Sturtevant’s Johns Flag made up one of the component parts of a 1967 iteration of Short Circuit, Rauschenberg’s multilayered, multimedia artwork that included works by contemporary artists amongst other cultural objects and paraphernalia. Exhibiting it in ‘Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Collage’ at Finch College in New York, Rauschenberg explained that he first made Short Circuit in part as a critique of institutional practice, and that in re-presenting it he was required to adapt it:
In the third Artist Show at the Stable Gallery, my collage, SHORT CIRCUIT, 1955, was motivated by the protest that there had not been any new artists invited to exhibit. Therefore, I invited four artists: Jasper Johns, Stan Vanderbeek, Sue Weil and Ray Johnson to give me works to be built into my collage. Only two paintings were ready in time to be installed into the major piece. The collage also contains the autograph of Judy Garland, and one of the first programmes of a John Cage concert. Because Jasper Johns’s flag for the collage was stolen, Elaine Sturtevant is painting an original flag in the manner of Jasper Johns’s to replace it. This collage is documentation of a particular event at a particular time and is still being affected. It is a double document.87
For the 1967 exhibition, Rauschenberg found a solution to the problem of a missing painting by enlisting Sturtevant to provide a replacement. Rauschenberg didn’t use the term ‘copy’ in his description of Sturtevant’s contribution. In fact, he proffered its converse, describing her work as ‘original’. He modified his assertion by explaining that Sturtevant’s work was done ‘in the manner of’ Johns – distinguishing her originality from the manner that she was adopting temporarily.
Rauschenberg’s observation that the 1967 version of Short Circuit was a ‘double document’ references the way in which his work represented two things: a record of the work as it first appeared in 1955 as well as the intervening effects of time upon it. The work was still being ‘affected’ and transformed under conditions of change, not least the theft of one of its constituent parts. Riegl’s discussion of the relative qualities of artistic and historical value is as relevant here, in relation to Short Circuit, as it was in the making a distinction between superficial and less visually based ‘originality’ (or uniqueness) in Sturtevant’s works of works. Artistic and historic value cannot be conflated, for they represent specific aspects of particular works of art. For Rauschenberg and Sturtevant, the work is not just the object presented but a constellation of relationships between different artists as well as installation contexts. The object Warhol Marilyn encompasses Warhol’s project as well as Sturtevant’s decision to make her work from his at a particular moment, in this case, 1965. This was very soon after Warhol first produced his Marilyns, rendering Sturtevant’s manoeuvre of making her own works from Warhol’s more provocative.
Sturtevant’s rationale for choosing well-known artists and works was most likely pragmatic. Works and the artists who are being referenced by them had to be ‘immediately recognisable. […] You have to know it’s a Johns or a Lichtenstein [or a Warhol] for the work to function.’88 Part of a work’s functionality drew upon Sturtevant’s ability to play the game of dropping names at the right times and places, through a strategic deployment of what Laurie Anderson referred to as ‘brand-name styles’ in an article reviewing Sturtevant’s ‘Studies for De Maria’s “New York is Shit”’ (1971) at the Reese Palley Gallery in New York.89 Anderson found Sturtevant’s series of framed text-based drawings ‘dull’, pace Sturtevant’s acknowledgment of her work’s lacking the ‘characteristic force’ of the work on which it was based. Yet Anderson located Sturtevant’s radicalism in her questioning of the ‘art world’s structural and financial dependence on individualistic stylistic branding’.90
Sturtevant described the range of reactions this strategy might elicit from a viewer: ‘You’re either jolted into immediately rejecting it, or the work stays with you like a bad buzz in your head. You start thinking, “What is going on here?”’91 Eugene Schwartz and Douglas Davis once described a spectator’s characteristic reaction to her visual coups:
I am sure that you have often noticed that visitors to your apartment – like the visitors to our loft – shrug off the Warhol or the Stella before you tell them that it is Sturtevant. Watch how their eyes roll! Their hair stands on end! Their palms collect sweat! Over and over they fall to fighting, arguing, debating.92
Sturtevant’s intention of ‘jolting’ the viewer relates her practice to the ‘parafictional’, a genre of art that Carrie Lambert-Beatty has defined as work that is neither fictional nor non-fictional, neither totally transparent nor a complete ruse.93 Conventional terminology fails to describe a situation in which the art object at hand is something other than what it first presents itself to be. Lambert-Beatty has argued that artists who engage with a parafictional mode lay conceptual traps for the viewer, who is poised to make cognitive mistakes. While Sturtevant was vehement that she did not make ‘fake’ works or spin stories, there are definite parallels between her practice and those of the artists Lambert-Beatty discusses – such as Walid Raad and the Atlas Group as well as the Yes Men and Michael Blum – namely, the putting into effect of visual tricks to cause the viewer to misjudge.94 Sturtevant’s works operate along similar ‘pragmatics of trust’, achieved explicitly through recognition.
Lambert-Beatty goes as far as to refer to being ‘taken in’ by a ‘traplaying artist’ as not only ‘epistemologically destabilising’ – certainly part of Sturtevant’s aesthetic aim – but even ‘humiliating’.95 This is not irrelevant to a discussion of Sturtevant’s work, as feelings of destabilisation and humiliation often translate into a ‘bad buzz’, an ‘eye-roll’. (Sturtevant was also unabashedly critical of certain audiences, using offensive language to deride them when they failed to grasp or agree to accept her expressed aims.)96
While there is a certain degree of trickery and even antagonism in Sturtevant’s work, there is also a case, as Lambert-Beatty has argued, for ‘ethical lying’ in parafictional works and in contemporary political culture more generally.97 Like placebos justified by an ultimately honourable purpose, Sturtevant’s works can be considered to challenge the viewer ‘shrugging off the Warhol or the Stella’, as if to say, you think you know what you are seeing, and have seen it all before, but what does one miss by relying on assumed knowledge? What is remaindered out when the experience of art is reduced to a game of attribution and classification? In this respect, Sturtevant halts the reduction of the visual experience of art to this kind of information gathering. She never intended for her Warhol Marilyns to remain objects almost as good as any ‘real’ Marilyn by Warhol. Having produced the works to set them in motion as catalysts in her artistic thought experiments, the question of what an art object is – its historical value, contemporary relevance, cultural significance, fiscal position in the market and relationship to truth and fiction – is laid bare. This is a rich and complex pay-off for the jolt of initially feeling fooled into accepting a second-class compromise with the moral bankruptcy of a fake.
Sturtevant’s interest in creating works from other works that challenge the viewer’s perceptual habits and her disdain for the fallacious idea of the copy stem from her concern for the way in which the pseudoscience of cybernetics once configured the human subject, and consequently, framed a particularly reductive experience of art. She has referred to cybernetics frequently in her performance-lectures, citing its ‘rigid loop with its suffocating boundaries’.98 Famously defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as a theory of information and communication, cybernetics was initially developed for fighting wars,99 and it broached the links between human and non-human communication. Human beings were abstracted from humanist discourses and analogised to machines and computers, marking the advent of concepts such as artificial intelligence and the post-human.100 Pamela Lee has discussed cybernetics in relation to visual art practices of the 1960s, explaining the reach of the theory as a ‘pop culture buzzword’.101 In a cybernetic world, the content of art, along with everything else, is evacuated: surface appearance is privileged as a function of the rapid transmission and reception of information.
Cybernetics, as Wiener theorised, offers a world picture in which people are configured as nodes that communicate through the exchange of orders or commands.102 According to the cyberneticist, the world is nothing more than the mutual internal relations of these incoming and outgoing messages, amounting to a very reduced experience of the external world, in which signs are unquestionably transparent, a dangerous positing of a universe in which everything is reduced to image and information, and the ‘other’ whom one confronts in dialogue is inescapably ‘opaque’.103 When everything is reduced to information, the notion of the exact copy becomes plausible, because copies are all ‘surface’: there is no content to differentiate or nuance one sign from another, as there is no need to look deeper, past the classificatory urge.
In defiance of the cybernetic model, Sturtevant argued that her works are not copies of other works because copies are impossible; there are always going to be differences amongst iterations of apparently similar works as well as structural differences in the subjectivities of perceivers – the surpluses generated by context. These are not simply the differences in surface detail that distinguish, to the connoisseur, one art edition from another. Her works masquerade as copies and function as ‘fake copies’ as a means of exposing the shortfalls of the cybernetic mode, its inability to account for the nuances of communication as a living activity.104 As Eleey has argued, she was ‘faking faking’.105 By hijacking the dynamic of cybernetics, the quick and superficial glance of recognition and classification, Sturtevant harnessed the compromised viewing attention of the spectator, trained in cybernetic modes, in a guerrilla tactic to derail the system and demonstrate how it fails. Her works of other artists’ works resist the devaluation of the specific object and particular ‘utterer’ that cybernetics performs; they demonstrate how messages and information are misread and tampered with by artists, parafictional or otherwise, who manipulate codes.