Resumen de Spinoza in Vegas, Sturtevant everywhere: a case of critical (re-)discoveries and artistic self-reinventions
This article gives a historiographical account of the rediscovery of Elaine Sturtevant’s repetitions as a precursor to appropriation art and of the artist’s own attempts at guiding their interpretation. It shows that her pop-based repetitions and her claims to originality did not fi t with the conceptualist genealogies of appropriation and the poststructuralist discourse of the copy that were being put forward in the United States in the 1980s, but that this did not similarly complicate her standing in other reception contexts. It argues that the Deleuzian statements that she published from the mid-1990s onwards retrospectively opened up her work to poststructuralist considerations by nominally adjusting the interpretation of it from the language of originality to that of difference in repetition. Rather than follow the artist’s reinterpretation, this article distinguishes different stages in her work. It raises concerns about the tension between Sturtevant’s conceptualist aims and her repeating repetition, but also acknowledges that the effectiveness of her practice has largely resulted from its relentless pursuit.
