Sturtevant at 100: It Can Take a Long Time to Understand What Is Seen

Michael Lobel: On occasions like a centenary, the usual inclination is to highlight and celebrate the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the individual being honored. But, in preparing for our conversation about Sturtevant, for her centenary this month, I was struck by how ironic that was, given how much she put into sidestepping or challenging the image of herself as a singular artist. That’s certainly the case with her Duchamp After Man Ray Portrait (1966), a version of which is now in MoMA’s collection, in which she restaged a famous photograph Man Ray took of Marcel Duchamp slathered in shaving cream. There’s a kind of double erasure going on here, with Sturtevant submerging herself in the existing pose of Duchamp, who had obscured his own face: a disguise hidden behind yet another disguise, in effect. I think both of us come into this conversation wanting to highlight the contributions of an artist whose work we believe didn’t get its due during her lifetime; but, at the same time, how much is that laudatory intent undercut by her own strategies of absenting and self-effacement?

Bruce Hainley: She was no shrinking violet! When you and I first met Sturtevant, in Los Angeles in early 2001, for dinner at the then very new, very hip, and very “LA” Standard Hotel on Sunset, she was magisterially wrapped in what I always think of as her “Beuys” coat. A special guest of the Getty Research Institute, she provided so many lessons in how to move through the world—generously, but with no time for suffering fools. During a Q&A after her lecture, a supposedly eminent art historian delivered what she thought would be a skewering quizzing of the artist. Elaine turned to us and said, sotto voce but aware of a hot mic, “Is it just me or was that a really stupid question?” She brimmed with élan. Or Elaine.

BH: The narratives around Sturtevant’s work changed or coalesced when she returned to exhibiting in 1986 with her survey at White Columns in New York, after a break of more than a decade. (She said she was “playing tennis and carrying on” and in artistic “silent red alert”; one rumor is that she worked as a psychotherapist, which, given her aesthetic psych-outs, is delicious.) The press release for Sturtevant, which ran from February 5 to March 1, 1986, vouched for her work by emphasizing her relationships with other artists: “At last we are beginning to understand why Warhol lent her his Marilyn silk-screens…why Rauschenberg collaborated time after time with her…and why Duchamp attended her counter-creation of his ‘RELACHE’.” The Warhol anecdote first appears in the printed record in 1989, in the interview for the Journal of Contemporary Art between Sturtevant and Bill Arning, who was then director of White Columns. Perhaps it’s worth quoting in full:

Bill Arning: I would like to ask for the record the reaction of some of the original artists. What was Warhol’s reaction?

Sturtevant: Warhol was very Warhol. “Wow Elaine,” and he gave me the screen for the flower. Then I told him that I wanted to do the Marilyn. I went to his loft, a huge place full of silk screens. His assistant told me to take whatever Marilyn I wanted. I was in there for two hours, going through hundreds of screens, no bloody Marilyn. When I saw Andy he said, “Oh, wow, oh, wow, I didn’t know that, I thought it was in there.” I said, “Oh, wow, Andy, oh, wow.”

I decided to find the original Hollywood still, one chance in a million and I found it, I took it to Andy’s silk screen man and it was perfect. A Warhol screen from my photo which was his photo.

Later at some social thing, some guy is asking Andy all these questions, “How do you do that? How do you do this?” And he answers, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine.”¹

This is about as close to a description of her methods as there is, and it emphasizes the ecology of any given artistic community. “For the record” suggests that these stories about her relationships with other artists were in circulation before they were recorded, some of them, perhaps, neatened a bit. I feel certain you have your own way of reading this account, perhaps a way to locate it more exactingly.

ML: To some extent this gets us back to our sense of a slow drip of new information, one that over time has changed our sense of the history and reception of Sturtevant’s art. In this case, that would pertain to a letter I came across recently, one written by poet John Giorno to Rauschenberg, when the two were an item in the 1960s. It was early February 1967, and Giorno had just attended a party at Claes and Patty Oldenburg’s loft in Rauschenberg’s absence. It sounds like it had been a wild night—Giorno described it as “8 parties going simultaneously”—with dancing and drinking and plenty of art-world luminaries in attendance, including Warhol, curator Sam Wagstaff, and curator and eternal gadfly Henry Geldzahler. And Sturtevant as well. Here’s what Giorno recorded, in that letter soon after the event, about her exchange with Warhol: “She told Andy how she couldn’t do his Marilyns and he said ‘Oh Elaine, bring your screens to the factory and I’ll help you with it.’”²

These sorts of first-person accounts tend to be given primacy in art history. But this one has me scratching my head, since from what we know Sturtevant had already made at least a few Warhol Marilyn silkscreens by 1965—or at least that is what’s recorded in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. So I’m left wondering how we square Giorno’s anecdote with the existing chronology of Sturtevant’s working practice. In other words, why would she have been soliciting Warhol’s advice if she’d already begun making those works some two years earlier?

BH: That traffic in art and ideas between Europe and the US makes me think that some intrepid curator should see fit to bring home from Paris one of her most unbelievable and unbelievably American works, House of Horrors (2010), finally making an exhibition centered on that full-scale, blockbuster, spooky house ride, maybe with a single Warhol Black Marilyn, hanging on owl wallpaper, watching her fans waiting to climb aboard the ghost train.