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. “The brutal truth of the work is that it is not copying,” she said in a statement prepared for a public dialogue last spring with art historian Michael Lobel at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in connection with a survey of her work there. “The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamic is that it throws out representation.” The vehemence and the knotty, epigrammatic style are Sturtevant trademarks. So is the casuistically hair-splitting attention to terminology; Lobel insisted on her behalf 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.
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.” (1) 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.” (2) The feeling seems to have been mutual. Sturtevant’s withdrawal from the art world soon followed.
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. In the ’80s, appropriation was generally considered, rather amnesiacally, as a novel expression of two newly paired forces: a bull market and an image glut. Of course Pop itself had been in part a response to essentially identical conditions, a booming economy and the proliferation of mass-media imagery. But for artists of the ’80s, recently translated French theories of a reality vitiated by consumer imagery were the source most frequently footnoted. Not that attention to domestic intellectual history was altogether lacking. The catalogue essay Thomas Crow wrote for the 1986 exhibition “Endgame” (at the Boston ICA), an important event–and text–for the then ascendant neo-appropriators, begins with reference to the pseudonymous critic Cheryl Bernstein. In the early ’70s, “Bernstein” had invented an artist named Hank Herron, a dead ringer for Sturtevant (whom neither “Bernstein” nor Crow acknowledged). “The death of the author as it has been postulated by Barthes and Foucault, the triumph of the simulacrum asserted by Baudrillard, are ideas that enjoy wide currency among younger artists and critics in the mid-eighties,” Crow wrote. “Despite her older theoretical terminology, however, these ideas are fully present in Cheryl Bernstein as well.” (3) And, he might have said, in Sturtevant.
In fact, in a 1996 survey of the art of the 1960s, Crow did cite Sturtevant, crediting her with lending support to Conceptualist challenges against the “seductive visual packaging of painting or sculpture” by reducing it to “pure redundancy.” He calls her work “a tautology that released a potent surplus of meaning into the world, immaterial but inseparable from visual means.” (4) Along similar lines, Sturtevant said in 2004, “My work is the immediacy of an apparent content being denied.” (5) But she is also sharply
observant of distinctions between her own motives and those of apparently similarly inclined artists of the ’80s: “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.” (6) Perversely but persuasively, Sturtevant casts appropriation as a form of transpersonal heroism.