Sturtevant at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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While the paintings/drawing provided question of what exactly was being looked at, (How did Hainley put it? What remains of a cancellation?) as occlusion of what was Sturtevant. Against this blindness, cancellation, or hole, after her tennis break she returned with a visual maximalism that was so incredibly alluring. Recall seeing the inverted video pyramid at Gavin Brown - throbbing soundtrack lead in - and, mesmerized, watching the entire length of the video several times. What other art film has done that? Creating a gluttony, a casual technical lucidity that made them so consumable, a sugar image. They invoke an amnesia, the feeling of watching television as children, hours passing. Wake up to find yourself having been entranced by a void.

Sturtevant at Air de Paris

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Literalness in Sturtevant's work is always a sword's doubled edge, a trap  - that many fell into seen in early writing on the artist - literalness was staged obviousness acting as a foreground which blinded with its hamfistedness. The dark thing next to the bright light. Often this blinding was to hide a negation, the hole of the duplicate, Baudrillard speaking about the Twin Towers: "The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any original reference. [...] Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates," never concludes the thought, leaving a question of what happens to a sign that no longer designates, leaving a void. Repetition's semantic satiation feels like what exactly? Does what exactly?
To take Sturtevant literally here, constructing the idea that she wants to "KILL STUPIDITY" where the wallpaper is her declarative and the duplicated video exemplar of stupidity is a trap. The advertisement isn't stupid. What the video does is assimilate a contradiction so well as to negate any distinction between its words, between smart and stupid, to basically make it unthinkable, elegantly producing a negation, a blindspot, what Sturtevant had been predicting for years.


See too: Sturtevant at MoMA, Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac

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Dynamo for so much of the 1960s art world, Oldenburg was also, at times appallingly, no cartoon. (Séance Hannah Wilke.) Did an artist with such psycho-aesthetic investment in the invagination of commercial space ever stop to consider what might happen if, courtesy of a wildly inverting repetition, the phantasmatic derangements of capitalism or branding embroiled in his concession shoppe and its merging of philosophical and commercial notions re-rendezvoused to, vagina dentata-like, bite him in the ass? 

- Bruce Hainley, Under the Sign of [sic]

Sturtevant has extracted a few breathless acts of writing brilliance from those attempting siphoning of the mind's gymnastics ascertaining what, exactly, one sees seeing a Sturtevant. The murky dilute comedy of painting above as example. What one would wish for now is an almost exacting unpackaging of a Sturtevant object, a sort of T.J. Clark vivisection of the animal, dead on the table but understood, a Monsieur Sturtevant's Hat, would be something.

See too : Sturtevant at MoMA

Sturtevant at MoMA

(Sturtevant at MoMA)

It would make sense that Sturtevant’s culminating exhibition would be a bad one. Yet to call the show a disservice amongst an entire career of stop and starts and too-soon brilliance - what Hainley refers to as the artist’s tendency for prolepsis - makes this addendum of an exhibition all the more sadly apt; that to think the work capable of a finality of representation was of course misguided. An artist who in her 70’s began again with a whole new line of work capable of competing with 20’s Berliners in fresh faced zeal, the artist would have been better served outside this dullest of institutions. Yet curator Eleey, always the installation showman, and alongside the artist seems to have smuggled a few time-bombs of white-hot brilliance  into of the dim yellow tendencies of MoMA corporate-hood. An ecstatic video work placed within sight of Starry Night, an act of total historical vertigo, too soon.