In our digital age in which we easily appropriate, borrow, copy, cut and paste different materials, from texts to images, often without adding anything new (including comments, completely killing in this way any critical skills we may have...), the work of American artist Sturtevant assumes a different kind of meaning.
Born in Ohio, Sturtevant (Elaine Sturtevant - though she doesn’t like being called with her full name) moved in the ‘60s to New York where, inspired by issues such as originality, authenticity, authorship and intentionality, she started to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by contemporaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol (she even did an entire show using endless copies of Warhol’s "Flowers" series in 1991).
Pop Art mainly dealt with the surface, though, and, wanting to explore also the understructure of art, Sturtevant then moved onto Joseph Beuys and Duchamp and onto further artists such as Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Félix González-Torres.
She became a master in reproducing specific artists who weren’t very famous when she first started “borrowing” their works.
The artist was so accurate in recreating these works that, when a Jasper Johns' flag painting that formed part of Robert Rauschenberg's “Short Circuit” was stolen in 1965, Rauschenberg got her to paint a reproduction of the original work.
As the years passed, Sturtevant began exploring new possibilities, mixing mass-media images with her own filmed materials.
Sturtevant’s works appeared in several exhibitions (she held her first solo exhibition in 1965 in New York) and, in 2011, she received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale.
A new exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (opening next week) celebrates the American artist.
Curated by Fredrik Liew and entitled “Sturtevant: Image Over Image”, the exhibition features around 30 works, ranging from her repetitions of artists such as Warhol, Duchamp, Johns and Gonzalez-Torres, to her most recent large video installations.
The latter include interrelated films that, mixing borrowed images with her own material, address themes such as displacement and linkage, and four works specifically made for this exhibition such as repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s "Fresh Widow" in the Moderna Museet collection.
The title of the exhibition refers to the fact that Sturtevant went from making paintings, so favouring concept over image, to videos, that is favouring “image over image”.
“Sturtevant is a pioneer who, at the age of 82, is at the height of her career," Liew states.
"She was ridiculed when she made her debut in 1965, and no one at the time made the links between her work and a critical discussion of surface, product, copyright and autonomy. Nor did anyone consider what it could mean that a woman artist was repeating the works of male colleagues. But then, her repetitions came before Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Millet and Greer had published their seminal works on these subjects.”
The main aim of the works collected in this exhibition is to cast a critical gaze upon society and its superficiality. As Sturtevant states in the Moderna Museet press release for her exhibition: “What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go.”
“Sturtevant: Image Over Image”, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 17th March 2012 - 26th August 2012
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