under cover ladies night wallpaper: The artist Elaine Sturtevant's fastidious repetitions

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'Strangely absent from most histories of Pop and Conceptualism, Elaine Sturtevant's work has important ramifications for the understanding of both movements. It is as if Sturtevant, with a radical pragmatism, observed and considered so intensely the art of her contemporaries that her gaze burned through to its core.' -- Bruce Hainley, Frieze

'Sturtevant makes copies of art works, but she is no copyist. She appropriates, but is not an Appropriationist. She was a renegade female artist, but not a feminist. So what is this artist sine qua non all about? Is she illustrating Baudrillard’s sense of the simulacrum, or denuding Deleuze’s thinking on difference and repetition? Is she challenging or upholding the aura of the artwork in an age of reproduction? Perhaps a Proustian sense of memory, of ‘seeing again’, lies behind it all. Or perhaps Sturtevant is working against the empiricists, eliminating the possibility of ‘seeing’ altogether. After all, it would seem that the crooked stick of humanity has never quite gone beyond the idea that ‘seeing is believing’.' -- Elizabeth Lamm

From Friday February 5th to Sunday April 25th 2010
Elaine Sturtevant - The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

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After Sturtevant: Five 80s 'appropriation' artists

Sherrie Levine

Richard Prince

Mike Bidlo

Louise Lawler

Jeff Koons

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The other truth: some 20 years before the appropriationists of the 1980s, Sturtevant was making replicas of iconic works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns and others, extracting meanings that were very much her own

'There is a delicious absurdity in being first among simulators. But Elaine Sturtevant, no epicure, would never describe herself that way. Sturtevant insists that the proper word for her practice is "repetition," not copying, or appropriation, or anything else. Whatever term you use, the fact is that Sturtevant--she goes by one name only--was uncannily making replicas of other artists' paintings and sculptures as early as 1964, when she created Warhol flowers almost contemporaneously with his originals, then went on, in short order, to Johns flags, Lichtenstein comics, Stella pinstripes and Duchamp readymades. ...

Sturtevant 'Warhol Flowers', 1964

Sturtevant 'John Flag Painting', 1964

Sturtevant 'Stella Black Stripes', 1965

Sturtevant 'Lichtenstein Hot Dog', 1965/66

Sturtevant 'Warhol Marilyn Monroes', 1965

Sturtevant 'Duchamp Bicycle Wheel', 1965

'The flowers appeared in Sturtevant's first solo show, in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery in New York, and the story goes that Warhol, tickled by her attentiveness, loaned her the services of his silkscreen maker so she could extend the series. In fact when asked long afterward about how he made the flowers, he is said to have replied, "I don't know. Ask Elaine." Such bonhomie lasted only a few years. "Originally most of her artistic peers supported her work," reported curator Christian Leigh. "The climate began to shift when, in April 1967, she repeated The Store of Claes Oldenburg a few blocks from his own. By the mid-70s, what had at first been laughed at and appreciated for all the wrong reasons ... quickly turned to anger, rage, mistrust, and misunderstanding on a collective scale." The feeling seems to have been mutual. Sturtevant's withdrawal from the art world soon followed. ...

Sturtevant 'Oldenburg Store Object Pie Case', 1967

Sturtevant 'Beuys Walk', 1971

Sturtevant 'Duchamp Wanted', 1972

Sturtevant 'Duchamp Eau & Gaz', 1970

Sturtevant 'Dillinger Running Films', 1976

'But with the widespread interest in simulation that arose in the 1980s, Sturtevant's paintings and sculptures, not seen in a group show between 1967 and 1985, nor in a solo show from 1974 until 1986, began to circulate again. They were included in a 1985 exhibition called "The Art of Appropriation" at the Alternative Museum and, the following year, in "Production Re: Production," curated by Bob Nickas for Gallery 345 in New York. Sturtevant's work appeared in nearly a dozen more group exhibitions before the decade ended. "My work is the immediacy of an apparent content being denied. The dynamic difference was that Sherrie Levine, leading the pack, brilliantly used the copy as a political strategy, whereas the force of my work lies in the premise that thought is power.... [O]ur pervasive cybernetic mode ... plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self." ...

Sturtevant 'Gonzalez Torres Untitled (Light Strings)', 1993

Sturtevant 'Gonzalez Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1995

Sturtevant 'Sex Films', 1996

Sturtevant 'Stella White Stripes', 1987

Sturtevant 'Duchamp Bottle Rack & Rotor Relief', 1988

'Now finding a new audience, 20 years after its first return, Sturtevant's work "is first and foremost an act of love, as is the case with plagiarists everywhere," says Bernard Blistene, the curator of 'The Brutal Truth', the first major retrospective of her work, held at the Museum fur Kunst Moderne in Frankfurt in 2004. The references Blistene goes on to invoke include Thierry de Duve (for his concept of the readymade as an indexical image), Mallarme (for the notion of the "replay"), and Gilles Deleuze and Jean Francois Lyotard (for what they call "intensities"), as well as Bergson, Proust and Nietzsche, among others. Finally, in a reference to a writer who was influentially active when Sturtevant embarked on her career, Blistene cites Harold Rosenberg, for his typically piquant remark: "Art is collective ownership from which the individual is authorized to extract as much as he can use."' -- Nancy Princenthal, Art in America