A Sturtevant retrospective raises questions about the nature of her art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is calling its survey show devoted to the late Elaine Sturtevant "Double Trouble", which is a clever way to avoid a complicated semantic problem.

Beginning in 1964 and for much of her career, the American artist made "replicas" of the work of other artists, appropriating stencils from Andy Warhol to produce convincing knockoffs of his silk screens and meticulously reproducing the target paintings of Jasper Johns, the geometries of Frank Stella and the cartoon Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein. But what exactly does one call these works? Copies? Replicas? Forgeries? Imitations?

The MoMA exhibition, the first comprehensive American survey of Sturtevant's career, argues for thinking of these works as performances of a sort, more akin to a musician playing from a score than the traditional idea of an artist creating unique works ex nihilo.

Thus the artist, who was known simply as Sturtevant and died in May at age 89 while the exhibition was being planned, meant to deflect attention from the physical art object and the style it manifests, and focus on how it operates in the world, the way it is used and interpreted, and the various myths that sustain its special status as art.

To wrestle with the semantic problem is to engage with the artist and her work. The word "copy" doesn't quite work, because Sturtevant wasn't producing exact doubles of the work she appropriated. When she reproduced a famous Wanted poster originally made in 1923 by Marcel Duchamp (who looms large in her oeuvre), she inserted her own face and name in place of Duchamp's.

She was also fond of juxtaposing the styles of two artists in a new, double image, such as in a 1966 work on paper with the self-explanatory title, Working Drawing Wesselmann Great American Nude Lichtenstein Hot Dog. In this case the sexual titillation of Tom Wesselmann's pop style nude suggests a wry phallic interpretation of the Lichtenstein hot dog underneath it - but it also demonstrates that Sturtevant wasn't interested in mere reproduction.