilities of built environments as well as their written-in uses were illuminated. For example, at the Ramble, which Álvaro Urbano references in Tableau Vivant, exists a phenomenology of a public space, including the bodies which inhabit it and the nonverbal cues they use.
While Burton focuses primarily on the sociological predecessor to sex, David Halperin in his essay “One Hundred Years of Sexuality” writes of unsaid attributions of sexuality and power garnered through sexual activity and desire in the context of classical Athens. The “cultural formation” of sexual relations in ancient Greece relied on ideas of phallic “activity” and “passivity”: the act of penetration connoted dominance and power wherein the act of being penetrated, or assuming a passive position, was the inferior role. Therefore, it was logically assumed that for a male to maintain dominance, he should engage in sexual relations with his subordinates, which is what Halperin calls an “asymmetrical gesture.” Halperin writes, “In classical Athens...sexual objects came in two different kinds.... active and passive, aggressive and submissive. The relevant features of a sexual object were not so much determined by a physiological typology of genders as by the social articulation of power.” This “articulation of power” was likely not explicitly stated in a public decree, but rather was enforced nonverbally, creating a specific orientation of “subordinate” bodies towards or away from “dominant” ones, in public and in the bedroom. Athens’ figuration of power dynamics through sexual acts also parallel the Ramble’s in-group innuendos in that one outside of the temporal or social context of these sites would not be privy to the aforementioned formulations. Cruising, according to Getsy, utilizes “subtle signs that are available to some but not to others.”
One anthropologist who examines public and private phenomenology in the context of sex and gender is Don Kulick, who, in his study “A Man in the House: the Boyfriends of Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes” explores the treacherous and often unspoken methods of acquiring boyfriends, especially if a boyfriend is already in a relationship with another travesti prostitute. Kulick presents the case of Keila, who became interested in the boyfriend, Tiane, of another travesti who lived in her home. Their relationship began with “an electric exchange of looks as they passed on another on the street during Carnival, and quickly progressed into brief, meaningful greetings and Tiane passed by Keila while she was working on the street at night.” He writes that as their relationship budded, its secrecy was essential, and Tiane’s mother became “the intermediary,” passing along messages, food, and money between the two. These nonverbal exchanges, such as a glance or a brush across someone’s hand, reveal the inner workings of a group’s sexual or conceptual figurations.
Sites of this figuration, such as in the home of the travesti, the streets on which she works, or in the Ramble, also reveal their written uses. Tom Burr, a New York City based conceptual artist who emerged in the 1990s, and similarly explores phenomenological factors in his art, primarily within the realm of underground male gay culture in New York: cages, bars, and boxes, and the unique bodily positionality existing in these spaces. Both in his own work and Burton’s, there is an interest in material and social spaces and the implicit permanence, or lack thereof, within them, as well as in the transcending of pictorial and performative planes to embrace a more architectural approach (such as in the case of Burton’s later works which engage in the sociality of street cruising via public sculpture.) In doing so, and in infusing sexuality within a sense of place as opposed to performance art, there is a reworking of our collective associative tendencies towards sex. For example, Burr gives the example of the male torso as a pictorial symbol of gay male sexuality and masculinity, which is turned away from in the sculptural furnishings of Scott Burton. Burton’s Atrium Furnishment is sleek, communal, and soft. It engages ideas of sexuality through social engagement and intimacy, and prodded Urbano to create a close link between the two in his reappropriation of Burton’s work, yet its association is similarly unsaid. Further, the linking of material and social spaces contribute to its permanence. Each facet reinforces the other, even in the case of Atrium Furnishment’s partial destruction as a part of a renovation project in 2020.
Derrick Hodge similarly writes about the interconnectedness of sexual formulations and place in his essay “Colonization of the Cuban Body: the Growth of Male Sex Work in Havana.” He outlines that during the Cuban Revolution in 1953, the interactions between male sex workers and their clients “took on a specifically socialist character,” tending away from transactional behaviors and towards a more relational one. Under a new capitalist system which emerged in Cuba in the late 2010’s, this sexual and relational landscape drastically changed as emergent forms of sex work became typified. Hodge writes that the new Cuban sex worker, the pinguero, “was far better suited for the new capitalist relations.” In this way, the political and economic systems of Cuba infiltrate sexual relationships and dynamics, linking a sense of place to socio-sexual engagement. The link between place and engagement and thus, its permanence apply similarly to the case of the sex work industry in Havana. Derrick Hodge found that the new relational methods under Cuban capitalism had effects on desire, and writes that many pingueros were unable to have or enjoy sex, or desire another, without a financial aspect involved. Cuban politics permeate desire, creating behavioral schisms with a sense of permanence.
Nonverbal signaling of desire in street cruising and its link to anonymity and invisibility is outlined in the work of Scott Burton. His furniture’s form, function, and representational thoughtfulness are the foundation upon which social interactivity happens. Yet, they also create queer interventions into our daily lives, encouraging non-hierarchical bodily engagement with the sculpture as well as coded intimacy between viewers. The works illuminate the invisible distance between people, and allow them to disguise or camouflage themselves, something that was incredibly important for queer communities’ survival in the AIDS crisis. While Atrium Furnishment, although re-invented through Tableau Vivant, still faces an uncertain future, its permanence is emphasized through its site specificity (and re-appropriation of it). Permanence, Scott Burton realized at the end of his short life, was essential in allowing his legacy to live on through public art. With it, lives on the daily, queerly-coded social engagement that he engineered so well.
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