Elaine Sturtevant: Rhona Hoffman, 1990 - October 12th, 2024

Published on the occasion of Elaine Sturtevant’s solo exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery from June 1 - June 30, 1990.

20 pages
26.5 x 20.5 cm

Softcover, staple bound
Black-and-white images
*Mint, signed
Includes an essay by Donald Kuspit: “Repeating the Unrepeatable: Elaine Sturtevant's Absolution of Art”.

“Was Elaine Sturtevant, in 1965, the first artist to raise, wittingly, the question of the relation of copy to original? Was she, before the term had become current, the first postmodernist? When, in her first one-person exhibition, Sturtevant showed, inn Christian Leigh’s list, ‘a Johns flag, Warhol flowers, an Oldenburg shirt, a Segal sculpture, a Rauschenberg drawing, a Stella concentric painting, and a Rosenquist,’ did she realize that she was announcing the end of modernism, or at least its dadaistic self-transcendence? Did she know that she was saying that modernism had become the shrewdest part of popular culture, a trendy convention, that the ’modern look’ was a tired cliché, almost didactically academic- certainly programmatic- that modernism kept from being routine by performing new tricks but that it no longer surprised anyone? Did she know she was saying that its premises no longer led to any significant conclusion aesthetically or humanly?” (Kuspit, 1990)