Elaine Sturtevant, artist provocateur, famous for her exact copies of well known artists, is having a large solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where she is presenting her newest work: Elastic Tango and House of Horrors.
Knowledge and thinking are power, the power to look beyond the surface. How this is done remains the most interesting question. Elaine Sturtevant (b. 1930, Lakewood, Ohio) tells us a lot about this power of art – or virtual force waiting to become actualised in particular works – in her own writings, which have been collected for publication on the occasion of the exhibition The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking at ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.1 Looking at Sturtevant’s work through the lens of her writing leads to an understanding of both as a manifestation of thinking, or as she says, ‘Thinking while making objects. Thinking while writing.’2 This in turn requires the viewer/reader to pay particular attention to her use of language and images as the means to create concepts. The invisible force of art is that it does not represent, imitate, resemble; it does not recount or reflect on; it is thinking and knowledge but always in movement, and in becoming. Sturtevant’s work is articulation and syntax as ‘a set of necessary detours that one created in each case to reveal the life of things’.3 The life of things is a world based on differentiation in opposition to sameness. This vision of the world, we are told by Gilles Deleuze through Henri Bergson, can only be attained by placing the intellectual process against the illusion of experience. And here we recognize Sturtevant’s idea of the ‘brutal truth’: that her work is not copy, as it may seem if we stay on the level of the visual, but on the contrary embodies this very idea of difference.
Sturtevant has indeed been incessantly questioning the relationship between the inside and the outside, the interior and the exterior, through Foucault’s concept of the fold. In the early 1960s, Sturtevant started to remake the works of artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg or Lichtenstein soon after these works were produced, and before they reached critical acclaim. She continued challenging the limits of the concept of originality during the following decades, replicating works by Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella or Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The exhibition in Paris will present examples of such works, including Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America) (2004) or Stella Union Pacific (1989). Sturtevant’s proposition is that thinking is provoked by going beyond what lies on the surface of ‘to see’ and probing the understructure of art.
Beyond the replica, but presently through her use of video in works such as Dillinger Running Series (2000) or Infinite Exhaustion (2007), Sturtevant’s work continues to perform a leap from image to concept and the articulation of visibilities, which is the force. According to Deleuze, philosophy is not concerned with reflecting on but with the creation of concepts, not about reflecting but about creating (the principle of life as a whole). For Sturtevant, the exhibition is in that sense never retrospective (as in looking back) but pure creation of new thinking, as singular as the individuals that engage with her radical propositions.
'Repetition is a breath-taking
conceptual idea that has greatly
pushed the limitation of resemblance;
holding the higher powers of
non-identity and difference.
Its presence has narrowed the gap
between visibilities and articulation.4
For her exhibition in Paris, Sturtevant created a large-scale new work titled House of Horrors, taking the shape of a ghost train, the traditional funfair entertainment. This reminded me of a few other lines in Sturtevant’s text:
'Spectators, which brings to mind
gladiators being eaten alive by lions,
only demand entertainment.
Thus, seeing is only perception
and hearing is only a distraction.'5
While thinking about Sturtevant’s scary attraction, a travelling through artistic and cinematic icons of horror, such as Frankenstein, I found out about Hollywood’s Universal Studios own House of Horrors, a ride with the scariest characters of American horror films. ‘If they can’t scare you, maybe you’re already dead,’ suggested the trailer on the Internet. The House of Horrors brings to my mind the idea of laughter; a laughter that follows the expected event of a sudden fright when taken on a ride on the ghost train. With her House of Horrors, Sturtevant continues to perform the dynamics of repetition and difference. But what happens through fright and laughter in Sturtevant’s work? Is it the satirical power of caricature? Or the genuine desire to make the viewer experience pure laughter, as Jean-Luc Nancy describes it: ‘Laughter is the joy of art and language at the most extreme – of art as the limit of language, of language as the limit of art’?6
In November 2008 at Tate Modern, Sturtevant staged a short play titled Spinoza in Las Vegas. This performance conceived for the theatre revolved around a dialogue between Sturtevant aka Spinoza, and a male character called ‘the Ventriloquist’. This dialogue, simultaneously rehearsal and performance, was combined with sequences of images on screen (a two-dimensional décor suited to our cybernetic age), and interrupted by numerous entertaining acts (a rapper lip-synching to Ludacris’s Money Maker, a transvestite dancing on and around a pink moon and singing along Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, and a chorus line of teeny-boppers, among others), which all contributed to the construction of Sturtevant’s performance-essay. Through a bold and humorous mind game and role-play, Sturtevant placed Spinoza’s philosophical concerns within our contemporary ideological and cultural context.
S (Sturtevant/Spinoza): I’m not picking on Spinoza, I’m putting him on the line.
V (Ventriloquist): You are hanging him up in Las Vegas?
S: Very dangerous.
V: Poor Spinoza. Why are you doing this?
S: If you want to slice open the head, take on Spinoza.
Infinite space for thinking
Don’t worry, he has the time of his life…7
In the script, the Ventriloquist points out that Sturtevant does not look like Spinoza. But she replies that this is about interior and mental structures – as opposed to exterior and physical resemblance. This use of role-play by Sturtevant has nothing to do with performing identity, and we should not read much in the gender binary – Sturtevant as woman, Spinoza as man. What is at stake here in Sturtevant’s use of spectacle and performance, which is quite different.
Giorgio Agamben argues that capitalism, through the use of spectacle, has taken away people’s ability to be empowered by their own language as a means of producing ‘social memory’ and ‘social communication’. He states: ‘The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.’8
Spinoza in Las Vegas uses the spectacle as a device to turn its traditional aim on its head. This is not done through form – Spinoza in Las Vegas embraces the form of the spectacle – but through language and the intellectual process: ‘Try to remember that this is a mind game’ says Sturtevant to the Ventriloquist. Sturtevant’s eccentric fable offers to the viewer an insider’s look into what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘the cool universe of digitality’.9 Yet Sturtevant draws very different conclusions than Baudrillard on the issue of cybernetics, and the play proves just that. If she shares with Baudrillard his observation of the world as obsessed with simulacra and the surface of images, it is clear that Sturtevant believes in the ability of art to produce a different discourse through images, and to re-empower the viewer with his own subjectivity by giving him a ‘vast new space for thinking’.10
At the beginning of the play, Sturtevant refers to Michel Foucault in a dialogue between the Ventriloquist and the Dummy:
D: Knowledge is to cut.
V: To cut?
D: You know, knowledge is not for understanding but for cutting.
(…)
D: Listen smarty, Foucault, Michel Foucault.
He’s the ‘to cut’, not the cutting.
V: And the ‘cutting’?
D: Do you know that ‘très fuck you artist’ Sturtevant?
V: For sure…
D: She’s the cutting.
‘Cutting’ seems to be bound to discontinuity and Sturtevant’s idea of a movement of ‘jumps and bumps’, joining Foucault in his attempt to urge for a redefinition of the task of the historian in contemporary thinking: ‘It is as if it was particularly difficult in the history in which men retrace their own ideas and their own knowledge, to formulate a general theory of discontinuity, of series, of limits, unities, specific orders, and differentiated autonomies and dependences.11 Foucault describes ‘a particular repugnance to conceiving of difference, to describing separations and dispersions, to dissociating the reassuring form of the identical’.12 By taking Spinoza to Las Vegas, Sturtevant performs this dissociation or displacement in an extreme fashion, not ‘afraid to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought’.13 In that sense, Sturtevant does not cease to surprise the viewer, exploring terrains that are constantly renewed, always reinventing new conditions for the experience of art. Her world of art is without limitations, as excessive and transgressive as the real world within which she creates her works. She also sometimes slows down the movement, changing pacing and rhythm, to open again a radically different space. Vertical Monad (2008) – a recent work that will be presented again in Paris – consists of a room whose walls and carpet flooring are of the Payne’s grey colour, where sits a plasma screen on a plinth. The screen displays the same monochromatic grey and makes us hear a masculine voice, continuously reciting in Latin the entirety of Spinoza’s The Ethics (1677). Although the Spinoza of Vertical Monad and the one of Spinoza in Las Vegas suggest two extremely different movements and rhythms, they nevertheless belong to the same event of thinking, a thinking of difference, opposition, reversal and displacement, characteristic of Sturtevant’s challenging practice.
Vanessa Desclaux is an independent curator and writer based in London
The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking
ARC/ Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
5 February through 25 April
1. The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking, published by ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and JRP Ringier.
2. Conversation with the artist by email, November 2009.
3. Gilles Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', Critical Inquiry 23, Winter 1997.
4. In ‘Inherent Vice and Vice Versa’: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/07autumn/sturtevant.htm
5. Ibid.
6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death, MLN, Vol. 102, n°4, French Issue (Sep. 1987).
7. Extract of the screenplay for Spinoza in Las Vegas (2008).
8. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990), University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
9. ‘The Hyper-Realism of Simulation’, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford, 1988; originally published in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976).
10. Conversation with the artist by email, November 2009
11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Routledge, 1972. Introduction.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
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