|
| |
|
|
Got to be real
‘The Brutal Truth’ at MIT, ‘Knock-Offs’ at Green Street, and ‘Forging the New’ at Harvard
BY RANDI HOPKINS
|
|
|
|
|
Starting in the mid 1950s, familiar images from American culture began to find their way into serious art — this at a time when the dominant serious-art mode was Abstract Expressionism. Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and stenciled numbers, Andy Warhol’s images of flowers and Campbell’s Soup cans, and Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures of BLTs and pay phones brought to high art a detached demeanor (compare the hot and heavy brushwork of the Ab-Exers), a sly, wry humor, and, of course, quotidian imagery borrowed from billboards and supermarket shelves. It was the imagery that the artist we now know as Sturtevant (she was Elaine Sturtevant then) trained her keen eye and mind on, asking just what it was that made these cribbed images acceptable, even laudable. (Hey, the Museum of Modern Art was quick to collect this stuff.) And starting in the ’60s, she embarked on a career of making art that looked as if it had already been made by someone else — and always a male someone else, by the way. "Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth," which opens at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center on May 11, presents an overview of her work, which has included remaking Johns’s encaustic flags, opening a store of objects like Oldenburg’s, and even re-enacting Joseph Beuys’s performances, often very shortly after the "originals" were made. At first, she focused on works by Pop artists, but Sturtevant has since turned her attention to influential boy artists including Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Paul McCarthy. "My work has nothing to do with ‘appropriation,’ the refocusing of history, the death of art, or the negative questioning of originality," MIT’s press materials quote her as saying. "Rather just the opposite, as it involves the power and autonomy of originality and the focus and pervasiveness of art." You can hear this intriguing woman herself at an artist’s talk at the List on May 12. Can’t resist comparing Sturtevant’s show at MIT with the Green Street Gallery’s current offering, "Knock-Offs" (up through May 14), which features, as its Web site boasts: "unauthorized versions of works by ‘big-name’ artists created by smaller-name artists." A terrific cast — Kanishka Raja, Juli Raja, James Hull, Denise Kupferschmidt, Suzannah Sinclair, Sheila Gallagher, Alfredo Conde, and Matthew Little — brings us faux faves by biggies including Richard Artschwager, Sol LeWitt, and Barry McGee. It just goes to underline Sturtevant’s observations about the role of originality in art. And this generation seems to have taken up the exploration with a sense of humor. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, China, Korea, and Japan found themselves entering a larger world stage than ever before, and struggling to absorb social, political, and technological change, as well as Western influences that affected every aspect of society. The responses of East Asian artists to this tumultuous period is the focus of "Forging the New," which opens at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum on May 7, with more than 75 works. "Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth" is at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street in Cambridge, May 11 through July 10, with an opening reception on May 11 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and a talk by the artist with Michael Lobel on May 12 at 6 p.m.; call (617) 253-4680. "Knock-Offs" is at the Green Street Gallery, 141 Green Street in Jamaica Plain, through May 14; call (617) 522-0000. "Forging the New" is at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 32 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, May 7 through October 16; call (617) 495-9400.
|
