Not very long ago I spent some time in Frankfurt’s Museum f?r Moderne Kunst looking at the exhibition The Brutal Truth, which took this year’s top prize for international exhibitions from Beaux Arts magazine. (It’s too late for you lot, sorry; the exhibition’s down now.) TBT is a retrospective of the expatriate American artist Sturtevant’s work.

More or less her work, anyway; for her oeuvre consists of painstaking copies of the works of other artists.

Thing is, Sturtevant insists that these are not copies. No, she’s not delusional; she’s aware they are modelled on somebody else’s original, indeed her titles refer to the fact. But to her, her works are not copies; they are independent works of art in their own right.

I don’t think I agree. They plainly are copies (very well executed copies) of Warhol’s Marilyns and other (mostly) well-known works. Sturtevant likes working in the pop genre. But she is not above a bit of Duchamp (including a nice copy — er, derived original — of LHOOQ) and has ‘done’ some German artists, like Beuys and Kiefer, whose portentous (not to say pompous) works are in a spirit that could not be farther removed from that of pop. Though she is rigourous in reproducing only what others have done before, some of her works on paper do reveal an intriguingly original touch, if only in juxtaposing on the same sheet drawings after two different artists, e.g., Johns and Wesselman.

But we can fairly say that Sturtevant has produced an original work; and this is her work as a whole. It strikes me as an extended comment on the relationship between artist and artwork. What does it mean to say an object is ‘by’ a given artist? The question leaps foremost to the mind when looking at a Warhol, of course (and it is no surprise that so much of Sturtevant’s work has its origin in his). We may state with patent justice that a Sturtevant Marilyn is not ‘really’ a Warhol; but how much of Warhol’s work was ‘really’ his? (Not for nothing did he call his studio a ‘factory’). But Warhol is far from the only artist to have farmed out much of the drudgery of actual production to assistants. (And such outsourcing is not limited to modern-day silk-screeners; visit most Renaissance Italian studios and you’d’ve found pinctorial dogsbodies doing the scut-work.) Whether Warhol or Tiziano, of course, the artist did have a hand in the creation of his work; a metaphorical hand in its conception, and to a greater or lesser (usually greater) extent a literal hand in its making. But the idea of separation is often there. Sturtevant simply takes that final step (and not a very long step, if we are talking about Warhol).

So it’s not as though Sturtevant has nothing interesting to say. Still, I can’t help wondering whether it was worth the time and effort to structure her entire career around saying it. Rather a long run for such a short slide, don’t you think? It is, after all, possible to say a small but important thing succinctly. I recall once hearing the description of a work (to my regret, I have never seen it, nor can I recall the artist’s name) about tension and vulnerability. The artist erected a fountain of black ink in a white space. The fountain was cleverly arranged so that the ink flowed from a hole in the ceiling in a steady stream down through a hole in the floor (whence it was pumped back up top). Though no ink sullied the impeccably white surroundings, the stream was entirely unshielded; the slightest touch or interference would have ruined everything irretrievably in a spattering of black stains. A small thing, but an important one; and a thing eloquently said, but said succinctly. Sturtevant doesn’t do succinct, though, and I am not altogether certain that her message bears the time it takes her to tell it. I mean, could she not have said the same thing at least as effectively, and had a lot more time left for watching television, had she simply written ‘”Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” by Sturtevant’ and had done with it?