Sturtevant (Elaine Sturtevant) is one of the most intriguing artists to emerge from the New York art scene in the 1960s. Her copies of works of art by her contemporaries, such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein is often taken as part of the Pop Art movement, but in this slide lecture Dr Michael Paraskos argues that the practice is not really related to Pop Art, it is much closer to the disruptive and anarchistic playfulness of Fluxus than Pop. As a woman artist at a time when the art world was deeply misogynistic, Sturtevant suffered neglect as so many women artists have done. But her appropriation of other artists' work to make her own also led to ridicule and accusations of unoriginality and lack of thought which blighted her career.
3. 3
Figure 3. Doryphoros.
Praxiteles
Aphrodite of Knidos
Original 4th century BC
Roman copy after Praxiteles
There are no verifiable works in the
world made by Praxiteles. All his
sculptures are known either by
references in ancient writings or by
copies made later by Roman
artisans.
4. “Everything that needs to be said has
already been said. But since no one
was listening, everything must be said
again.”
― André Gide
6. Photograph of the Argentine
writer Jorge Luís Borges.
In Borges’s short story Pierre Menard thinks
himself so close to Cervantes, despite the 300
years separating them in time, that he
effectively becomes Cervantes.
Because of this he ends up writing Cervantes’s
novel Don Quixote not by copying the original
text, but through becoming the simulacrum of
the original author.
18. Roy Lichtenstein
Look Mickey
1961
"It occurred to me one day to do something that would appear to be just the same as a
comic book illustration without employing the then current symbols of art: the thick and thin
paint, the calligraphic line and all that had become the hallmark of painting in the 1940s and
'50s. I would make marks that would remind one of a real comic strip.” – Lichtenstein
19. Bob Grant and Bob Totten
Donald Duck Lost and Found
1961
28. Elaine Sturtevant
1924-2014
Born in Lakewood, Ohio.
Studied psychology at the University of Iowa
Later attended art classes at the Art Students League
in New York
29. Art Students League in New York
Major impact on twentieth-century American art.
Artists who studied there included:
Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein,
Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg,
James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly etc.
30. Elaine Sturtevant
1924-2014
Born in Lakewood, Ohio.
Studied psychology at the University of Iowa
Later attended art classes at the Art Students League
in New York
She was born Elaine Frances Horan, becoming Elaine
Sturtevant after marrying Ira Sturtevant.
34. According to Sturtevant:
“If you go back before the pop artists, you have the
abstract expressionists, who were obsessed with the
idea of creating a new imagery, and it was really an
obsession to create something new. And then when
you had the pop artists, and they came up with
incredibly startling, forthright, dynamic imagery, it
was a further step in that direction, but it was still
concerned with imagery. That seemed to me rather
at, because it’s limiting if you are only involved with
creating an image.”Elaine Sturtevant
Johns’s Flag
1965
36. Reviewing the Bianchini Gallery
exhibition in Artforum in 1965 Max
Kozloff dismissed her work for its lack
of originality, complained about its
‘disingenuousness’ and deemed it ‘the
most pathetic advertisement of an
artist’s apartness from herself that [he
had] seen – but otherwise a fairly
typical straw in the wind’.
42. Photograph of The Store of Claes
Oldenburg by Elaine Sturtevant
1967
“Claes Oldenburg who was one of my
biggest supporters and who
theoretically understood the work.
Then I did his Store, and he became
enraged.”
Sturtevant
43. “Mr. Herron’s work, by reproducing the exact appearance of
Frank Stella’s entire oeuvre, nevertheless introduces new
content and a new concept . . . that is precluded in the work
of Mr. Stella, i.e., the denial of originality.”
“Cheryl Bernstein”
45. Sturtevant in the catalogue to her
exhibition at MoMA, New York,
1971
I am not Anti-Art
I am not saying anyone can do it
I am not “poking fun at the artist”
I am not “reporting the current scene”
I am not in the process of celebrating process
I am not making copies
I am not making imitations
I am not interested in painting sculptures or objects
I am not interested in being a “Great Artist”
That’s real medieval thinking.
47. FLUXUS Fluxus was announced by the
Lithuanian-born artist
George Maciunas (1931-1978) in 1963
Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, in
Düsseldorf.
“(Fluxus seeks to) purge the world of
bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual',
professional & commercialized culture
... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY
FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, ... promote
NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all
peoples, not only critics, dilettantes
and professionals ... FUSE the cadres
of cultural, social & political
revolutionaries into united front &
action.”
FLUXUS
48. FLUXUS Fluxus was announced by the
Lithuanian-born artist
George Maciunas (1931-1978) in 1963
Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, in
Düsseldorf.
The early phase of Fluxus, often called
Proto-Fluxus, began in 1959 when a
group of artists who had met in John
Cage's class at The New School formed
the New York Audio Visual Group.
This group provided venues for
experimental and performance art.
FLUXUS
54. Three Seascapes (1961) a dance solo in three
parts, with each section exploring a different type
of relationship between movement and sound.
Part 1: Wearing a black overcoat, Rainer runs in a
pedestrian trot around the perimeter of the stage
to the last three minutes of Rachmaninoff's Piano
Concerto No. 2, occasionally lying down in a
scrunched up position on her side.
Part 2: Rainer moves slowly across the space,
moving her body in undulating spasms.
Part 3: Rainer screamed wildly and thrashed
around with a black overcoat and twenty yards of
white tulle.
Yvonne Rainer
56. “Elaine Sturtevant assumes a unique position of
making her work the work of other artists. Having
simulated the techniques and images of some well-
known Pop artists, she here undertook a dance project
in the form of a “Study for Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Three
Seascapes.’” Her tempo and serious deadpan of the
first section—running around in an overcoat and
occasionally lying down (to Rachmaninoff) seemed just
right.
“She wisely abbreviated the screaming of the third
section and the middle section, originally a difficult,
intentionally awkward slow motion walk across stage,
with undulating pelvis and plastic irregularities of
hands moving at the head, became a rather painfully
awkward version of awkwardness as executed by a
non-dancer. Which is okay I think (why not?) and
simply puts the movement into another (awkward)
dimension.”
Jill Johnson
57. I am not Anti-Art
I am not saying anyone can do it
I am not “poking fun at the artist”
I am not “reporting the current scene”
I am not in the process of celebrating process
I am not making copies
I am not making imitations
I am not interested in painting sculptures or objects
I am not interested in being a “Great Artist”
That’s real medieval thinking.
Sturtevant in the catalogue to her exhibition at
MoMA, New York
1971
NO to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
Yvonne Rainer
No Manifesto
1965
58. NO to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
Yvonne Rainer
No Manifesto
1965
59. In the face of hostility from some in the art
world and deliberate sidelining of her by the
art press in 1974 Sturtevant effectively gave
up art and withdrew from the art scene.
60. Sherrie Levine
After Walker Evans: 1
1981
In the meantime a
new generation of
artists emerged who
rejected all
concepts of
originality, known
as the Pictures
Generation.
Their art was based
on the
appropriation of
other artists’ images
64. Audrey Flack
The Kennedy Motorcade, 1964
This trend started with Photorealist
painters like Audrey Flack
65. Left: Walker Evans, Alabama
Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936
Right: Sherrie Levine, After
Walker Evans, 1981
Levine’s photographs are
analogous to photorealist
painting – like photorealist
photographs.
66. Sturtevant
Lichtenstein Crying Girl
1966
Roy Lichtenstein
Crying Girl
1963
Perhaps these images by Sturtevant are
photorealist paintings and prints of other paintings
and prints?
67. Installation view of the
exhibition Sturtevant,
Bianchini Gallery, New York,
1965
“The appropriationists were
really about the loss of
originality and I was about
the power of thought. A very
big difference.”
68. Elaine Sturtevant
Lichtenstein Crying Girl
1966
‘The multiplication of things under an absolutely
identical concept has as its consequence the
division of the concept into absolutely identical
things.’
Gilles Deleuze
Différence et Répétition
(1968: Difference and Repetition)
69. Photograph of the Argentine
writer Jorge Luís Borges.
In Borges’s short story Pierre Menard thinks
himself so close to Cervantes, despite the 300
years separating them in time, that he
effectively becomes Cervantes.
Because of this he ends up writing Cervantes’s
novel Don Quixote not by copying the original
text, but through becoming the simulacrum of
the original author.