Sturtevant Estate I Am Never Am The Other
Powerstation
3816 Commerce Street
Dallas, Texas, Usa
Not an appropriationist, Sturtevant asserts that a “copy” has the “absolute beauty of looking just like the real thing. But copy conceals dangerous gaps.” She situates herself comfortably in these chasms of doubling and re-doubling, exposing the power of thought by way of repetition. Charging toward the not-so-distant past in the production of her “work of a work” (many of her artworks were authored shortly after the source), Sturtevant outpaces the history of her sources into individuation. The objects she creates are things that are not something else, but echo the familiar.
Early in her career, she omits her given name in favor of Sturtevant, a gender-neutral moniker that labels artworks and exhibitions with an exteriority of sameness and an interiority of otherness. The dialectic disrupts assumed structures of power to foreground the “uncertain content” of “pure masculinity and femininity” as theoretical constructions. The question as to how her objects and images should be received, processed and interpreted is never constant but persistently destabilized by its own terms. Taking to task the immediacy of appearance, she transforms the potentiality of embedded content in an artwork into an anxious play of singular/plural identities.
