Sturtevant at 100 It Can Take a Long Time to Understand What Is Seen

How do you mark the centenary of a trailblazing artist whose work avoids encapsulation?

Bruce Hainley, Michael Lobel

During the early 2000s, as the artist Sturtevant approached the last decade of her life, she produced a work titled The Dark Threat of Absence (2002), a video installation in which she revisits Paul McCarthy’s video Painter (1995), an abject exploration of Abstract Expressionism and painterly prowess. The installation features, according to Sturtevant, “strident repetitions that bring to full force the blatant exterior: the outside brutally dismissing the interior.” At this point in her career, she was working primarily in video, following four decades during which she had interrogated the conventions of originality and authorship by “repeating” works in various mediums by other artists, particularly iconic works by her friends and peers, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Marcel Duchamp.

While Sturtevant’s repetitions appear to be facsimiles, she clarified, “The brutal truth of the work is that it is not copy. The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation.” As the 21st century began, Sturtevant’s investigation of “the dark threat of absence” was a piercing analysis of the interior of an image saturated world that had become all “blatant exterior.” The project ironically seemed to parallel her own relative absence from the standard art historical record, a lacuna that was addressed by a series of shows at the time, including Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth, a major survey at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany in 2004. In 2014, the same year she died, MoMA hosted a major exhibition of Sturtevant’s work curated by Peter Eleey and Ingrid Langston. Early on during this period of rediscovery and recuperation, in 2001, Sturtevant met Bruce Hainley and Michael Lobel, two scholars who knew the artist intimately and whose writing on Sturtevant has become indispensable to understanding her work in all of its slippery but trenchant glory.

On the occasion of Sturtevant’s centennial year, Hainley and Lobel discuss some of the artist's earliest exhibitions in New York and Paris in the 1960s, and her enduring influence today. In our world transformed by infinite reproduction, endless data sets, AI, and social media channels, Sturtevant’s art seems more relevant than ever. As Hainley and Lobel explore, we are only just beginning to understand what she was up to.

—Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance