Not eccentric to but working as a centrifugal force amongst the artists who made the American art world of the 1960s and 70s so dynamic, Sturtevant, in addition to landmark solo interventions, participated in important performances by Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, and exhibited her work in key group shows including Gene Swenson's 'The Other Tradition' at the ICA in Philadelphia (1966); the Dwan Gallery's 'Language II' (1967); and the Leo Castelli Gallery's benefit show for E.A.T. (1969). In the 1970s Sturtevant made repetitions of works by Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer; her Study for Various Beuys Films (1971) was shot by Robert Fiore, whose involvement was crucial to the completion (and sonic evolution) of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty film (1970). When she returned to the art world in the mid- 1980s, most notably with what was billed (somewhat paradoxically, since Sturtevant has always had little truck with retro-spection) as a 'career retrospective ... curated by Douglas Davis and Eugene Schwartz', she continued to present a radical challenge to the historical-categorical separation of different movements of art (Pop, Conceptual, Land art, institutional critique) while showing art's economic, contextual and social complications.

Sturtevant reveals the total structures working in the interior of art; in other words, her work concerns the inappropriable.¹

Bruce Hainley: For your first solo show in England, 'Cold Fear', you put into catalytic tension two Warhol Black Marilyns (both from 2004), facing off across from your Duchamp Fresh Widow² The works were lit so everything else in the room fell into utter darkness. Coming into the gallery, everyone was almost blinded by the effect. Your 1973 show at the Everson Museum also placed Warhol Marilyns (1965-73) counter to several of your Duchamps (with Beuys works as a third meaning or component).³

How would you suggest people begin to think about these two exhibitions in relation to one another? In terms of same and difference? In terms of reversal and power? The two shows, separated by thirty years, both accomplish something radical, but is it more helpful to think about continuity or rupture? How does recurrence get rewired?

Sturtevant: The high-tension wire of 'Cold Fear' was created by displacement and the confrontation of space as an object.

This is to articulate visibilities: to make thought visible.

The Everson Museum had four rooms - Duchamp 1200 Coal Bags (1973); Beuys fat/felt sculptures (1971-73); Warhol Marilyns; and the last room containing the films Duchamp Nu Descendant un Escalier (1967/68), Study for Various Beuys Films, Warhol Empire (1972): it is pushing disparity and repetition to force the radical ejection of representation.

This is to trigger thought.

Both exhibitions are the rupture of continuity, leaps and dark crevices - with the running thread of conceptual movement forward.

The difference of underlying structure stems from the reversal of hierarchies that cybernetics has forced into potent and dangerous modes of being. 'Cold Fear' is image over image. The Everson show is concept over object.

Note: The current speed of our digital world has shifted the object to its own representation; to the vast violent absence of image as object.

BH: Some parts of your answers are speeding right past me, so let me rewind - not to erase but to clarify!

Rupturing continuity marks a key Sturtevant mode.

'Raw Power' was your most recent show at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.⁴ There was a work in the show that many people would recognise as having a relation - perhaps even continuity?! - with what 'Sturtevant' means for most:Gober Partially Buried Sinks (1997). Your Gobers remain more ominous and funereal (venereal?) than Gober's. But there were other works - Hate Kill Falsity Infinite Exhaustion (2007), which showed a dog endlessly racing across four monitors - that many might not see as 'Sturtevants': seemingly, the repetition unleashed from a stabilised artistic referent ('Gober') operates on another level and/or in another way. I can begin to comprehend 'Cold Fear' as image over image more easily than 'Raw Power'. Could you talk about the relation between those two shows and how your work jettisons the referent?

(2006), which summoned Abu Ghraib, and

Oh, also, is the best catechism for cybernetics Paul Virilio, or walking into the Apple Store to ogle the new MacBook Air? I notice that Rome has an Apple retail outlet before Paris. Strange, n'est-ce pas?

S: Implicit in conceptual thinking is development of thinking. Thus we go:

from objects to grabbing the dynamics of movement in film;

from jetting representation to strangling cybernetics' tight hold on our mode of being; from object to shifting mental structures;

from hate as specific to the hard-core game of hate killing;

from truth glued to concealed falsity.

Infinite Exhaustion is time-movement and image-movement to reveal our digital world of excess, limitation, transgression and exhaustion.

As for continuity, it is dismal identity and the demon of Same.

BH: 'Dismal identity': this leads me to ask another kind of question. You have, from the start of your career, resisted biography. Sturtevant's air force deploys only stealth jets from an undisclosed location. Your resistance to the biographical throws light upon how often biographical information structures how art is considered, written about, sold or even stands in for the 'object'. People have come to expect this kind of information - as if a picture of the artist were more important than a reproduction of his or her work. Of course, as finite beings, we are all accidentally delivered into the moment of our birth, so history impinges upon us. Could you say something about your stance? And does your resistance have anything to do with your move into writing? It is only after your faamous return, after more than a decade's hiatus, with the show at White Columns that you start doing interviews and writing not only about your work but also about others' (i.e. Duchamp, Paul McCarthy, etc.).

S: Not really. Also not really about other artists.

BH: So you would say your essays, rather than being about other artists, are about ... art? The contemporary situation? Man's plight?

S: Think we have some confusion here.

I don't write about other artists.

Never wrote about other artists.

Initial writing was not about 'art' but rather the understructure of art: the silent power of art.

And pushing to create vast new space for thinking.

Never is the writing about specifics.

Rather the disentangling of cyberimpositions.

And the infinite dimensions of shifting mental structures.

BH: How do you see your work being used by other artists? So much of your project unravels artistic teleologies, questions the 'development' of a signature style, challenges ideologies of 'influence', decentres subjectivity. And yet, you demonstrate (deploy?) the artwork as a possibility of and for thinking. It's difficult not to consider that you provide an X-ray image of the system of art. For example, it was as if Roy Lichtenstein was addressing you, when he asked, in the form of a painting: 'What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?'⁵ You showed him and others what you knew, and then some. But how do you think someone thinking about art - who wishes 'to be' an artist - should use your work?

S: Definitely the work should not be 'used' but rather for confronting the force of the thinking that brings it to a higher level. Image duplicators, etc. are the power of our thrust to surface and absence, obsessively firing up disastrous interior resemblance.

BH: Would you say something about 'America America'?⁶ How did you know Jeannine de Goldschmidt, who ran Galerie J? How did the show come about? Did you design invitation cards or a poster for the show? The work was all made in France, correct?

S: ... [laughing] This is so no way.

BH: Well, I ask about 'America America' because it would be a powerful title to use right now, although because of completely different reasons. When I first saw the huge banners for your MMK show with the image of your Johns Double Flag (1966) and the exhibition's title, 'The Brutal Truth', I thought of the Americanness of those double flags, the dark regression of America under the current administration, and I momentarily read 'The Brutal Truth' as if it was a translation of 'America America'.⁷ How do you think about your work and your thinking in relation to America and Americanness? I remember hearing you correct someone when he referred to you as an 'expatriate', saying it wasn't so despite the fact that you reside in Paris.

S: What a switch. Hip-hopping from abstract to information and explanation is disrupting.

Anyhow, thus, and, because: the premise is that knowledge is not for understanding

but for cutting.

Voilà.

- Bruce Hainley