Sturtevant,

“The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking”

David Lewis

“The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking” at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris/ARC, February 5–April 25, 2010.

Sturtevant hates most writers. This is very well known. There are probably many reasons for this, but it must in large part be because she is herself a writer, and, as the catalogue for her recent, important exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris makes clear, a powerful one. So in what follows, we will follow the lead of Sturtevant’s own texts, and attempt to move closer to the kind of madness that she calls thinking—a madness that may have nothing, or everything, to do with writing.

“The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking”: this is not only the title of the exhibition and the catalogue but also an additional, unpublished text, which Sturtevant read aloud at the Musée d’Art Moderne on April 8, 2010, and then again at Kunst-Werke1 in Berlin. Like the exhibition, “The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking” has a magisterial quality, as if summing up a distinguished, now widely appreciated, but nevertheless still rather daunting, which is to say difficult, career.

And since, for all its negations and resistances, thought is transparent—which is to say exactly like madness—I want only to note, as if such a conjunction were the simplest thing in the world, that “The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking” offers a great number of Heideggerian formulations.

This is rather strange, because Sturtevant often engages, both in her work and in her own writings about her work, with various philosophers, and the discourse around her work is, likewise, heavily inflected with certain philosophical propositions: Spinoza, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Foucault, Hegel, Kant, etc. But Heidegger is rarely, if ever, mentioned—neither by the artist nor her interpreters.

Still, in “The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking” the Heideggerian system, or practice, or metaphysic, or aesthetic, or orientation, is unmistakable:

One. The text functions on a wholly ontological (oracular) level; everything in it is grounded in an assumption about the nature of being; it is from this assumption regarding whatever it is that is from which all subsequent historical events flow.

Two. Sturtevant’s history of Being is, like Heidegger’s, a disaster: the history of Being is, necessarily, a forgetting of Being; a loss of what Sturtevant calls celestial and terrestrial space, such that the world becomes a three-ring circus jammed with “clones / cheaters / half-ass people / stupid people / whacked-out people / hate-rage people / opinion people / information people / and a few other billions of people / tricksters / and / speedos / with short circuit thinking.”

Three. Sturtevant’s ontological critique is, like the late Heidegger’s, in large part technological: the ontological disaster is best understood as a technological one. Sturtevant refers constantly to digital technology and refers to the present as “our cyber fold.” It is technology that she seems to blame most often and most intently for the current situation. For example: “This digital world with its cybernetic master / has brought forth the raw power of: killing / war / hate / fear / rupture / and / a deadly / finite death.”

Four. There is in Sturtevant, as in Heidegger, an intimation, however, of what can be called a “saving power” which is not separate from the disaster but rather part of it; a power which can be accessed only through the disaster, and at the end of a history of (the forgetting) of Being and the closure of metaphysics. Sturtevant suggests that it is the exhibit itself that offers hope. In the second half of the text, the artist recounts the phases of her work, as if recounting the phases of the history of Being: the early Deleuzian-simulacral ‘difference and repetition’ type phase, which she calls “Concept over Image,” was followed by the filmic “Image over Image” and then by the culminating “Wild to Wild,” in which one is bombarded with an “endless downpour” of objects that provide a false sense of Being. But “Wild to Wild” is also the name Sturtevant gave to half of the exhibition (the other half is the “House of Horrors”, which is not a traditional exhibition at all but rather a working ghost train, which takes the viewer through a Sturtevant-created haunted house).“Wild to Wild,” sometimes referred to by Sturtevant as the “Wild to Wild force,” opposed to and combined with the “House of Horrors”, is both the culmination of the disaster and the power, according to the artist, that returns one to an “interior” and “a sense of self”; it is what transforms and redeems the (disastrous) cybernetic surface.

How does this transformation, or redemption, take place? How does the “Wild to Wild force” work, exactly, to save us? This is not quite clear—neither in the text nor the exhibition. The exhibition, obviously, expertly stages an opposition between “Wild to Wild” and the “House of Horrors”: “Wild to Wild” is a relatively traditional retrospective, with works in various media from previous phases of Sturtevant’s career; the “House of Horrors,” by contrast, has no individual works; “Wild to Wild” is clean and bright, as a museum space should be, while in the House of Horrors the viewers are plunged into darkness; in the “Wild to Wild” section, it is the viewers who create the pace, and determine their own direction; but since they are placed on a train in order to go through the House of Horrors, they have none of these prerogatives; they are given a set of scary-funny images which they cannot choose to edit or ignore (not without closing their eyes).

The opposition is clear, and very clearly crafted. But how it works, be it metaphorically or empirically, to transform the disaster, remains vague.

Does this vagueness suggest that the disasters of Heideggerian ontology are, like its triumphs, also Sturtevant’s? Does it mean that Sturtevant can in the end insist, as Heidegger did, that only a god can save us?

One could say instead that the saving power, which is the key to the whole thing, is not so much vague as it remains unsaid. And the unsaid is exquisite. Heidegger knew this perfectly (horribly) well: “The utterance of thinking is a telling silence. Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence.”2

But in either case, the result is prophecy. And if the mechanics of salvation are in both cases unclear, the operation of the oracle, which is to say the flow of energy after the collapse of the dialectic of enlightenment, is clear enough, although for obvious reasons rarely discussed. One knows more or less exactly how the Oedipuses (the writers) of the future will be created.

To avoid confusion, it should be noted that this tendency towards (false) prophecy makes Sturtevant, like Heidegger, better as an artist, although not necessarily as anything else.

1. See “L’école de Stéphanie,” Kunst-Werke, Institut for Contemporary Art, Berlin, May1, 2010.

2. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes One and Two: The Will to Power as Art and The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 208.

Image : Sturtevant, Blowjob, videostill, 2006

Exhibition "The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking", Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2010.