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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TOM BURR is defined by the beauty of contingent things. Places, identities, bodies, histories, subjectivities, and aesthetic forms are destabilized via processes of construction and reconstruction. Burr problematizes the autonomy of the sculptural object by referring beyond it, yet he returns us to its material substrate as a precondition of meaning. He expands the conjugation of sculptural practice so as to stage a tightly controlled interplay between object-oriented autonomy and situational emplacement, manifesting precariousness with exceptional grace. The object becomes a platform--virtually theatrical, deceptively allegorical--for the display of its own tenuous existence and of the hovering identity, or authorial status, of its maker. Burr's work has evolved organically over the past two decades, with the...
