Sturtevant

“Double Trouble” makes for a rare experience. Not only is it the first solo institutional presentation of Sturtevant in the United States since a small 1973 show in Syracuse, New York, it also allows one to see the artist’s work at the museum that holds many of the so-called iconic pieces that she has used as her working material: On one floor you stumble upon Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow, 1920, a reduced scale French window, where the name of the artists’ female alter ego Rose Sélavy is inscribed as COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920 at the base of the piece, while in another gallery seven of these glasses have been lined up on a black wall (Sturtevant’s Duchamp Fresh Widow, 1992/2012). There is wallpaper with human genitalia on one floor (Sturtevant’s Gober Genital Wallpaper and Gober Drain, 1994/95), which is also on view as part of Robert Gober’s retrospective on the first floor. One encounters “Warhol,” “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” “Joseph Beuys,” “Stella,” among others, it’s as if all are actors cast in a play staged by Sturtevant.

Long before it was a household term, appropriation was, for Sturtevant, simply another word for a brush creating what she refers to as a “total structure,” which is perhaps the institution of art, its social context, and its politics, as well as the narrative of twentieth-century art that the Museum of Modern Art has actively participated in constructing since the institution’s inception in 1929. This, then, is a show that has been at MoMA for a long time, though it has remained invisible. Sturtevant flipped the Duchampian coin and put a disco ball in front of the readymade gesture. She wanted to make an “artwork that could disappear,” but one that aimed to expose the discourse of art from within.