(Aggressive Exclusionary Critical Distance)
In Elaine Sturtevant's life and work there is alot missing or elipses. Her first name is missing. Her first name is the key to her appearance in the New York art world in the 60's. She was a woman. A very intellligent, gifted artist. She knew her odds. She had the benefit though of an expansive critical distance from the predominantly male art world.
It is conceptual art without the "narrowing down focus" of subject matter.
Her structure blew away new boundaries and opened up a huge void which inhibits most people intellectually who are able to confront it.
At a symposium titled, "Interior Visibilities" in 1996 at the Musee des beaux arts Montreal she said, "The quest was to go beyond, to seek past the surfaces and reach for the understructure - the silent power of art".
Elaine, Hero, Heroine, Heroivity
How did she know there was a whole world of ideas beyond the subject matter addressed by the art practitioners of the time? She didn't. She "discovered" this space. I think she came to realize the enormity of the discovery she made.
She has destabilized the foundation of the current art. She has made that program obsolete. She referenced Duchamp and Beuys, both practitioners of thinking. Both placed the arena of thought ahead or equal to the material manifestation of that thought.
Duchamp created the possibility of thought as a single entity. Beuys eliminated boundaries between intellectual disciplines, such as Science and Art, Politics and Art.
Her genius was to present existing structures (other people's art work) now devoid of the original intent, thereby invoking all that is not present, the unthought. It is a huge, daunting confusing place for thinkers first approaching it.
People tended to fixate on the prevalent "issues" of their time in relation to her work, originality, authorship, thereby missing the true importance of the work, the more challenging side.
We must begin again to structuralize the space to explore it. The challenge is to fashion structures. What will they be? We will never again be able to make permanent structures. They will be contingent. We have developed shifting capabilities in our thinking and these must be explored.
"...part of the base is intuitive knowledge, the trigger that fires the intellect". in conversation with Bill Arning
"I make reproductions in order to confront, in order to trigger thinking". Sturtevant
"Sturtevant's elimination of 'seeing' - to get you somewhere else" John Waters
In lieu of subject matter
What happens when you remove subject matter from art, what is left? You start to consider the structures that define what can be art. The same with any intellectual discipline. What we think is defined by how the structures of that thinking have been set up.
In the 60's Elaine Sturtevant made copies (or reproduced or made slightly exact reproductions) of artworks of different artists. How does one approach an artwork that is a repeat. Repeat the same reaction to the original artwork. I hope not. You are free to imagine what you like. A big void quickly opens up. What an exciting prospect. In her work there are no parameters to indicate within what parameters to think. It is wide open. It is so open that it has defeated most people before they begin. They do not recognize the necessary challenge she has set up and they fall into the familiar pattern of thinking that they have always relied on, namely, the issues of authorship and originality.
Her work is close to what is. And what is is a very demanding place to be. We will probably never get there, but we try.
A whole museum of Elaine's work becomes a vast space in which to think. It gives you permission to, for once, think beyond the art.
Marcel Duchamp was one of the first to show the flexibility of the designation "art". These intellectual divisions have been assaulted by crossing boundaries or blurring of the boundaries, mixing two or more intellectual disciplines in one project.
If one follows intellectual intuition, the possibilities to reimagine and utitlize this area for expansiveness of thought is very attractive.
I propose to imagine a space where new configurations of thought structures can be tested.
The call to deassemble and reorient our thinking is the necessary place where thinking "exercises", develops itself, becomes able to go back to the subject matter which it can now confront with new-found flexibility.
