Copyright 1990 The New York Times CompanyThe New York Times January 1, 1990,Monday,Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 1; Page 26, Column 1;Cultural Desk LENGTH: 918 wordsHEADLINE: Scott Burton, Sculptor Whose Art Verged on Furniture, Is Dead at 50BYLINE: By ROBERTA SMITHScott Burton, an American sculptor whose work balanced stubbornly and elegantly between art and furniture while evolving into a new kind of public sculpture, died of AIDS on Friday at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. He was 50 years old and lived in Manhattan.Mr. Burton worked in a tradition of utilitarian modernism that started with the Russian Constructivists and was continued by the De Stijl and Bauhaus artists. His greatest achievement may lie in his forays into public art, which evolved in accordance with his belief that art should ''place itself not in front of, but around, behind, underneath (literally) the audience.''By the end of his life, Mr. Burton's simple yet eye-catching benches, stools and chairs, cut from smooth and sometimes jagged pieces of granite, could often be found with people sitting on them in several North American cities, including Seattle, Cincinnati, New York City, Portland, Ore., and Toronto.Mr. Burton, a small, wiry man known for his erudition, verbal precision and explosive laugh, worked as a critic and an editor for Art News and Art in America before becoming a full-time artist. He emerged in the late 1960's and early 70's as part of an artistic generation that came of age in the shadow of Minimalism.An Enemy of Esthetic BoundariesLike many of his contemporaries, including such artists as Vito Acconci, Siah Armajani and Kim MacConnel, he was concerned with dissolving esthetic boundaries, in particular the one between the fine and the decorative arts. The art historian Robert Rosenblum said of him yesterday: ''Scott was as singular and unique as a person as he was as an artist. His fiercely laconic work destroyed the boundaries between furniture and sculpture, between private delectation and public use and radically altered the way we see many 20th-century masters, including Gerrit Rietveld and Brancusi.''Mr. Burton's own sculptures, which could be used as tables and chairs when they were not on exhibit, often infused the plain abstract forms of Minimalism with a sense of utility, history and wit. To accomplish this, the artist drew on his wide knowledge of furniture - a passion since childhood -both modernist and vernacular, 19th and 20th century.He was inspired by tensile chairs and tables of Rietveld, the Dutch De Stijl designer who, like Piet Mondrian, specialized in simple geometries and primary colors. Further inspiration came from the round stone table and stools that Constantin Brancusi created as a memorial for the fallen of World War I in Tirgu Jiu, Rumania. But he also took ideas from Art Deco designs, the common American lawn chair, as well as rustic or Adirondack furniture made from bark-covered tree trunks and branches. Among his favorite tactics was the unexpected use of luxurious materials. One work combined galvanized metal with mother of pearl; another, a table made of pink onyx was lighted from within.Formal Study in High SchoolMr. Burton was an only child, born in 1939 in Greensboro, Ala., to Walter and Hortense Moberly Burton. His parents separated when he was quite young, and in 1952 he moved with his mother to Washington. There his interest in art led him to study informally with the painter Leon Berkowitz while still in high school. Shortly after graduation from high school, he also studied for a time at Hans Hofmann's painting school in Provincetown.Uncertain that his passion for furniture and design could ever lead to an artistic career, he turned to literature, obtaining an B.A. from Columbia in 1962 and an M.A. from New York University in 1963. By the mid-60's he was working regularly as a freelance critic for Art News, then under the editorship of Thomas B. Hess.Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America and formerly the editor of Art News, worked with Mr. Burton at both publications. ''As a critic his enthusiasms were passionate, his dislikes were categorical,'' she said. ''He wrote as he would later cut granite, with high style, great clarity of form and a very sharp edge.''Beginnings in Performance ArtMr. Burton entered art making by way of performance art, an important part of the early 70's art scene, using furniture found on the street for stark tableaux inhabited by silent, slow-moving actors. For his first exhibition, at Artists Space in Manhattan in 1975, he exhibited a tableaux of furniture without the actors and from there moved on to fabricating his own designs. Thereafter, Mr. Burton exhibited regularly in art galleries in America and Europe, and also had one-man exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London and the Baltimore Museum of Art. This fall, a retrospective exhibition was organized jointly by museums in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart, West Germany.At the end of his life, Mr. Burton's interests in dissolving the boundary between art and design took him into the curatorial realm. Last spring, at the invitation of Kirk Varnedoe, the director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, he organized an exhibition of Brancusi's works at the museum. In it, some of Brancusi's bases were exhibited on their own, as sculptures in their own right, a treatment that outraged some critics, while impressing others.According to friends, a few days before his death, the artist had been invited by Rudi Fuchs, the director of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, to select an exhibition from the museum's extensive decorative art collection.There are no survivors.