"When Sturtevant presented her repetitions – including Warhol’s flowers – in her first solo show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1965, she was met with incomprehension, reproach and indignation. Her works were understood superficially as copies. However, in repeating works, Sturtevant wanted to open up the space behind them, to initiate a critical discussion about the surface, the product, the copyright and the autonomy and the silent power of art. Warhol himself, who blithely left behind the debates about the original and reproduction and rendered the principle of uniqueness obsolete, made an original screen available to her for her flower series. With her works she also anticipated Gilles Deleuze’s ideas about difference and repetition in his 1968 book of the same name. In addition to numerous Warhol flowers, Sturtevant also produced other works after Warhol and after Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and James Rosenquist, whose surnames she refers to in the titles of her works – along with the title of the original – hence alluding to the iconic nature of a name, behind which a work can even disappear. In 1974, the criticism of her approach became so intensive Sturtevant decided not to create any more art until, she said, the retards caught-up. This happened in the 1980s with the emergence of the generation of appropriation artists, including, for example, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Richard Prince. In the mid-1990s, Sturtevant shifted her focus to younger contemporaries like Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres and Robert Gober, but with the same instinct for works that would instantly become icons of art history."

Sturtevant's method isn't mine -- not exactly -- but without her brave, rigorous example I don't think I ever would have picked up a camera.
- posted by cjb @ 10:14 AM