Comebacks are the pastime of fading starlets, nipped, tucked, puffed to perfection and wheeled out in front of a no-longer adoring public in order to win them over once more. They are notoriously hard to pull off, and the cost of failing to invest the old and overly familiar with a lost novelty is high. For that reason, a comeback is usually a one-off, and since success rules out the need for repeat performances, it is not the most likely of activities in which to specialise, excel or even make the means of a career. However, the notion of a comeback can be used to think through Sturtevant's ongoing practice of carefully remaking iconic artworks by an all-male line-up of art stars, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, which she began in the 1960s - often before these figures gained broader recognition.¹ Taking her 1986 'comeback' exhibition as my point of departure, I will extend the logic of this show so that the tactic of the comeback can be tracked throughout her career, with the aim of demonstrating that a practice that depends on the pre-existing is not necessarily a retrospective exercise but, as in Sturtevant's case, can also be an action oriented to the future

Sturtevant's famous comeback took place in 1986 at White Columns, New York - her first solo show since her 1974 exhibition at Onnasch Gallery (also in New York) of remakes of works by Joseph Beuys, after which she ceased producing and exhibiting art. In what has become an undeniable allusion to Marcel Duchamp's exchange of art for chess, she has stated that during those years she had dedicated her time to 'writing, thinking, playing tennis and carrying on'.² However, in the manner of her earlier work, this co-option of Duchamp's gesture of removal and return is not a picture-perfect copy of his heroic homecoming;Sturtevant rejected the opportunity to present a masterpiece in the manner of Etant donnes (1946-66), and instead offered an almost po-faced presentation of the very same work she was producing prior to the hiatus in her practice: the exhibition included Duchamp Fountain (1973), Lichtenstein But It's Hopeless (1969), Warhol Marilyn Diptych (1972) and Warhol Gold Marilyn (1973), all made throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.³

Although visitors to White Columns were not met by a body of work cosmetically enhanced for that decade of image and excess, Sturtevant's reemergence in the 1980s was regarded as somehow 'timely'. Work that once seemed out of step all of a sudden appeared at the same pace as art made according to what had become mainstream principles. After transposing these works from the 1960s to the 1980s and casting them against a backdrop of appropriation and simulation, Sturtevant's insistence on remaking the work of others did not seem so perverse. The press release that accompanied the exhibition attests to her 'of the moment' appeal: 'Elaine Sturtevant may have been the first postmodernist intruder on the American scene [...] her ideas seem of particular historical importance.'⁴ Indeed, her co-option of the role of the commentator as her own, in which she has always already consumed the object under scrutiny, hinders any attempt to account for the object itself.⁵ In her 1966 exhibition at Galerie J in Paris, the gallery door remained locked for the duration of the exhibition, inside of which her Wesselmann Great American Nude (1966) was propped up against a wall and Lichtenstein Crying Girl (1966) was upended rather than hung in a conventional manner. Yet despite literally distancing the viewer from these works, her practice was not an exercise in alienation, for these works were not seen anew; rather, the commentary she provided spoke back as a dissenting voice.

Indeed, a comeback is also the ultimate retort, and, in a textbook example of l'esprit de l'escalier, Sturtevant's response to the criticism that led to her withdrawal from the art world came to her only latterly. While generally a time-lag thwarts the opportunity to deliver a killer comeback, it worked in Sturtevant's favour. 'Fortunately the appropriationists were hanging out at the time, which gave me a whole new space for potent dialogue. This was very crucial, as it allowed entry into the work by negative definition - a valid, powerful position.'⁶ Despite her acknowledgement of this about-turn in thinking, her words suggest that her practice cannot be abridged in the convenient tag of precursor, as her work calls into question the very structures that such chronological designations depend upon. It is often noted that, rather than reaching back into the annals of art history for her source material, she remakes work at the point of its production, pointing towards the years of half-light in the life cycle of an artwork (however, these observations do not account for the recurrence, time-lag and delay that she puts in motion). Claes Oldenburg's Store (1961-62), for example, was reproduced six years after Oldenburg's installation. Sturtevant's practice finds work that is actually lying in wait, between its first flush of youth and its ascension to art-historical elder. But by intervening in that moment of indeterminacy she voices a scepticism towards any conventional historical framing.

Not only did simulation return attention to Sturtevant's practice in the 1980s,it also had the less desirable effect of restricting discussions of her work to simulation's own terms. However, mobilising the concept of a comeback opens an alternative narrative in the strategy of remakes, freeing Sturtevant's work from its associations with appropriation - and, by extension, from a reading of it as criticism of amnesiac methodologies that sever items from their origin. Jean Baudrillard diagnosed the tendency to depend upon historical examples as a 'retro scenario' in which 'all history is resurrected in bulk' and where 'a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates';⁷ Sturtevant's practice provides a counterpart to this indiscriminate rehabilitation. The artworks she remakes are always iconic for their time or style, as she herself has stated:

In order for the work to function you had to recognise the work immediately [...] You had to know who that particular artist was. So of course you'd take these painters who had very strong images, and they'd function for me.⁸

The bottle-blonde comic-book heroine of Lichtenstein But It's Hopeless is unmistakably Roy Lichtenstein's, yet the fit of despair into which she has thrown herself, the portentous tear welling in her eye and the primary colours delineated with a fat black outline are not - they are the stock-in-trade of popular culture and Pop art alive. By using a work that is not only familiar to the viewer but which also trades in the imagery of commercial culture, she can rest assured that its content has always already been consumed. Rather than investing these forms with new meanings, associations and inferences, Sturtevant opts to push the viewer's focus beyond that of representation. Accordingly, the work does not provoke in the way an 'original' might. The slow curl of excitement that obscurity tends to bring about is not offered, but neither is it done away with; instead, that tug of intrigue is located elsewhere, someplace almost beyond reach. Sturtevant describes this process as 'the immediacy of an apparent content being denied'.⁹ Not being the Lichtenstein that it appears to be, Lichtenstein But It's Hopeless counteracts that 'apparent content' so that the spectator's attention is not held by the internal relations or surface of the object but by its conceptual identity, and pushes the viewer to examine where meaning can reside (if not in representation).

Instead, she shifts the focus of her viewers' attention to the contexts of the works, both geographical and temporal. Whilst her return cannot be seen apart from 1980s New York, her logic of production is chronologically promiscuous. By effecting a temporal shift, coming by way of going back, she employs the past in the service of the future. The predominance of Pop as Sturtevant's point of departure directs us to work that speaks definitively and succinctly of 'the 1960s'. Yet she proposes that the work is neither reducible to nor best understood in terms of those historical and cultural relations. Although appearing the same as its prototype, Warhol Gold Marilyn (1973) effortlessly shrugs off the previously indelible marks of its era; the violent shocks of pink, blue and yellow almost float free from the inferences they previously held and in so doing almost obliterate the likeness of the iconic film star, so that the fate of this work is newly up for grabs.¹⁰ The glossy ground of gold accentuates the surface of the work, reducing the Marilyn portrait at the centre to a series of colours that are ripe for consumption yet acid, bitter but ultimately irresistible. She makes the work come back in such a way that it speaks of an entirely different duration to the one suggested by the commercialism for which both Marilyn Monroe's image and Andy Warhol's technique act as shorthand today. Sturtevant's work demonstrates that capitalism brings about a specific notion of time, one that reduces it to a synchronised system that allows for an efficient, mechanised, working world. Yet the instantaneous efficiency of capitalism, which divides life into the homogenised units of minutes, hours and days, is simultaneously rendered inadequate by her Marilyn, as it resists the immediacy of consumption that such a system involves. Sturtevant takes Warhol's Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), a work that is definitively 'of its time', and demonstrates how its persistence attests to an entirely different temporality that literally runs rings around both the conceit of historical trajectory and the homogenisation of time itself. It burns through its history as if it couldn't be left in the 1960s, and simultaneously retains a currency that can never be spent. By remaking a work from the year of Monroe's suicide ten years after and then re-showing it again in 1986, Sturtevant conjures a time that is not composed of regular units but that reflects the vagaries of history. The recurrence of Warhol Gold Marilyn in different decades brings together disparate moments, and the consequent fluctuations of memory and perception flood the work until it can no longer be reduced to any particular date - and until the viewer is able to intuit alternative organisations of time.

One sense of time that Sturtevant does not dispense with is that of memory - her own. She uses catalogues only to check the size and scale of work, and declares that her working process is one of 'summoning with sufficient intensity the memory of images viewed in order to be able to recreate and invent them'.¹¹ This might suggest that Sturtevant's glance is always a backward one - the front cover of a 1988 exhibition of drawings at Bess Cutler Gallery, for example, features the always convivial Lichtenstein Laughing Cat (1988) emblazoned with the dates of Sturtevant's career reversed: 1988-1965.¹² Yet retrospection has a finality that, in Sturtevant's world at least, is always off-limits: 'Nobody wants a retrospective; once you've had a retrospective you're done.'¹³ Sturtevant is anything but done - she finds use in fabric others would find exhausted, blank and wrung dry of any potential. If her objects speak in terms of a return it is to goad us to revisit the prospects the works conjured at their point of conception. Duchamp Fountain has the look but not the feel of its more famous counterpart, as it manages to evade the reams of writing on the readymade that intervene between us and Duchamp's object. Duchamp Fountain refuses to fit into the opportune hole to which it has been assigned; it awkwardly bulges beyond those confines, forcing us to notice what has been shaved off by the generalising effects of history. Sturtevant reverses the tactic that Duchamp introduced by holding hostage not an everyday object but an artwork, and in so doing she scrutinises the particularity of the art object itself. She cannot re-present the original object, but rather her remaking is a means of investigating how and why these particular artworks have taken hold of our consciousness so firmly. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Gilles Deleuze writes that memory is not simply about the past, but about a past that is caught up in the present, intertwined with and orientating the now in a way that is not immediately apparent. Sturtevant has made this project her own by attempting to mine one from the other - the present from the past - by excavating the art object from the web of historical associations that have come to stand in for and before itself. Yet she does not share in Deleuze's all encompassing enthusiasm for such an enterprise, and instead proposes it as subject to scrutiny. If she renders Duchamp's urinal - the object that speaks most eloquently of art in the twentieth century - up for interpretation once more, this is not to disavow the object's status, as the producer's name is included in the title and acts as an unabashed reminder of its position in art history. Rather, it is to return us to the point of its conception so that we can question whether the trajectory embarked upon by the readymade is the only one that it inaugurated when it Instead, the viewer is compelled to re-enter the work and reassess the impact that it made, so that the comeback that Sturtevant stages is not one of Warhol, Marilyn, 'the 1960s' or her own career, but that of every initial encounter with the object and, more importantly, the power contained in that moment. was introduced into art history. Deleuze's description of the synthesis of time as 'the past and the future [that] do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the present itself in so far as it is a contraction of instants' is entirely dismantled.¹⁴ Instead, the viewer is compelled to re-enter the work and reassess the impact that it made, so that the comeback that Sturtevant stages is not one of Warhol, Marilyn, 'the 1960s' or her own career, but that of every initial encounter with the object and, more importantly, the power contained in that moment.

In this way, the comeback frames a retrospective way of working as neither reactionary nor in thrall to fictions of origin. A comeback is not just a return to the moment of conception but an action that looks to retrieve the power and potential that was encapsulated by that moment. To consider exhibitions by Sturtevant as 'The Best of the Twentieth Century Part I' would mean to imagine her practice as a mere exercise in preservation. Such an approach would fail to acknowledge the way Sturtevant's operation is always orientated towards difference, or, more accurately, the potential for difference. In Untimely Meditations (1876), Friedrich Nietzsche draws a distinction between uses and abuses of history on the understanding that we abuse history when we repeat the past in order to remain the same and guarantee continuity. Sturtevant's methodology never comes close to such an abuse; for her it is not a question of amassing material to establish the security of a stable sense of the past. She rejects an archival approach to history in which the more material is added the more secure we are in the knowledge of the past and the better we can build on it. the works she remakes do not consolidate or repeat their time but differ markedly from anything produced previously so that, in order to be understood within the time when they are remade, they force a rethinking of the nature of time itself. To remake Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1995) is to remake the creative potential that gave origin to Gonzalez-Torres's piece, reliving the potentialities that once constituted the work. Sturtevant evokes Felix Gonzalez-Torres before his institutional acceptance - that is, Gonzalez-Torres at his most radical and political - and, because of that, her work proves to have a power that creates or alters the direction of time in order to shake off the lassitude of the present. This comeback is not just an example of what Sigmund Freud calls deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), for these works have not been repressed by a collective psyche in shock (indeed they are thoroughly ingrained in the our idea of art history). Rather, Sturtevant shares in the disdain that Nietzsche reserved for those who 'no longer let the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide with regard to its worth'.¹⁵ Yet her interest is not in the consequences that have already been played out but those that are yet to be forged, the alternative narratives and durations that her objects bring about. Works can thus no longer be consumed in the same way; presentness of perception and representationis 'thrown out' and the process of engagement literally slowed down. She does not prompt us to search our unconscious for what is already known (although maybe forgotten), but instead ensures that previously trained responses and habits are no longer of service, reanimating the psyche to undertake new thinking rather than delving back into its murky recesses.

Sturtevant is not that fading starlet who looks to erase the signs of experience; she is the half-time coach who reminds her team of viewers of the deficit in their thinking, challenging them to make a comeback. This time-out slows down the perception of the object so that this delay becomes co-extensive with the time-lag that has taken place in the understanding and appreciation of her practice. The game she plays, however, is not Duchamp's chess - for chess, as Deleuze and Felix Guattari have noted, is 'coded'. The artworks she co-opts (those 'you had to know') can be compared to chess pieces, as 'they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations and confrontations derive' - and it is this resemblance that she casts into doubt.¹⁶What she shows is that it is only in their delayed state that art objects come back to be endowed with relative powers that depend not on the place they occupy or the time when they occur but the time and place that they work to create and the viewers create for them.

- Belinda Bowring