The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
    • Shows & On demand
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

CultureArt

Sturtevant: Leaps Jumps and Bumps at the Serpentine Gallery

Sturtevant: Leaps Jumps and Bumps at the Serpentine Gallery | Exhibition review
26 June 2013
Eleanor MacFarlane
Avatar
Eleanor MacFarlane
26 June 2013

Conceptual art is more about the ideas behind it than the content of the art itself, and Elaine Sturtevant is a conceptual artist whose work uses images from popular culture and other artists to ponder the nature of art. She has been around long enough to have been ahead of her time for decades and only now is the world catching up with her ideas. Copied clips, endless small repetitions: if this sounds like contemporary information technology overload, this artist has been making such work since the 60s, and continues to examine and expose the way we understand images.

It’s not the sort of exhibition you can come to and let the work speak for itself – you really have to know what the artist is saying rather than figuring it out, although there is a wicked sense of humour throughout that needs no mediation. A three-screen video entitled Blow Job turns out to be a close-up of a mouth blowing red ribbons. Now that’s funny, as is a line of blow-up dolls against a bank of windows. Within the gallery we see their backs, while passers-by see their faces from the outside, a plaintive, ridiculous view. Sometimes Sturtevant’s work defies complete definition and is deliberately enigmatic.

John Waters Dorothy Malone’s Collar is a small three-piece video installation with film clips on loop of the actress Dorothy Malone placed next to stills, which occasionally match the film, like a frozen clock being accurate only when the right time comes around. This is an eloquent little piece on the nature of real and reel time. A much larger video fills a gallery wall: Finite Infinite shows a dog running on loop, seemingly forever. And yet Sturtevant allows jumps in her looped videos, destroying her own illusions.

In multiple screens playing seemingly random clips, she mixes up created video with stock imagery and TV, and after a while we realise that Sturtevant is not borrowing the imagery but examining the ideas behind them. She copies/repeats a screen-printed Marilyn Monroe, continuing the Warhol idea of examining popular culture as valid artistic material. Also with a light installation, wallpaper, a video, which rotates around a room and a Pac-Man animation, the Serpentine have managed to present Sturtevant in her first major show in the UK as an artist who uses the mechanics of readily available ideas to examine how we think about art.

★★★★★

Eleanor MacFarlane
Photos: Katie Harris

Sturtevant: Leaps Jumps and Bumps is at the Serpentine Gallery from 28th June until 26th August 2013. For further information visit the gallery’s website here.

Related Itemsreview

More in Art

Ten artistic depictions of the Christmas story through the ages

James White
Read More

Five gifts for art lovers this Christmas

Emma-Jane Betts
Read More

Five alternative art exhibitions for Christmas 2020

Catherine Sedgwick
Read More

Sensing the Unseen: Step into Gossaert’s Adoration at the National Gallery

★★★★★
Anna Souter
Read More

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum: The evolution of a force for good

James White
Read More

Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul at the Royal Academy

★★★★★
Anna Souter
Read More

Magnetic North: Voices from the Indigenous Arctic at the British Museum

★★★★★
Samuel Nicholls
Read More

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain

★★★★★
Jessica Wall
Read More

Rob and Nick Carter on Connaught Village’s public neon installations: “Accessibility of art is crucial during a pandemic”

Lilly Subbotin
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap
  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • You Me at Six – Suckapunch
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • An interview with Ifrah Ismael: Tales from the Front Line and other stories
    Theatre
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Persian Lessons
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The White Tiger
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Female filmmakers lead nominees for the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards
    Cinema
  • Persian Lessons: Exclusive new clip
    Cinema
  • Jeremiah Fraites: Piano Piano
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Quo Vadis, Aida?
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Ten short literary collections to get you back into reading
    Literature
  • Mayor
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Rosas & Ictus: Drumming at Sadler’s Wells | Theatre review
The new tapas menu by Ametsa at the Halkin Bar