Johns Target (1st Study)

In the 1960s, Sturtevant began reproducing the canonical works of her contemporaries, thereby testing the notions of originality and creativity in an era of the mass circulation of images. She rigorously learned the original techniques and then titled the works by contracting the artist’s name and the original title of the works. By toying with the myth of the artwork and the value of the name of the man who made them (the artists she copied are all men), Sturtevant was able to highlight the gender imbalance in New York’s art scene.

Her piece Johns Target (first study) (1986) can perhaps be associated with the Targets that Jasper Johns created between 1955 and 1961. The target and the American flag would become one of the artist’s most radical and recognisable motifs. For Johns, the target was a way to paint “things that the mind already knows”, an idea that Sturtevant took one step further. She explained that, “when you realize that it’s not a Johns, you’re either jolted and you reject it immediately, or the work haunts you like a bad buzzing sound in your head. You have to start asking yourself what's going on here... how this works”.* The disparities between the versions encourage the viewer to look past their superficial similarities and to question deeply the essential, underlying structure of art.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties

*Sturtevant, interview with Peter Halley, index magazine (en ligne), 2005.