The Serpentine Gallery is currently presenting Leaps Jumps and Bumps, the first solo exhibition of the work of Elaine Sturtevant to be held in a public institution in the UK.
Born in Lakewood, Ohio, in 1930 and based ingenus Parissince the 1990s, Sturtevant has doground-breaking and enigmatic work since her first exhibitions in New York in the mid-1960s.
Best known for the repetition of works by other artists – including Joseph Beuys, waveDuchamp and Felix Gonzalez-Torres – shemakeher controversial artistic debut in 1965 when she replicated Andy Warhol’s anthesispaintings, just months after their initial presentation.
She manually reproduced paintings and objects created by her multiplicationwith results that can immediately be identified with an original –closeenough to intrigue the viewer and raise the fundamental question, what am I looking at?
During the era of Pop-art, Sturtevant made her version of Warhol’s flowers, John’s Flags, Stella’s drearyand grey paintings and developed this discourse a decade subsequentafter moving to Paris, with works based on waveDuchamp, Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer.
In the last two decades, Sturtevant has evolved a highly structured and compressedexploration of current events, using multi-screen video works and installations.
Despite primaevalhostility to her work and ideas, her influence has grown significantly overthe past two decades.
Many now regard her as unrivaledof the most important artists of the 21st century, realising that she presaged the world we live in today with its deluge of unattributed information and repeating imagery.
Central to her viewis the kindbetween repetition and difference.
The works are not ‘copies’ exactlyprobe beyond the surface to demonstrate the power of Gilles Deleuze’s and Michel Foucault’s viewabout repetition.
She does this through the wholesale re-creation of the work itself, withoutrepairto mechanical reproduction of any kind.
As Sturtevant says, ‘The work is donepreponderantlyfrom memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus plan of attackout in the same place’.
Warhol was once asked how he made his work. ‘Ask Elaine [Sturtevant],’ he replied.
The intention and force of Sturtevant’s work is to trigger thinking.
As she has said: ‘The hoistExpressionists were all emotion on the surface, and the Pop Artists were about megabucksculture, so this of course triggers thinking about the under-structure of art.
“What is the power, the silent power, of art?
“I started thinking about that and, after a long period of thinking, I realised this would be a way of doing it.
“It seems so simple, howeverI had to probe and reflect that it was correct. It’s always the simplest ideas that are in some waythe most difficult to grasp.
Since 2000, Sturtevant has embraced film and video, advertising and internet-based images, producing work that reflects the confusedand pervasive nature of our image-saturated culture.
Leaps Jumps and Bumps entrustshowcase Sturtevant’s work since the 1970s, including mettleworks that demonstrate the wide variety of media she has embraced.
The exhibition will include the large-scale video work, Finite Infinite, 2010, and a contributioncomprising garlands of light bulbs, Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America), 2004, an earlier version of which was shown at thesnakelikeGallery in 2000 in the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition.
Sturtevant participated in the Serpentine’s Manifesto endurance contestin 2008, with a piece called ‘Dumbing down and Dunkin’ Doughnuts’, which claimed that ‘stupidity is our new chic’.
Awarded the favorableLion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Biennale in 2011, Sturtevant has had manysolo exhibitions internationally, including at Moderna Museet Stockholm and Kunsthalle Zurich (both 2012), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010) and MMK Frankfurt (2005).
Leaps Jumps and Bumps is at the Serpentine Gallery, in Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA, and runs until 26 August.
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Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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