.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"I make reproductions in order to confront, in order to trigger thinking."
...Hovering between indifference and aggressiveness, only Warhol (whose Flowers series Sturtevant selected the year he conceived it) went as far as to give Sturtevant the silk screens that he had created to produce them. Why should that surprise us? Was he not the only person at the beginning of the 1960s to have already got out of his system the argument between original and multiple, to get out the image of painting, to have perverted the principle of "uniqueness" by deliberately soaking up everything? Was he not the only one to draw attention to the difference in reproduction itself, the difference that Sturtevant was to play out in all its variations with and through him? Was he not the laconic person who assumed that everybody wants the same thing, who banked on the hard instinct among collectors, and that the conditions for change are not as much in the appearance of things as in the method of organizing them? This is the terrain in which we initially discover Sturtevant: to understand why we expect the same thing, to understand moreover that one can expect it (B. Blistène, "Label Elaine," Sturtevant, The Brutal Truth, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, pp. 36-37).
...Hovering between indifference and aggressiveness, only Warhol (whose Flowers series Sturtevant selected the year he conceived it) went as far as to give Sturtevant the silk screens that he had created to produce them. Why should that surprise us? Was he not the only person at the beginning of the 1960s to have already got out of his system the argument between original and multiple, to get out the image of painting, to have perverted the principle of "uniqueness" by deliberately soaking up everything? Was he not the only one to draw attention to the difference in reproduction itself, the difference that Sturtevant was to play out in all its variations with and through him? Was he not the laconic person who assumed that everybody wants the same thing, who banked on the hard instinct among collectors, and that the conditions for change are not as much in the appearance of things as in the method of organizing them? This is the terrain in which we initially discover Sturtevant: to understand why we expect the same thing, to understand moreover that one can expect it (B. Blistène, "Label Elaine," Sturtevant, The Brutal Truth, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, pp. 36-37).