Tom Burr
Sculpture Center , New York, USA
References to iconic creative figures have often lurked in Tom Burr’s recent work. His new exhibition, ‘Addict-Love’, is no exception, evoking a trio of mercurial Modernists: Frank O’Hara, A. Everett ‘Chick’ Austin, Jr. and Kurt Weill. The show’s title, from an O’Hara poem, is also that of a mournfully theatrical piece in which a maroon velvet curtain that once graced a storied Los Angeles theatre hangs from an austere metal structure; more velvet and brown vintage draperies litter the floor, while several books rest casually on the structure’s narrow, stage-like platform. One book is opened at an image of O’Hara – who, in addition to being a poet, was a curator at MoMA during the ‘60s – standing in the museum’s sculpture garden, the very heart of mid-century US high culture. A sparkling impresario who directed Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944 and embraced film, music, theatre and dance, Austin has been credited with introducing the States to work by titans like Picasso and Balanchine. Weill’s career, of course, included both Brechtian theatre and the New York world of commercial musicals.
As usual, Burr’s hinged plywood constructions at first convey a severe formal integrity. On closer examination, three black folding sculptures seem to have gathered for an urbane chat – smoking, drinking, flirting. Vintage cigarette advertisements embellish hinged haze (all works 2008); whiskey ads from back issues of Esquire are tacked on bent booze; and ads for Patou and Chanel scents decorate propped perfume. In the latter a black feather boa stretches across a crevice that suggests a crotch, then drapes onto the floor as if libidinal energy were discreetly bleeding from the angular form. In an interview with Florence Derieux published in the catalogue for a retrospective at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Burr remarked that when he began making the hinged pieces, he was interested in the idea of collapse and failure in relation to Modernist art and furniture design, adding, ‘I also wanted them to be able to carry, as an armature, a certain degree of alignment with the human body, in order to self-consciously dabble in historical figurative sculpture, but also to have a degree of pathos and charm.’
Austin is the most hauntingly summoned persona here. His staging of the premiere of the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts inspired Chicks, with its vintage Chanel gown folded, abjectly or in mid-bow, over one of a crowd of white balusters. In Chick, a chillier elegy, a pale straitjacket reclines on a white hinged construction sitting on a white rubber runner – inspired by a flooring material in Austin’s office at the Atheneum – alongside a steel ashtray and drafting lamp. One senses that the body has escaped from its restraints only to be absorbed into the stiff chaise-like structure. Tacked up nearby is Chick Clips, a quartet of found book pages overlapping in a geometric arrangement. Part of the text relates how, while on an archaeological expedition with his mother, the young Chick would play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade on a gramophone every night to set the mood for the next day’s dig. The author goes on to note, ‘Chick began to see that all art, when it is looked at with the knowledge of how it is made, becomes contemporary art.’ Could the same apply to the art of living?
Kristin M. Jones
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