Tom Burr
Sam-I-Am (2019) is a sculpture by Tom Burr shown here installed in the Avery Court of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Created as part of Burr’s 2019 exhibition MATRIX 182 / Hinged Figures, curated by Patricia Hickson, the work is a continuation of the artist’s periodic use of the hinged figural form to explore the inextricable bond that bodies have with architectural space. Specifically, Burr’s interests lie in how the queer body—and being queer—molds and contorts according to the physical spaces and social contexts determined by the aesthetic proclivities of the dominant, heterosexual culture.
Sam-I-Am was one of eight sculptures installed in conversation with a selection of artworks throughout the museum, while one work, Inventory of Inherited Masculinities (2019), was installed in the living room of nearby Austin House, former home of Chick Austin, the glamourous art historian who at age 26 became director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1927. The location of Sam-I-Am, sited as it was in the majestic interior of the Avery Court, intervened with the museum’s iconic sculpture Venus with Nymph and Satyr (1600) by Pietro Francavilla.
Tom Burr, Sam-I-Am, 2019, plywood, paint, hinges, mirror, photographs and printed material, steel push pins, in MATRIX 182 / Hinged Figures, Wadsworth Atheneum, June 6–September 18, 2019. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Tom Burr, Sam-I-Am, 2019, plywood, paint, hinges, mirror, photographs and printed material, steel push pins, in MATRIX 182 / Hinged Figures, Wadsworth Atheneum, June 6–September 18, 2019. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Burr’s work, in fact, recalled an earlier intervention with the same sculpture in the same location by Tony Smith in 1966. Smith’s Fixture was one of eighteen sculptures installed—comparable to Burr’s exhibition—in and around the museum. In Smith’s case, the exhibition extended even farther afield, beyond Hartford, to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Organized by Samuel Wagstaff, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1961 to 1968, Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture was the artist’s first solo exhibition presented concurrently in Hartford and Philadelphia.
But, whereas Smith’s triangulated plywood Fixture completely enclosed the ornate neoclassical sculpture, extending the boxlike form to the cantilevered balconies, Burr’s Sam-I-Am, a malleable hinged figure, was supported by a black plywood plinth spanning the width of the fountain.
Tony Smith, Fixture, 1966, plywood mock-up, site specific, 16 x 32 x 18 feet, in Tony Smith: Two Exhibitions of Sculpture, Wadsworth Atheneum, November 8–December 31, 1966, photo credit: Edward Saxon. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Tony Smith and Sam Wagstaff in front of the painted plywood mock-up of Spitball (1961) on the Travelers Plaza across the street from the Wadsworth Atheneum, during the installation of Smith’s solo exhibition, in 1966. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Photographic prints culled from the museum’s archive, portraying men and women dressed in formal attire dancing near the Francavilla sculpture in the Avery Court, were juxtaposed with covers of the journal Mattachine published by the Mattachine Society, a national gay rights organization founded in 1950. Also, a 1966 photograph of Smith and Wagstaff, standing in front of a plywood mockup of Smith’s Spitball (1961) installed across the street from the Wadsworth Atheneum, is placed partially under one of the covers of Mattachine, the journal’s mission prominently stating, “the voice of the homosexual community on the east coast.”
Sam-I-Am—and, in fact, the Wadsworth exhibition—represents Burr’s ongoing engagement with the aesthetics and discourses related to the work of Tony Smith. In the late 1990s, Burr made a series of large-scale works, such as Black Box (1998), which directly quotes Smith’s 1962 work although completely negating its impenetrability by breaking open the box to reveal a social gathering space, replete with seating, mirrors, and shelves. Another work, Black Bulletin Board (1998), uses the form of an informational bulletin board as a site for presenting a collection of black-and-white photographs picturing the supple, angular surfaces of Smith’s sculptures, pinned alongside and overlapping stills from the contemporaneous 1963 film Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger. The refined, polished surfaces of Smith’s works are queered and eroticized next to the equally refined and polished surfaces of male bodies and leather jackets in Anger’s film.
Tom Burr, Black Bulletin Board, 1998, wood, photographs, paint, tacks, 23 1/2 x 116 inches.
Then, in another gallery, Burr installed an earlier work titled propped perfume (2008). This gallery of the museum is devoted to showcasing seven Abstract Expressionist paintings donated by Tony and his wife Jane Smith in 1967. Propped perfume was originally presented in Burr’s exhibition at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York, in 2008, where, the artist later reflected, it
was meant to suggest some of the intensely social atmosphere that surrounds art movements. Along with its original companion pieces, bent booze and hinged haze, propped perfume considers the smells, tastes, and intoxications of these scenes being played out in a collective fashion. It pokes fun, in a sense, at twentieth-century rituals surrounding creative figures.
Recontextualized at the Wadsworth Atheneum, propped perfume comingled with paintings by such figures as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, a social milieu of luminaries—all heterosexual males whose big public personas then and now convey a hyper-masculinized prowess.
Tom Burr, propped perfume, 2008, plywood, paint, hinges, steel thumbtacks, vintage magazine ads, feather boa, steel cable, in MATRIX 182 / Hinged Figures, Wadsworth Atheneum, June 6–September 18, 2019. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
The black geometric quality of Burr’s hinged figure, situated as it was in this gallery, recalls the aesthetic characteristics of works by Tony Smith in the museum’s collection. A black marble edition of Spitball (1961), and the unique lacquered wood sculpture New Piece (1966), are installed nearby. The latter was gifted to the Wadsworth Atheneum by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, having been owned by Mapplethorpe’s lover and patron, Samuel Wagstaff.
James Voorhies, December 27, 2021, New York