Transcript
Speaker: Elaine Scarry's 1999 book on beauty and being just begins with this passage. What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?
Speaker: It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.
Speaker: Beauty brings copies of itself into being. On Beauty and Being Just is an idiosyncratic book, most famous, I think, as an inspiration for Zadie Smith, who shortened Scary's title and used it for her third novel, On Beauty, which was published in 2005.
Speaker: It's sort of a funny fate for the title of a scholarly book to find its way into a more popular work like this. It's sort of an example of what Bob Dylan calls love and theft. But in a way, we might take it as a kind of corroboration of Scary's point about copying. It's not just beautiful boys or flowers or birds that can inspire the urge for replication. Sometimes a beautiful idea can do the same.
Speaker: For it's worth, I'm not particularly convinced by the argument of Scary's book. But I do think there's something wild and fascinating about the notion that beauty is basically an incitement to make copies. But anyway, the reason I've been thinking about Scary's particular version of beauty actually doesn't have anything to do with the content of her book.
Speaker: Instead, I find myself taken with a weird little aspect of its form. What I find fascinating is the fact that when Scary talks about a series of paintings by Henri Matisse that she finds beautiful, she doesn't include, as one might expect, especially in a book from a well-heeled Ivy League press, photo reproductions of the paintings.
Speaker: Instead, she puts in what I can only assume are her own hand-drawn reproductions of them. Her eye saw something beautiful, and her hand decided to draw it. Maybe I'm all wrong about these sketches and where they come from, but I can't help but find the image of Scary carefully drawing the palm trees in a painting as she contemplates their beauty really delightful. It makes me think about the difference between writing about something that captures your attention and drawing it.
Speaker: Both might be ways of replicating something that matters to us, but my sense is that we tend to value the intellectual seriousness of the first more than the second. Anyway, Elaine's scary and beauty are both pretty far removed from today's conversation, except for the fact that I seem to be Elaine-maxing, because on today's episode of Some Marvelous Experience, I'll be talking to two brilliant writers, critics, and editors, Rainer Hamilton and Shiv Kotecha, about the work of the conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant.
Speaker: Sturtevant is famous, though not as famous as she should be, for works that she started producing in the 1960s that precisely recreate the works of other artists. The chief example we'll be talking about today is Sturdivant's Fresh Widow, which is her 1992 reproduction of a work originally produced by Marcel Duchamp in 1920.
Speaker: Sturdivant recreated the art of minifigures, and Duchamp was clearly a crucial inspiration, but most of the works that she replicated were by her contemporaries. I think she's possibly most associated with Andy Warhol.
Speaker: The cover image for the exhibition catalog for her 2014 MoMA show is her version of Warhol's flowers, for instance. Apparently at one point, someone asked Warhol for specific details about how he made his silkscreen images, and his response was just to shrug and say, I don't know, ask Elaine.
Speaker: What Warhol was recognizing with this comment was something that might easily get left out of people's understanding of what Sturdivant was up to. It could seem, when she makes her own version of a Warhol or a Frank Stella or a Rauschenberg, that what she's doing is a kind of conceptual prank, an act of appropriation or even theft, a comment that's fundamentally a critique of the institution of art or whatever.
Speaker: All of that is relevant and certainly part of why Sturdivant matters. But Warhol is nodding to the fact that Sturdivant's reproductions are also testaments to the depth of knowledge she developed about the works that she was making, the amount of care that she devoted to them.
Speaker: In order to make her own art from the work of other artists, she ended up knowing those other artists' work even better than they did themselves. Despite the conceptual nature of what she's doing, in other words, there's something almost devotional on the level of process and material about the act of copying that she engages.
Speaker: If nothing else, it becomes a way of spending time with something that matters to her, a way of affording it a particular kind of sustaining attention. This aspect of Sturdivant's process wasn't something I'd really thought about before talking to Shiv and Rayner about the way that Sturdivant's work, which they more or less discovered right at the moment they were getting to know one another, served as an important occasion for friendship.
Speaker: One way of thinking about what Sturdivant is doing is that she's modeling a way to relate to the world, to ideas, to style, to other people. A way that doesn't get hung up on recognition.
Speaker: And in that way, it's sort of a model for one kind of friendship, or at least for one way of making other people and their ideas, styles, practices a part of your own life.
Speaker: It's a way of taking both ideas and the material that's right in front of your face seriously, which is a difficult thing and a good practice for taking people seriously as well.
Speaker: Obviously, Duchamp's Fresh Widow is a kind of exception to this, but it's interesting that many of Sturtevant's works were devoted to recreating the art of her contemporaries, and that many of those were her friends.
Speaker: The fact that many of those artists, too, were also gay men, and that when she returned after a long hiatus to making these reproductions in the 80s and 90s, she was doing so in the context of the AIDS crisis and the collective mourning that went along with it.
Speaker: All of that deepens the significance of her acts of replication. It's like her work was a commitment to keeping the moment of perception alive, something that's even more poignant when we recognize that that attention was being directed to people that mattered to her.
Speaker: To be clear, it's a little perverse to read Sturdivant's career through the lens of friendship. The art world's response to what she was doing often seemed to be neglect, if not outright hostility. And Sturdivant herself, who was very guarded about her personal life, definitely understood her project as centering on concepts, not people.
Speaker: But I think that this just underlines how generative the space is between a concept and its implementation, and maybe how much of what really matters exists within that space. Because part of what is so powerful about a concept, say, or an idea, what's powerful about a procedure that you use to write a poem, is that you can give it to someone else without losing it yourself.
Speaker: Or even, someone else can take it from you without taking it from you. Of course, not everyone is going to feel good about this gesture, but that doesn't change the fact that this kind of copying can be a form of friendship, and not just a form of theft.
Speaker: At any rate, I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Rainer and Shiv about Sturdivant's Duchamp Fresh Widow.
Speaker: I'm really glad for this opportunity, especially to kind of, um ah perhaps we'll get into it in another order as we start talking, but I feel like I took this as an opportunity to somewhat fictionalize our friendship and that maybe Sturdivant is like the repress content, but we haven't actually spent much time talking about Sturdivant, even though I know we both love her.
Speaker: um And so there's been a weird way of seeing in preparing for this how much she was there through the last... It's like footprints. Sturdivant was carrying you. Exactly.
Speaker: Well, let's go. I mean, we can go ahead and get started. ah so I haven't um really met either of you, um ah but I had a sense just based on reading your work that your friendship is a kind of um crucial part of your intellectual and psychic lives.
Speaker: um And it's interesting to me because that sort of feel, um you know, that that my relationship to your relationship is a little bit like ah my relationship reading a New York school poem where there's like some sense that there's some friendship um that feels like an important part of the poetry that, you know, i I don't really have any access to, but nonetheless, I have like a parasocial attachment to. um So maybe we could just get started by, you could tell us a little bit about your, um about your friendship and the way it's a part of your intellectual and creative life and psychic life in general. I don't know, but ah maybe that would be a place to start.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good place to start. um There are so many ways to answer this question, including chronology. um But I don't know, Rainer, if you want to start.
Speaker: um I'm not always the best at years, but my sense is that we met in 2013, 2014. And
Speaker: and didn't become close until 2015, right before you moved to Berlin. And then I went through a really dramatic breakup and found myself living alone in an apartment I couldn't afford. And i called Shiv in Berlin and was like, do you want to live with me when you come back to the country?
Speaker: um And Shiv moved in and then we lived together for ah seven or eight years. And those years were the years in which ah most of my published work was, was written. And often initially, like God was right. And the switch and the awful truth were sort of all written or finished at the same desk in a tiny closet office with like both of us and a cat and a litter box sort of stacked on top of one another. so it's, it's toxoplasmosis coded.
Speaker: Exactly. Yeah. um And we moved a few times in that living together. We lived in three apartments or so. And That's a sort of straight chronology of it, but I feel like for the work itself, there was something we met in a moment where we were both really invested in bad ways and in generative and fun ways in some idea of conceptual writing.
Speaker: what what What promise conceptual art might have for writing? And I think that in each other, we found a better way of looking at that question that made it possible to make work we cared about.
Speaker: would you would Would you agree with that, Shiv? Yeah, i would I definitely agree with that. I think that like um the question of conceptual writing, I think, is something that I was interested in from, um I think, long before I met you, Rainer, but with great skepticism, which is to say, i knew that I was really interested in a kind of procedural mode of working and in sort of a general program with which to turn the object on its head or to like look at, ah to, to, to, to really think about the ways in which I wanted to make writing that works in certain ways against um the imposition of identity, for instance. And um conceptual writing provided me
Speaker: ah ah a great deal of ways to actually think about that question and to make work, um, with that in mind. But, um, it was always with, um, a sort of arm's length that I, I sort of kept it. And I think with Rayner, um, and maybe with Stridevant, um, I found, uh, two people that maybe had the same skepticism I did. Um, and,
Speaker: that was not some, that was not a sort of rejection, but a kind of use, like actually thinking through that material further and taking it even more seriously to kind of incorporate it incorporate it in my own work, um, with like an attention to its limits or something like that.
Speaker: But, you know, I, I think Rainer, you're right. We met around 2013, 14, I'm not mistaken, you came to a reading of mine in, Brooklyn and i was already a fan of your work. Um, and you smoked cigarettes then. So, ah it gave me opportunity to talk to you. Um, and, um,
Speaker: It wasn't, yeah, it wasn't until the few months before I left for Berlin um in the spring of 2015, I think, that we started hanging out more regularly. um And I think at that time also sharing work pretty much right away.
Speaker: um You were working on a novel and I was working on a long poem. um And we sent one another 10 pages um of what we were working on every Sunday.
Speaker: and sometimes that required, that required, that warranted like reading on either one of our parts or even commenting or giving feedback, but mostly not. It was just a way of both staying in touch and knowing that something was possible, uh, i.e. writing.
Speaker: Um, when I was in Berlin, I also went through a shitty breakup. Um, and I feel like ah you, you, you carried me through that by way of text message as well. Um, and,
Speaker: And yeah, in the subsequent years, I think i i it was it was really learning that my writing could also incorporate not only whatever kind of quote unquote conceptual procedures or histories or something that I was interested in, but actually think about ah my lived experience, i.e. living with you as a way of documentation, as a way of sort of thinking about reenactment of relationships, which um is something I'm still interested in in doing in my writing.
Speaker: Part of what's interesting about what you're already saying is that there's some there's something that entering into a project of some kind of conceptual writing with someone else ah can be generative in a way that maybe um ah doing it in isolation isn't. And I don't think people necessarily who aren't um who haven't thought a lot about these things would connect any kind of conceptual work with sociality or relationality or or friendship.
Speaker: What you're describing is a kind of is a friendship that made some kind of conceptuality possible, and maybe in a certain way, a kind of, you know, a procedure that helped become an occasion for friendship on the other side as well.
Speaker: Yeah, i I think on the general level, the condition of like loving and being loved is really generative. It's a lot easier to write something because someone in the same room wants you to than to write something because you've asked yourself to.
Speaker: And then on the specific level, i felt like the contemporary moment we were trying to write into was one that was generative in some of these ways we've mentioned, but also really prohibitive. There was a sense that to write about identity, whether that was gender, sexuality, race, was somehow...
Speaker: conservative. ah There was a sense that to even be interested in one's own life in the way that some of the inherent, like, the mayor was, was to again take on a rather conservative posture. And in each other, I think we found, like, a love for work that defied that, and also a little bit of permission to be like, what if there is something interesting in what's happening to me and what I'm experiencing? And what if,
Speaker: trying to leave that outside of the set of things, an idea or a concept can be applied to is actually the conservative gesture. Yeah. I mean, I think that I, um, it was a, a, maybe a license to use, um, things from one's own experience by way or with the kind of technique of appropriation or the technique of, um, something more mannered than expression. Um, and so, uh,
Speaker: like a simple text exchange between us could be reframed as a kind of courtly dialogue. And that was an interesting kind of way of dealing with the rejection by way of writing.
Speaker: um So it just, I mean, there was just a sort of, um I guess, an allowance. And as Rainer said, I think that was really at the root of that is just having like sharing a home with someone I really loved and, um, sharing this and going to like, you know, multiple poetry readings and talking about them, um, every week all the time and, and reading similar books.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, actually articulating, I think for ourselves, what was interesting and what wasn't and making some of those claims about what actually was conservative, um,
Speaker: for our own part. I think also an invitation to be a little...
Speaker: want to find a way to describe this without seeming like there's any sort of like unnamed person i'm i'm I'm secretly trying to talk shit about, which is really not true, but i think we had a shared sense that we had made ourselves smaller in a number of ways because of the perceived or real desires that writers or editors or lovers or the general people who were deciding what mattered and either dominant or experimental literary scenes and uh there was a i there was none of that impulse in our relationship there was no sense to defer or to take oneself less seriously or to set aside an impulse and take someone else's ideas as our own there was a um
Speaker: there was room to step more fully into one's own mind in that relationship than there was in any other aesthetic or even like friendship-based relationship I was in at the time.
Speaker: I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this. so there's something really powerful about recognizing that a kind of procedural work or conceptual work ah can be occasioned by love or other kinds of feelings and not just intellection or not just, um you know, not just um ah thinking.
Speaker: There's something about the move away from expression as being the organizing principle of art that almost necessitates a kind of sociability. Then the kind of ways in which your um writing gets created and circulated, specific audiences it ah is made for and exists within, like does become even more important so that it's not an accident that this kind of writing is something that exists in a certain kind of scene or in a certain kind of, against a certain kind of relational backdrop.
Speaker: uh you know in a way that's kind of the the point of this sort of avant-gardeism if you know we could call it that like you you need other people ah in order for this kind of work to to make sense yeah i would add to that too that i think a lot of the
Speaker: process-based work or work that's kind of obsessively repetitive and a gesture always feels to me extremely emotional emotional because it feels ah a set of coping strategies applied over and over again in the most neurotic way. Like I think Shiv's The Switch is a great example of this. An obedience residency manual as well. But there's um there's a sense that you can do this, even the thing that's meant to be cold. i'm This is not a conceptual poem, but one of the references that we share in common is Shlowski's Zoo or Letters Not About Love.
Speaker: there's the rule that the letter can be about anything but not about love. And of course they become much more intensely romantic for that prohibition. um But I also agree that there's the other thing where if you're going to write not in a gesture of sort of refusal, you have a sort of easier access doing it alone. It's easier to imagine a person working in solitude, and making work that,
Speaker: um has a happier relationship to tradition. if you're going to try to say no to some tradition, you sort of need other people to join you in them. I mean, to me it's also like a question of like, I don't know, reading about the way certain works are like shared or circulated in the first place, which is to say like a lot of the works that maybe I would include within the kind of like moment of conceptual writing in the sixty s and 70s were like collected within zero to nine. And that those volumes were also like,
Speaker: like Vito and Bernadette like took the pages and then sort of wrote some of their own stuff on top of them and then bound it together and sent it out to a group of friends. So there was like a sense that there was like, that these things were actually always sort of relational, even if they were sort of, uh, did they, they supposed a kind of coldness or a sort of, um, strict philosophical, import. It was always sort of,
Speaker: written in transaction with other people in a way. The other thing about this kind of writing that um maybe goes without saying based on our conversation thus far is that there there does seem to be a really interesting relationship between conceptual writing and conceptual art um and visual art in particular, or maybe not especially visual, visual art.
Speaker: um And so maybe we can transition ah to Sturtevant as, you know, ah have the sort of secret presence in your um ah in your relationship all along. It does sound like um there was so there was a MoMA ah exhibition in 2014, think.
Speaker: um ah which would have sounds like that was also around the same time that you met. So maybe there really is a ah narrative here that's worth ah worth exploring. But can you tell us a little bit about about your first initial encounter with this work?
Speaker: I think it was that show, at least for me. I mean, I think, Rainer, you may have gone there first. And I followed you. Well, like you told me about it um and what Stuart Avant was up to. um It was Double Trouble at MoMA. I think it was 2014.
Speaker: um And I very quickly had to go see it myself. um and had did not know about Sturtevant before that moment um and had an opportunity to see you know her ah repetitions um of Duchamp, which we'll talk about a little later, I think, um but also Warhol, all of the sort of pop artists. I don't remember if that show had the like Felix Gonzalez-Torres in it. um but it's something I've been reading about more recently as preparing for this conversation. um
Speaker: And ah so that was in 2014, but then in 2015, Rainer came to visit me, well, came to Berlin and I was there and we hung out.
Speaker: And one of the ways we hung out was we went to the Hamburger Bonhoff to go see esteron a Sturtevant exhibition that was on view there. And I think that's where um my where I actually really started to understand what the work was about um beyond maybe a kind of provocatorial like um market flipping or something like this, um that maybe was maybe my first read of the work, like, um ha ha, what what is she up to here repeating these works?
Speaker: um that That exhibition of the Hamburger Bonhoff was mostly her drawings. And so you got a really intense and comprehensive view of the um the actual work that went into and and the time spent um in in learning how to make a John's flag or how to make a Lichtenstein or how to make a Warhol. Yeah.
Speaker: um So it wasn't really about, and I think that like both of these things I associate with um my um early understanding of conceptual writing and what's possible within that, which is this sort of gesture, however, kind of loaded or empty as being kind of, um,
Speaker: having an sort of aesthetics to it, um as well as maybe, I guess, the more procedural or labor-oriented, what is maybe sometimes, was sometimes kind of siloed by terms like boredom or something like this, but what I have always thought of as being kind of like devotional, or as Rainer put it, like actually super emotionally charged um gestures.
Speaker: And there was a way of maybe actually seeing how, And the sort of, in sort of, like, in in looking at the drawings, how Surtavan's interest in all of the figures that she was, quote, appropriating to make her own works. I
Speaker: know that. um, was something to do with learning their technique and actually fully understanding it.
Speaker: And the kind of maybe sort of, um, the way in which that technique is able to produce an effect in the object that's made afterward, um, that helps you not just look at it, but think about the original in a, in a very sort of puzzling, crazy way.
Speaker: Um, Yeah. ah So that's, I mean, this is, this is how I'm sort of thinking about that thing 12-ish years ago.
Speaker: Yeah. Both of these shows came at really like an interesting moment for each of us as writers and as new friends. And it's also hard for me not to see them in relationship to the Duchamp exhibit that's up at MoMA right now, um which makes a similar gesture.
Speaker: yeah, Yeah, the MoMA show Double Trouble, it was the most famous of Sturtevant's works. It was the most recognizable. And so you were really seeing the end result of successful acts of repetition, which drew more or less attention to the amount of work it took to get those exactly right. But it was still a focus on um how close...
Speaker: her execution could be to the original, but without necessarily an emphasis on that process. And the show at the Hamburger Bonhoeff, was it i I remember it hitting us both that um to make Stradivant's work, you had to actually have an extreme commitment to learning how to master a wide variety of aesthetic techniques, and you had to have a lot of affection for and interest in the work.
Speaker: And... thinking about that reshaped my own relationship to the impulses. I think at the time I felt a little bit embarrassed by like whatever part of me still really wanted to learn how to write a beautiful sentence I thought was at odds with the more intellectual commitments I had rather than the means of executing them There is a way of looking at it that showed the sort of training that goes into making a work of art that in the end might be what um Duchamp would have called non-retinal or she would have called non-visual work of art where the would work of art.
Speaker: result of the work of art as a thought in the viewer rather than simply something their eye receives. But there's, it still takes a lot of skill and curiosity about the visual element to produce that thought.
Speaker: And I think I was leaving that part out in my own sort of trying to train myself to make the work I wanted to make. And then the Duchamp show at MoMA right now is similarly wonderful in that it begins with,
Speaker: his teenage paintings. You get to see what he was doing with his paintings of his dad when he's a little kid. And it's all presented as, in the way that biography can always be kind of retroactively falsified, but there's something persuasive in seeing a lot of these earlier works as as related to the intervention he's making in art as the ready-mades. And then one of the reasons that Shiva and I chose this artwork, Sturdivant's Duchamp Fresh Widow, 1992,
Speaker: nineteen ninety two is that the work that she's making a copy of, which is, we should describe it, um it's either one or a set of seven or a set of 12, depending on how displayed. But the the fundamental part of the work is a window um in a wooden frame painted this kind of teal, French door style.
Speaker: um Fresh widow in the title is a pun on French walls. window. um And each window has eight panes of glass, all of which have been covered in black leather. And Duchamp's original has printed on the bottom in English, Fresh Widow, copyright Rose Celebi, 1920.
Speaker: So Shiv, you brought this up that one of the things that's interesting about this, one of the reasons we liked it is that it's not a ready-made Yeah. I mean, I think actually, you know, and I was thinking about sort of mentioning this earlier um before we got on this call about like how maybe Sturtevant says a ready-made in a way that Duchamp's isn't. But, um you know, Duchamp had the the ready-mades that were like just objects that are sort of co-opted into becoming art object. And then there's like
Speaker: ah other sorts of ready-mades, I think, that are... um
Speaker: that are ah maybe like an everyday object that then is sort of treated by Duchamp in certain ways. And then the object is complete. This one is interesting because it's also ah an object that he had outsourced to someone else um to produce.
Speaker: ah So he, this is, he makes... He makes the first, um I don't know, I guess he wouldn't call it a prototype, but the first object is made in 1920 when he's leaving Buenos Aires for Paris via New York.
Speaker: And he has an American carpenter make a um make make fresh widow. um So there's, I think, a lot of strange levels of displacement and um production of the non-functional within that.
Speaker: instruction or within that sort of, um, manufacturer, which is to say that, um, unlike French windows, which are mass produced and like resist a particular kind of copyright. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's a housing fixture in a certain way. He's at, he's asking this carpenter to make a smaller version. It's like a reduced size version of the window, um and to produce it with,
Speaker: these sort of leather, um, these opaque leather coverings on where the windows would be. Um, and, uh, you know, I think that like, it's also the first work that i he signs as, with Rose Salavi. Um,
Speaker: In 1964, which happens to be the same year that, um, Warhol's Brillo boxes comes out, uh, which is like another work that like the original object kind of looks better than the the thing you find in the grocery store kind of thing.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: uh, there's like, I think a series of these widows made. Um, and so there, he was, he was thinking about this project, I think at multiple points in his career. And I'm not sure how much that has to do with Sturtevant's interest in the object.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, the original has the sort of, uh,
Speaker: it's it's a It's a thing that he makes with other people, um which is one maybe one element of it. It's also something that has um the title of the work, the insistence on the copyright of it, which I find really kind of crazy. And the the signature, Rose Salavi.
Speaker: In 1964, he adds a gold plaque that says Duchamp on it. So there is like multiple signatory kind of markers. Yeah. which I think of course maybe all might appeal to Sturdivant along with the kind of rejection of a kind of um visual or perceptual schema of looking at the work by way of the leather, um which of course occludes vision in a kind of literal way.
Speaker: um It's an interesting, I mean, I think Duchamp as many artists saw were like, within modernism, I guess, like interested in the window and what the kind of canvas as window could produce. I mean, ah I think that there's there's like a, there's many people that we could sort of name here.
Speaker: um ah But like, he was also working with windows um with works like the the large window, at the bride, et cetera. And so this is a, this is a, it's a strange Duchamp, I i think. um And ah I don't want to call it a minor one because I don't think it is, but it's also one that's not, um I think importantly, not fully representative of the artist's work, as I understand it.
Speaker: Do we know, so then in 1992, Sturdivant creates another instance of this, do we know, did Duchamp, did she have access to Duchamp's instructions or was it just a kind of reverse engineering where um she, you know, just recreated it based on ah based on her a study of it?
Speaker: That's a good question that I have not found the answer to, actually. i don't know, Rainer, if you... i I wasn't able to find that either. I think
Speaker: i think that she had access to Duchamp's description of the instructions that he gave to his opener. But even on that level, I don't, didn't see her repetition of that. Like Duchamp sort of adorably says that he wants, um, the leather to be polished. like a shoe and And, um, she doesn't say that perhaps because by 1992 people are no longer polishing their shoes every day.
Speaker: But there's a sense of, um, but I do think it's interesting that she's copying, the 1921 and not the 1960s one. The gold plate with Duchamp does not appear. And when we were talking about this, we were deciding what to what to choose as the artwork to represent our friendship or some such. We were thinking about, Shiv brought up, that um it's difficult with widow in the title to not see for Duchamp, the widows of World War I, and for Sturdivant, the widows among her friends who are losing their loved ones to the AIDS crisis.
Speaker: And then, yeah, and there's also the leather covering the windows is very morning-coded, I feel like, as well. Yeah, it's it's it's very morning. I mean, leather also is, like, a gay signifier. Most assertifonts, mean, at least the people she's most known for working alongside and hanging out with seem to be gay men.
Speaker: um Almost all of them. Yeah, like, did you know anyone who wasn't a gay man is a question I was asking myself. as i But, like, i mean, around the same time as she makes...
Speaker: Duchamp's Fresh Widow. She also makes work by Robert Gober. um She's making work by Felix Gonzalez. She's making stradavants that resemble these other people's work.
Speaker: um And there's, I mean, yeah. so i mean For both, I think, bouch Duchamp and for stradavant, the kind of concept of memorial, a mourning, is ah is a really kind of also ah not for me like an intuitive concept affective zone for them to go to.
Speaker: And I think that like in maybe these, the late works that she makes ah between the eighties and like kind of in the two thousands that, or at least in the early nineties, mourning becomes like actually maybe a sort of,
Speaker: she'd hate this, but like observable thematic in, in, in what's being made. um Well, makes me think of of one of you that earlier had described the kind of attention that's necessary to work like this as being devotional in some way. um ah And there does seem to be um a degree to which just the kind of attention that's necessary to recreate something um ah is um I don't know almost like a powerfully ritual act. Like you really have to know something so well to be able to reproduce it, um, so that it can have ah a kind of, um, uh, you know, an emotional, uh, dimension of a kind of coping strategy or a kind of way of carrying something into the future.
Speaker: i mean, that's ah especially the case for something like the, the Felix Gonzalez Torres or where you really are, um, you know, uh, showing a kind of devotion to something by carrying it into the future and, and, and not, um, sort of refusing to, to let its existence be a, um, something that's over.
Speaker: listen i think there's another element too, where in, in different ways, both Duchamp and Sturdivant are interested in how to make work with the gestures they're making without accidentally reducing it to a sort of reification of the artist as someone with good taste.
Speaker: And it could seem like Duchamp, mean, that Sturdemant's in a special danger of that since she seems to mostly be making work that shares a lot in common with work she likes a lot.
Speaker: And I feel like the, um but she escapes the gesture common to appropriation art where what the artist is credited for is a particularly savvy act of recontextualization.
Speaker: The artist like notices of this image that seems to be ah more mute in its non-art context suddenly can communicate an idea when just like re-described as art.
Speaker: And she doesn't even do what Duchamp does with, for example, like the Mona Lisa with the mustache, which is a sort of like, um all false are eb though like i'm I'm, I'm, I know better. I can poke fun at this like monolith of,
Speaker: are It's instead like a strangely lateral move of really getting to know and repeating the work of near contemporaries for whom she has a lot of respect and with whom she has a lot in common, which i feel like um it's an interesting relationship of the importance of her own decision making in in the choice of the works.
Speaker: Yeah, the near contemporary, I hadn't really thought about that, but the, the, the fact that she's doing it with art that's, um, contemporary or or near contemporary anyway, ah is in and of itself really fascinating, uh, and quite different than, you know, an act of recreating canonical works from, ah you know, a hundred years ago or something, um, that it does seem like it's a kind of, um, uh, uh,
Speaker: like a commitment to the present in a way or um a way of ah of affording a kind of um a kind of attention that's often ah only directed towards the past at the present moment.
Speaker: And to sort of say, you know, ah that one's colleagues are um suitable objects for this kind of for this kind of gesture.
Speaker: like that seems like a, another affectively, uh, charged gesture to make. who When she was working with her friends, right?
Speaker: I think all of these gay men and they were, they they're, they're all men, right? Specifically. I think that these these, like Warhol made her a screen print to, to make her own work.
Speaker: Um, Rauschenberg, uh, produce this sort of conditions for which her John's flag, I think first appeared. And so there are these kinds of, uh, like actually, how do I think, how do I take my friend's work more seriously?
Speaker: Um, it's actually learning about them from within, um, or like what's underneath the work, um, to figure out how, what, like what it's actually, what it's, uh, visual effects are and what they contain. um which is again a kind of like slant away from like the, uh, away from the artist herself toward a different sort of kind of making, um,
Speaker: That seems interesting, too, in relationship to at least some of these figures like Warhol, where the effect of the process um seems to really consolidate a a sense of the um the the sort of style of the of the artist itself.
Speaker: ah Where, you know, that the the the silk screen, even though it doesn't involve ah that much of Warhol's own kind of specific manual labor or any, you know, brushwork or that sort of thing. Like, it still reads as Warhol, ah where Sturdivant is, like, explicitly trying to create work that that doesn't...
Speaker: I don't know. I guess maybe what I'm asking, is there a recognizable Sturdivant style um ah that we could identify in these works? ah Or is it work that completely escapes um that kind of author function or whatever we want to call it?
Speaker: mean, I guess maybe this is how I was thinking of your describing the work earlier, Rainer, as kind of um later producing a kind of lateral relationship to the source, which is to say like, um and this is these are Sirdo and Fon's words, but I think that she says her project is about catalytic recognizability, so which is to say recognizability is maybe just the sort of first moment of a thought that moves both forward and back.
Speaker: Um, and what happens in that process is that, uh, art history is revealed not as something that's particularly, um, vertical or historical as we would normally think about it, but something that is, um, uh, is the right word? Synchronic, um, or something horizontal, um, or something that happens like simultaneously to other things. Yeah.
Speaker: That's really interesting. But, like, also, I mean, we might even think about this in the way that, like, like a longer artist longer art history is also one of... ah full chock full of copyists everywhere. Right. Copying what it's there.
Speaker: And, like that's like, that sort of, like, even... I don't know, pre-modern, renaissance, like, and you name it, like, copyists are kind of everywhere, except for, like, the 20th century. There are these kinds of inflated ideas about the artist or the author the the signature being kind of key to understanding and maybe alongside that style.
Speaker: And I think what... one sort of, like i don't know, really sort of crucial thing that Sturnevant's works do is um place me in a moment before that modernist maybe impulse um or or or or the ah rather, maybe not the impulse, the stranglehold of like authorship.
Speaker: Yeah, this is all, haven't tried to articulate it clearly in a long time, but when I was in graduate school, the thing that I was writing about was how something like a single author style reemerges in works made by procedures that ought to prevent it, whether it's because there's a act of collage or repetition or quotation or a chance scrambling, the fact that people seem that there does seem to be something like a recognizable start of in style when that seems like it should be impossible.
Speaker: And to get there, you have to look at a bunch of different competing ideas of style, which are more or less connected to the idea of the individual author, whether that's like Sontag's sense of style as an act of will, um or others' idea of style as something like that sounds like a person or that has a brushstroke that can be identified to authenticate.
Speaker: But and as an idea of recognition, it doesn't have to be instant recognition. And I think a lot of what it means to learn how to look at art is to learn a new set of things to recognize. Like if you were to look at Duchamp's Fresh Widow, for example, and you had never heard of Marcel Duchamp and you also hadn't heard of Alain Sturdivant, there would still be something you could recognize in it, right? There would still be something to be done with it. You would not be able to successfully get a the answer to the question, what is Alain Sturdivant's style?
Speaker: You also wouldn't be able to get to the question, what is Marcel Duchamp's style? and you wouldn't be able to talk about stylistic periods, but you would probably still be able to get to, if you spent time thinking about it, a lot of ideas about perception, opacity, and decision-making that are important to all of those things from looking at the work on its own.
Speaker: And the question I think is one of which shorthands are functioning or not functioning. um I think that a lot of people mistook Sturtevant's work as kind of negative, cynical, institutional critique because they thought the gesture was like, ugh, this is only art because you know Duchamp signed it, but if I sign it too, show you the falseness in that. But I think that that's an idea you can only come to about her work if you spend no time looking at it. If you read about it as a gesture, but don't have to spend time with the object. And the object itself demands a kind of...
Speaker: attention to detail that I think gets us at an idea of style that's recognizable as related to idea or cognition or, um this even older school sense of aesthetics is something that happens to the viewer.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I think that like, she is, she's learning the sort of techniques of her friends, but, she's not sort of, she's, she's figuring out a way in which art is, is like way more than the technique or way more than any motif even. um And by more, I'm not sure exactly what I mean, but that it's, that the work is extremely material rather, and, and that it's made and you can see the ways that it's made and those ways are,
Speaker: in in paying attention to that, you might come to an understanding of how, like how to overcome your reliance on looking at motifs or something.
Speaker: Uh, and there, there's, there's like, I'm something that happens to you there as, as a harder thing to define and maybe subjective experience or something like that. Um,
Speaker: but it is she in, in writing about what she wants her repetitions to produce, she uses the word bad buzz a few times. And I really like this. Um, don't know if I can find, uh, you can reject what you're looking at, but it sits in your head like a bad buzz.
Speaker: Um, and I think that kind of, um, uh, the this disjunction between our reliance or a desire to see something like style and what happens when we, when you see a Sturdivant is like simultaneously extremely material. And, uh, and maybe because I saw that drawing show actually, um, with you Rainer.
Speaker: Do we have a sense um of how her work, is it plausible to locate a change that happens with the AIDS crisis?
Speaker: um She stops making work in the 70s and then comes back to it in like 84. Or she stops showing any work. but She does that again later, right? She takes a break from like 2004 to 2018. I think there's a couple of times where she just stops making work because she...
Speaker: is furious about the critical understanding of it. And she's also completely, she does she doesn't really reveal much about her biography, right? Or her personal relationships at all.
Speaker: Right. She was very adamant that if people had access to that information, they would use it to misread them. right um And it's it's like when she talks about her, quote, comeback in the 80s, she talks about being...
Speaker: both the sort of um the the stupidity of, but also how cool it is to be seen as a progenitor of appropriation art, which was then like post pictures generation becoming like something that could be recognized or understood within at least the American art world. right So I'm not really ah hundred percent sure um what the answer to your question is in regard to this, like,
Speaker: but but But the answer to your question is, except for the fact that, like, you know, I guess all of the men that she's making work, some of the men that she's making work, ah repetitions of at that in that period, the late 80s and early 90s, are making work about collective mourning.
Speaker: There's one description which doesn't also also doesn't answer your question, but um i Bruce Hanley is my favorite writer on Duchamp. And also after I read After I...
Speaker: Saad Duchamp's work was introduced to his writing altogether because of his book, Under the Sign of Sick, which Samir Teh put out. Okay, so there's this there's this moment that Hanley has in his um memorial for Sturtevant that was published in Artform.
Speaker: I read it this morning. I know it's BDS, but I i did it anyway because it was pre-2023.
Speaker: There's one exhibition of Fresh Widow that happened in London Benny Reynolds Gallery in 2006. And I think, Rainer, when we were together the other night and you were looking at that image of Fresh Widow kind of lit up in a kind of black box, this was that exhibition. the one side was hanging across from each other. This is Bruce.
Speaker: was um Duchamp Fresh Widow from 92, on the other side, two Warhol Black Maryland's, come which were also sort of unswerks.
Speaker: And he says, the way that Widow lit her Maryland's was so generous and the way the Maryland's became, the and the way the Maryland's were were so glamorous that they rejected that glow.
Speaker: A dialogue that now becomes an essential clue leading to her new location, the exquisite and off-limits territory between light and dark. That exquisite off-limits territory, I think is what, I think he's referring to her being dead, actually, right at that moment.
Speaker: But I'm really compelled by this sort of presentation of the work as being sort of lit up in a black box because this sort of artifice of it suggests that the windows might act like a mirror, and yet they, as as the placement of the works alongside the Maryland's, suggest that that mirror doesn't work.
Speaker: So an artist like Sturdivant is someone who... um it's very easy to read a description of what she's doing and come away with a particular ah understanding of what it is, which is that, you know, a kind of appropriation that is um taking art, specifically art, often art that's procedural to begin with, or that is organized around an idea and sort of taking the idea um and making your own art with it.
Speaker: But in a way, um you know part of what this work seems to be about is about the way that ideas can be shared or concepts can be shared or procedures can be shared. ah And you can you know you can absorb or reproduce or take in some sense ah the idea of a work of art that comes from a friend of yours That's a way of um that's like a model of friendship, not a model of it's not a transaction.
Speaker: Right. When you influence a friend, even intellectually, right, when there's an idea that you um introduce to someone.
Speaker: it then becomes like a buzz in their head that they carry around with them forever, you know? And so it's not a a kind of one-and-done model of um importing things and having possession of them, but it's really a way of relating to that person, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Speaker: The sort of beauty of a concept might be that you can take it from me, but we can still both have it. And so it's a model of sharing rather than a model of of transfer.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think especially because doesn't have to all be roses, right? Like, I'm sure that some of her contemporaries did not like the what she was doing.
Speaker: But no one suffered on account of it, despite, I think, in the contemporary moment, no one imagined what would happen to an Elaine's Territivan. And people are obsessed with the idea that they've somehow been personally wronged if someone, like, quotes them without sufficient attribution.
Speaker: But, um... I think one of the reasons her work is hard to understand retroactively, at least what I was remembering when reading about this before of this conversation, was that she anticipates a lot of people's fame before it happens. Like, a lot of art critics are confused by the fact that Sturdivant seemed to choose almost exclusively people's work to reproduce who become sort of retroactive icons in a period where others didn't survive. And it certainly isn't because of her intervention. She was not a tastemaker in that sense. She was, as the most women artists were,
Speaker: overlooked more than she was, looked too, but she was able to make what might be called replicas or copies or homages to all these artists who in in no way suffered from that gesture. they're the the The idea was so not used up, but it was able to serve two totally different purposes. and that was true whether or not the artist was hostile to or friendly with the gesture.
Speaker: but don't think i have anything to add
