Scott Burton Memorial

sCOTT BURTON

1939 - 1990

Scott Burton, an American sculptor whose work balanced stubbornly and elegantly between art and furniture while evolving into a new kind of public sculpture, died of AIDS on Friday at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was 50 years old and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Burton worked in a tradition of utilitarian modernism that started with the Russian Constructivists and was continued by the De Stijl and Bauhaus artists. His greatest achievement may lie in his forays into public art, which evolved in accordance with his belief that art should ''place itself not in front of, but around, behind, underneath (literally) the audience.''

By the end of his life, Mr. Burton's simple yet eye-catching benches, stools and chairs, cut from smooth and sometimes jagged pieces of granite, could often be found with people sitting on them in several North American cities, including Seattle, Cincinnati, New York City, Portland, Ore., and Toronto.

Mr. Burton, a small, wiry man known for his erudition, verbal precision and explosive laugh, worked as a critic and an editor for Art News and Art in America before becoming a full-time artist. He emerged in the late 1960's and early 70's as part of an artistic generation that came of age in the shadow of Minimalism.

Mr. Burton entered art making by way of performance art, an important part of the early 70's art scene, using furniture found on the street for stark tableaux inhabited by silent, slow-moving actors. For his first exhibition, at Artists Space in Manhattan in 1975, he exhibited a tableaux of furniture without the actors and from there moved on to fabricating his own designs. Thereafter, Mr. Burton exhibited regularly in art galleries in America and Europe, and also had one-man exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London and the Baltimore Museum of Art. This fall, a retrospective exhibition was organized jointly by museums in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart, West Germany.

At the end of his life, Mr. Burton's interests in dissolving the boundary between art and design took him into the curatorial realm. Last spring, at the invitation of Kirk Varnedoe, the director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, he organized an exhibition of Brancusi's works at the museum. In it, some of Brancusi's bases were exhibited on their own, as sculptures in their own right, a treatment that outraged some critics, while impressing others.

According to friends, a few days before his death, the artist had been invited by Rudi Fuchs, the director of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, to select an exhibition from the museum's extensive decorative art collection.