Undetectability: Scott Burton, Public Art, and Visibility in the First Decade of the AIDS Crisis

Vassar College Claflin Lecture Art historian and author David Getsy will give a lecture on the works of Scott Burton, one of the most well-known proponents of the new public art in the United States in the 1980s, and his work involved making site-specific sculptures of furniture that anonymously served the passerby. These seemingly innocuous functional artworks were based in Burton’s long-running investigation into the queer experiences of public behavior, cruising, BDSM, and tactical dissemblance. Burton’s sculptures hide in plain sight, and this talk will examine their undetectability in the context of the first decade of the ongoing AIDS crisis.