Sturtevant
For her exhibition “Leaps Jumps and Bumps,” Paris-based artist Sturtevant effectively turned the Serpentine Gallery into a conceptual obstacle course, one in which spectators could easily jump to conclusions about what they saw, only to bump into conflicting information that challenged facile thinking. This strategy was paradigmatically exemplified by the artist’s tactic of repeating works by her peers—here, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She has pursued this approach since the mid-1960s, and in the course of the past ten years it has been rediscovered to great critical acclaim. As ever, Sturtevant’s exhibition was scintillatingly staged. Through peepholes from outside, visitors could see a large-scale, looped video projection of a running dog, Finite Infinite, 2010, while on the other side of the building, the installation Sex Dolls, 2012, exposed them to seventeen inflatables lined up against the gallery’s windows—a perceptual reversal poking fun at the desire for cheap thrills in a simulacral world driven by speed and exhaustion.
Among Sturtevant’s recent exhibitions, “Leaps Jumps and Bumps” stood out for its inclusion of an unprecedentedly large number of videos—nine in all—an often overlooked or misunderstood part of the artist’s work. Their concentrated presentation here revealed their structural diversity and conceptual coherence, both qualities linked to the leap that Sturtevant had made in the mid-1990s by situating her work in a Deleuzian framework of difference and repetition with time as its central theme. At the Serpentine, this leap was perfectly demonstrated by one of her earliest video installations, Dillinger Running Series, 2000, a rotating projection showing the artist striding along to a rhythmic beat. The piece sidelined the obvious issues of resemblance—Sturtevant as Joseph Beuys as John Dillinger—in favor of durational experiences and a strong sense of forward movement. If Dillinger Running Series and as Finite Infinite prompted reflection by virtue of their images’ own visual, sonic, and spatial qualities, other video installations such as, most notably, Elastic Tango, 2010, used the collision of disparate images and sounds to trigger a feeling of irritation not entirely unlike that which came from the juxtaposition of her repetitions of the works of different precursors, as in Warhol Marilyn Diptych, 2004, and Duchamp Fresh Widow, 2012, displayed together on the wall diagonally across. Flipping in rapid succession through a range of found footage that encompassed imagery mostly of violence and excess, punctuated for repose and mental reordering by footage of a dancing couple during the intermission of what was structured as a (nonnarrative) three-act play, Elastic Tango bears witness to how Sturtevant’s concern has increasingly been with a wider social context and her professed aim “to dislocate cybernetics’ pervasive strangulation.”
More compelling than Elastic Tango was its much abridged version, Rock & Rap Act 1, 2012, a video projection of solely the red theater curtain that slides sideways to reveal and conceal by turns the legend ELASTIC TANGO. Watching the quiet movement of the curtain turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable until, as you waited in vain for the next act, it eventually dawned on you that what was really “elastic” was time, or rather the brief intervals between movements that were differentiated by no more than a few seconds. This subtle yet powerful play with expectations was sufficient to keep perception at least temporarily from resuming its habitual rhythm. A deceptively simple yet unsettling work, Rock & Rap Act 1 could be considered an emblematic meditation on the issues of presence and absence that arise within Sturtevant’s practice, one predicated on the refusal of representation and on an assessment of the state of recent art, in which the only remaining mode of resistance to superficiality is thinking about art’s own underlying structures—insofar as thematic content is concerned, essentially a practice of deferral, but one that is still fascinating and deeply challenging.