The first book to chart Scott Burton's performance art and sculpture of the 1970s. Scott 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. With 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.

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.

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an explosion of interest in sculpture. Sculptors of the New Sculpture movement engaged in a wide range of experimentation, seeking 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 the representation of the human body. Sculpture through close study of works by key figures in the movement: Frederic Leighton, Alfred Gilbert, Hamo Thorneycroft, 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 and compellingly stand in for both a living body and an ideal image. Complicating the conventions that had characterised much previous sculpture in Britain, they fervently pursued a commitment to the mimetic rendering of the body in three dimensions. In response to the problems and perils of such a commitment, late-Victorian sculptors worked to develop strategies that allowed them to accommodate naturalism and symbolism as well as the materiality of sculpture. Getsy offers an analysis of the conceptual complexity of the New Sculpture and places its concerns within the larger framework of the development of modern sculpture.

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 Musee 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." Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (02/14/16-05/10/16)