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The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) Richard Phelan To cite this

The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) Richard Phelan To cite this version: Richard Phelan. The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014). E-rea - Revue ´ electronique d’´ etudes sur le monde anglophone, Laboratoire d’´ Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone, 2015, Que fait l’image? de l’intericonicit´ e en Am´ erique, 13 (1), <10.4000/erea.4567>. <hal-01313100> HAL Id: hal-01313100 https://hal-amu.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01313100 Submitted on 13 May 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- entiﬁc research documents, whether they are pub- lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destin´ ee au d´ epˆ ot et ` a la diﬀusion de documents scientiﬁques de niveau recherche, publi´ es ou non, ´ emanant des ´ etablissements d’enseignement et de recherche fran¸ cais ou ´ etrangers, des laboratoires publics ou priv´ es. E-rea 13.1 (2015) 1. « Que fait l'image ? De l'intericonicité aux États-Unis » / 2. « Character migration in Anglophone Literature » ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Richard PHELAN The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Avertissement Le contenu de ce site relève de la législation française sur la propriété intellectuelle et est la propriété exclusive de l'éditeur. Les œuvres figurant sur ce site peuvent être consultées et reproduites sur un support papier ou numérique sous réserve qu'elles soient strictement réservées à un usage soit personnel, soit scientifique ou pédagogique excluant toute exploitation commerciale. La reproduction devra obligatoirement mentionner l'éditeur, le nom de la revue, l'auteur et la référence du document. T oute autre reproduction est interdite sauf accord préalable de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Revues.org est un portail de revues en sciences humaines et sociales développé par le Cléo, Centre pour l'édition électronique ouverte (CNRS, EHESS, UP, UAPV). ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Référence électronique Richard PHELAN, « The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) », E-rea [En ligne], 13.1 | 2015, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2015, consulté le 06 mai 2016. URL : http://erea.revues.org/4567 ; DOI : 10.4000/erea.4567 Éditeur : Laboratoire d’études et de recherche sur le monde anglophone http://erea.revues.org http://www.revues.org Document accessible en ligne sur : http://erea.revues.org/4567 Document généré automatiquement le 06 mai 2016. E-rea est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) 2 E-rea, 13.1 | 2015 Richard PHELAN The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) Image 1. Elaine Sturtevant, Felix Gonzalez Torres AMERICA AMERICA, 2004 Light bulbs, rubber light sockets and cords, 12 parts, 20 m with 7.5 m extra cord each. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg and Estate Sturtevant, Paris © Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC 2010. Photo: Pierre Antoine 1 “Works of art are supposed to be timeless and immutable, but as decades pass, they may also change unrecognizably”, writes Robert Rosenblum in Modern American Art (170). Reflecting on his long relationship with the work of Frank Stella, the American critic who accompanied so much of the art of the 20 th century here questions the time necessary to adequately comprehend art which is contemporary to us, and shares his sense that some of a work’s future needs to be experienced in order to look at it fully. How thinking changes seeing, how material sameness can be alloyed to cognitive difference are questions that constitute the very essence of the work of Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who was born in Ohio in 1925 and who died in Paris in 2014. Her case is so extreme, or quasi theoretical, that Sturtevant (as she preferred to be named) could be a protagonist out of Borges, or the embodiment of a conceit by Baudrillard or Barthes. Her work is a challenge for intericonographic studies as it consists in literally redoing that of her contemporaries—in the 1960s a silkscreen painting by Andy Warhol, more recently an installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Images 1 and 4)—remaking them with no apparent differences. Although in the 1980s her work was reassessed within the then- flourishing genre of Appropriation Art, few American museums have dared to purchase her works, unlike those of fellow Appropriationists 1. The present article examines the case of this marginal artist by first considering the historical practice of the copy, a practice whose exasperation she anticipates, then highlighting the determinations of Sturtevant’s repetitions and finally endeavoring to situate the latter’s œuvre within the debate on intericonography. 1. In the beginning was the copy 2 In classical Antiquity, a legend, relayed to us by Pliny the Elder, relates the origin of drawing and painting to a young woman whose example in turn inspired her father to invent clay The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) 3 E-rea, 13.1 | 2015 modelling. The maiden of Corinth traced on a wall the outline of a young man projected there by sunlight or by the light of a candle; she could thus continue to behold the profile of her lover when he would leave for war. Implicit here is the notion of mimesis essential to Western visual tradition: copying direct from the model, copying from nature. In specifically American terms, this is a movement in which the hand follows perhaps that of the supreme artist; “His undefiled works” being the way Thomas Cole, the fabled “American boy” of 1825, spoke of the landscapes of the Hudson River Valley which the adamic American artist attempted to reproduce (Bjelajac 197, 193). The idea of the copy therefore comes from this essential although problematic notion of Nature as model and perhaps that of Nature’s God as teacher. From the outstart, the image would seem to involve a double— although the arithmetic proves to be more complex. As a prelude to Sturtevant, let us therefore propose and examine carefully the unfolding of a sequence: artists copy, artists appropriate, culture appropriates, mass culture massively appropriates appropriations. 1.1. Artists copy 3 Artists copy perhaps in the holistic and programmed manner of children. Copying is learning from the inside; in this way, the artist learns gesture, technique, the plasticity of paint and of materials. In a drawing class, for instance, one copies and recopies the (fe)male nude in clay, in pencil, in pen and ink, in charcoal, on various grains of paper; and through repetition, one’s body learns the requisite breathing, gestures, movement, sequence, and choreography. During the Renaissance, an artist was required to reproduce certain themes like the Annunciation, the Nativity, or Christ in Majesty (Baxandall) 2. Early in their career, medieval and Renaissance artists copied and recopied specific motifs, many of which (the nape of a neck, a fold in a robe…) were learnt from style manuals. Styles, in the larger sense of the word, were also learnt or picked up by emulation—thus with Mannerism (still a new style without a name) at the time of Michelangelo. A distinction can be made between the formal period of apprenticeship (Leonardo, for instance, working in the workshop of Verrocchio) and the continuous learning- by-copying process (Michelangelo visiting the Brancacci chapel to copy Masaccio). We know what Michelangelo made of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve; we are still discovering other remakes such as that in beads by American artist Liza Lou (The Damned, 2004, image 2). The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) 4 E-rea, 13.1 | 2015 Image 2. Liza Lou, The Damned, 2004 Resin, steel, and glass beads, 218.44 x 106.68 x 78.74 cm. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris /Salzburg and Estate Sturtevant, Paris 4 Artists copy the great masters. For centuries, artists would set up their easel and copy at museums; they can still do so every morning at the Louvre; visiting the Prado, one might see someone replicating a Velasquez (and one’s eye might be caught by the play of lances and bayonets between the original and a copy of the Surrender of Breda). James Elkins today takes his students to the Art of Institute of Chicago to understand Monet, Corot and Pollock. To understand Monet, he claims, you have to try to replicate the brushstrokes so that they have the requisite variety and omnidirectionality in order to prevent them from slurring or blurring (Elkins 9-19)—looking and learning, we might say, to put it simply. But it is not simple, in fact; for, in order to see, it is not enough to look, you need to do. This is one of the lessons of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man where the eponymous artist is but one of the characters who needs to perform in order to measure and see the immensity of 9/11 (Phelan “Performing Man” 162-170). The Counter Feats of Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014) 5 E-rea, 13.1 | 2015 1.2. Artists appropriate 5 Artists appropriate, artists borrow. Picasso, for instance, borrowed from almost everybody: Chardin, Corot, Courbet, Cranach, El Greco, Goya, Ingres... Thomas Hart Benton borrowed from Mannerism; and his pupil Pollock borrowed from Picasso. But to become Pollock, the latter stopped uploads/Geographie/ sturtevant-counterfeats.pdf