The first book to chart Scott Burton’s performance art and sculpture of the 1970s.\nScott Burton (1939–89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space—most importantly, street cruising—as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton’s underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used.\nWith research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton’s deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton’s life in New York’s art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.

Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

Arts & Photography

Getsy, David J.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an explosion of interest in sculpture. Sculptors of the “New Sculpture” movement sought a new direction and a modern idiom for their art. This book analyzes for the first time the art-theoretical concerns of the late-Victorian sculptors, focusing on their attitudes toward representation of the human body. David J. Getsy uncovers a previously unrecognized sophistication in the New Sculpture through close study of works by key figures in the movement: Frederic Leighton, Alfred Gilbert, Hamo Thornycroft, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Havard Thomas.
These artists sought to activate and animate the conventional format of the ideal statue so that it would convincingly stand in for both a living body and an ideal image. Getsy demonstrates the conceptual complexity of the New Sculptors and places their concerns within the larger framework of modern sculpture.

Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Paul Mellon Centre

During his lifetime, Auguste Rodin's name became synonymous with modern sculpture-- and sex. Rodin came to emphasize the importance of desire and the sexual as the markers of his individual perspective, using them to fuel his increasingly daring treatments of the nude. In the minds of many viewers, the dramatic and activated surfaces of his sculptures came to be seen as evidence of not just a sculptor's touch but of a lover's touch as well. This fascinating book makes a case for reconsidering the terms of Rodin's influence, arguing that the sculptor placed renewed emphasis on the materiality and objecthood of sculpture as a means of asserting his own desire's inseparability from his works.

Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture

Yale University Press

Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender

Van Gogh's Bedrooms

A fascinating look at the genesis and meaning of Van Gogh’s famed paintings of his bedroom Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom, a painting of his room in Arles, is arguably the most famous depiction of a bedroom in the history of art. The artist made three versions of the work, now in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d’Orsay. This book is the first in-depth study of their making and their meaning to the artist. In Van Gogh’s Bedrooms, an international team of art historians, scientists, and conservators investigates the psychological and emotional significance of the bedroom in Van Gogh’s oeuvre, surveying dwellings as a motif that appears throughout his work. Essays address the context in which the bedroom was first conceived, the uniqueness of the subject, and the similarities and differences among the three works both on and below the painted surface. The publication reproduces more than 50 paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters by the artist, along with other objects that evoke his peripatetic life and relentless quest for “home.”

Van tilborgh, Louis

Groom, Gloria

Fiedler, Inge

Art Institute of Chicago

<div>An innovative analysis of 1960s abstract sculpture that draws on transgender studies and queer theory Now back in print, Abstract Bodies was the first book to bridge the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies with the discipline of art history. Original and theoretically astute, it recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender's mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender studies and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists--Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927-2011), and David Smith (1906-1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender's multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.</div>

The definitive monograph on the irreverent transcultural painter of queerness and urban life 
Straddling East and West Coast postwar art cultures from the late 1960s until his death, Martin Wong (1946–99) painted narratives of queer existence, marginal communities and gentrification in a visual vocabulary that merged Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti and sign language. Wong took a thrillingly irreverent stance on sexual and political topics that were rarely given recognition within the art discourses of the time. 
The most substantial volume on the artist yet published, and the result of exhaustive research, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief situates Wong’s exhilarating painterly explorations within his era and his complex cultural position, reproducing an abundance of paintings from across his career.

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief

Ault, Julie

Individual Artists

Walther Konig

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Getsy, David J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Getsy, David J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Getsy, David J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)

Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture

Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender

Van Gogh's Bedrooms

Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief