Sturtevant: L’abécédaire de Deleuze

S is for Sturtevant, the Conceptual artist and postmodernist, whose replicas of works by leading figures of contemporary art challenged notions of authorship and originality. Anticipating the mimetic images of the Pictures generation, Sturtevant began her “repetitions” (she preferred the term to “appropriations”) in the mid-1960s, re-creating works by her contemporaries, many of them male, from memory. Through painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and later video, Sturtevant’s reproductions undermined the institutional and material conditions of the modernist project by questioning the very process of creative expression.

S is also for “style,” one of twenty-six themes explored in “L’abécéd­aire de Gilles Deleuze” (Gilles Delueze, from A to Z), 1988–89, a series of televised interviews between the French philosopher and journalist Claire Parnet that was the inspiration for Sturtevant’s similarly titled video installation recently on view at Shanghai Seminary. Each session of Deleuze’s primer corresponds to a letter in the alphabet—beginning with a (“animal”) and ending with z (“zigzag”)—that Sturtevant recasts as thirteen dialogues prompted by the initials of art-world personalities. For example, French curator Caroline Bourgeois muses about “beauty,” while American curator Sylvia Chivaratanond considers “satisfaction.” L’abécédaire de Deleuze’s presentation here was itsfirst outside Europe, restaging the original installation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, where it premiered in 2012. The more than three-hour video was divided into three segments that ran simultaneously on a trio of monitors placed in front of just as many wooden chairs. Still images of each participant—curators, museum directors, writers, and critics with whom Sturtevant worked closely over the course of her career—were projected onto the gallery’s back wall, creating a strange disconnect between portraits rendered still, large, and iconic and the intimate exchanges unfolding across each screen. 

Recorded in the artist’s studio in Paris (where she lived until her death at the age of eighty-nine in 2014), each dialogue, whether in French or English, shares the same informal, candid style, yet the themes vary. Several use Sturtevant’s practice or Deleuze’s ideas as points of discussion. German curator Beatrix Ruf opens with “rats” then quickly segues to “repetition” in the art world, announcing that she is “fed up” with the concept (with the exception of Sturtevant’s replicas, which she declares are “adventurous and visionary”). American curator Stuart Comer recalls how he first encountered Sturtevant’s work in 1990 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, where the artist was exhibiting her handmade reproductions of Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings,” 1958–60. What follows—ostensibly a section devoted to the letter s—seemed to stumble upon rather than systematically pursue subjects beginning with the letter. This contrasts with segments that are clearly focused, such as French critic and curator Stéphanie Moisdon’s reflections on “Sacher-Masoch” or Deleuze’s writings on “sadomasochism,” and French curator Philippe Vergne’s well-considered thoughts on “puritanism” and the need for a new artistic “vocabulary.”

Less engaging were those interviewees who veer too sharply into the self-referential, among them Swiss curator and critic Bice Curiger, who solipsistically identifies her own curatorial projects related to the letter b. Commencing with the word house, Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also shares a history of his various exhibitions sited in domestic spaces, including one staged in his own kitchen and another in the former summer home of poet Federico García Lorca in Spain. (However, this interlude is enlivened by a cameo of Sturtevant—otherwise absent from view—whose reflection flashes briefly in a mirror leaning on a wall behind Obrist.) Sturtevant biographer Bruce Hainley delivers the longest and most rewarding segment of the series. Invoking the nature of “being,” he wonderfully weaves personal history and commentary on the Iraq War, HIV/AIDS, portraiture, and the future of books in the digital age to consider “how the self appears or disappears.”

L’abécédaire functions a bit like a time capsule, capturing a particular moment in the art world that, through the lens of our political present, now seems somewhat remote. At the same time, it is a reminder of the artist’s prescience. Sturtevant was keenly aware of the power of images in a world increasingly saturated by visual media and information overload. Shifting her focus in the last decade or so of her life to video-based installations and works employing digital technologies, she succeeded in expanding her explorations in replication to ever-newer realms.

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