A sexy funky show that goes through thought and time.
On the centenary of Sturtevant’s birth, ZIP ZAP ! celebrates the work of the pioneering American artist, spanning over five decades. The exhibition is a celebration of art, as well as a commemoration of an artist whose groundbreaking practice encourages us to consider the very meaning of artmaking.
Sturtevant’s repetitions, by memory, of artworks by her contemporaries are not copies, nor are they ‘a matter of distanced, allusive quotation’. Rather, as Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris curator Anne Dressen wrote on the occasion of Sturtevant’s major exhibition at the museum in 2010, they are ‘tools [...] for getting away from the surface to provoke thought’. Through her process, Sturtevant created rigorous studies on the artworks she repeated: on their making, their canonisation, their valorisation. In this sense, her work is situated at the juncture where the visual gives way to the conceptual.
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. — Sturtevant
Sturtevant began to manually repeat works by other artists in 1964, initially engaging with American Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and James Rosenquist. Sturtevant had an exceptional instinct for selecting works that would later be recognised as masterpieces, and repeated works by such artists that would become iconic in their own right. Among the early works in the exhibition is a 1966 repetition of Rosenquist’s Spaghetti and Grass (1965). The work was part of Sturtevant’s very first, and now historic, exhibition in Europe, held in 1966 at Galerie J in Paris.
Study for Rosenquist Spaghetti Grass, 1966
Oil on canvas
164 x 116 cm (64.57 x 45.67 in)
Sturtevant’s sustained engagement with the works of American Minimalist Frank Stella is among her most renowned. Stella famously asserted that ‘what you see is what you see’ in his works, characterising the visual experience as one of instantaneous apprehension. Sturtevant’s process turned this idea on its head. As Eugene M. Schwartz wrote, she was ‘the first to reverse the modernist direction of creative flow – not from idea to object, but from object to idea’.
Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor is surrounded by an installation of inflatable male and female sex dolls, who lean gormlessly against wallpaper repetitions of works by Marcel Duchamp and Robert Gober. These dolls, as art historian Elisa Schaar put it, ‘pok[e] fun at the desire for cheap thrills in a simulacral world driven by speed and exhaustion.’
While most of her references involved her contemporaries, Sturtevant also remade several works by Duchamp, whose practice prefigured the questions of authorship and authenticity at the centre of her own work. In 1992, after having relocated to France, Sturtevant recreated Duchamp’s 1920 work Fresh Widow – a set of French windows with panes covered in polished black leather. Despite the playfulness of the wordplay and the fetishistic connotations of the materials he used, the title of Duchamp’s work is a reference to all the women who lost their husbands in the First World War.
Sturtevant
Duchamp Fresh Widow, 1992-2012
Enamel paint on wood, leather, glass, resin knobs
77 x 51.5 x 10.5 cm (30.31 x 20.28 x 4.13 in)
Although some of her contemporaries were resistant to Sturtevant’s method, Andy Warhol, who himself played with notions of authorship and originality in his own work, embraced it, to the extent that when asked about his own technique, he is said to have quipped: ‘I don’t know. Ask Elaine [Sturtevant].’
SturtevantDouble Marilyn, 2004
Silkscreen on canvas
68 x 42 cm (26.77 x 16.54 in)
Warhol even gave her one of his Flowers silkscreens so that she could repeat it. The resulting works have become some of Sturtevant’s best known, and a monumental 1990 example, which was included in her very first exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais in 1991, is exhibited once again in ZIP ZAP !
Sturtevant
Warhol Flowers, 1990
Warhol Flowers, 1990
Synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas
293.8 x 293.8 x 4 cm (115.67 x 115.67 x 1.57 in)
293.8 x 293.8 x 4 cm (115.67 x 115.67 x 1.57 in)
From the early 1980s onwards, Sturtevant increasingly turned her attention to the next generation of artists. Her 1995 repetition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) consists of a large platform edged with a garland of lightbulbs, which serves as a stage for a live go-go dancer. Sturtevant follows exactly the concept of Gonzalez-Torres’s original: the visitor encounters the dancer by chance, most frequently seeing the platform empty, its lights still lit. The performance itself, therefore, is less important than the fact that the work confronts the viewer with his absence.
By restating the centrality of absence in Gonzalez-Torres’s work in her own repetition, Sturtevant reiterated the interest in absences, gaps and difference that underscores her wider practice. Her approach resonates with the theories put forward by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his early masterwork Difference and Repetition (1968): that the inevitable imperfection of a repetition establishes difference, a distance that simultaneously separates it from and connects it to what it repeats. In repeating the works of other artists, Sturtevant creates difference, in the Deleuzian sense.
The disparities between versions encourage the viewer to look beyond their surface similarities to make, as Sturtevant put it, ‘the leap from image to concept’: instead of something to be taken at face value, the work becomes a catalyst for considering the ‘understructure’ of art. By drawing our attention to that which isn’t, Sturtevant makes us think anew about what is.
SturtevantFelix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1995
Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, wire and go-go dancer in silver lamée bikini and walkman
183 x 183 x 54.5 cm (72.05 x 72.05 x 21.46 in)
Beginning in the 1990s, Sturtevant’s work shifted away from repetitions as such, instead engaging with ‘the zip zap of our digital world with its dangerous potent power’. Her video works interrogate and short-circuit the endlessly repeating imagery of post-internet life in a way that, today, seems more relevant than ever. In Elastic Tango (2010), nine stacked screens run clips of Sturtevant’s previous works alongside a miscellaneous jumble of fragments she recorded from the television: BBC nature documentary footage with cartoons; the ominous mushroom cloud of an explosion with commercials.
Sturtevant
Elastic Tango: A three act play, 2010
HD cam - metallic tape, nine camera video installation 16/9,
installed on an upside down pyramid, RT: 11"
installed on an upside down pyramid, RT: 11"
In her early works, Sturtevant was ‘the first to reverse the modernist direction of creative flow – not from idea to object, but from object to idea’, as Schwartz wrote. In the post-internet world, as Sturtevant explained, ‘it’s moved from an object over image [...] to an image over image’. Responding to this very contemporary set of impositions, Sturtevant’s purpose in her video works is the same as always: ‘to confront, [...] to trigger thinking’, and to assert the power of thought itself.
