Peter Eleey's “The Quick and the Dead,” at the Walker

Sturtevant with Walker Art Center curator Peter Eleey. (All photos: David Velasco)

On Sturtevant's Lecture after the show:

"The witty grand dame kicked it off with a reading of two prior, published interviews, the delivery of which roiled the audience to laughter. (Interviewer: “What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?” Sturtevant: “I don’t think it was art.”) After two erudite papers on more esoteric topics—“Modes of Thought” and “The Transgression of Visual Desire”—she turned to the audience for questions. The discourse, strained due to sound problems, at one point verged on the pedantic, with Sturtevant proposing that one flustered inquirer, who asked about the philosopher Irigaray (“I can barely hear you. Are you saying revigorize?” Sturtevant asked), should “try reading Foucault and Deleuze.” This may be the land of Garrison Keillor and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but it’s also home to the august University of Minnesota Press, and telling a roomful of Minnesotans at a Walker lecture to “read these thinkers first without trying to understand, then try reading again,” is a bit like encouraging Oprah to check out Toni Morrison.
By the end, though, the audience was again on Sturtevant’s side as she recounted a meeting (“years ago”) with Warhol outside an exhibition of his “Oxidation” paintings.

“So, Elaine,” went Warhol, “why don’t you do one of my piss paintings?”

“But Andy, I don’t have the right equipment.”

“Well, Bianca did one,” he helpfully noted.

“Shit,” Sturtevant said. “I didn’t know she had a prick.”

Warhol turned red, or so the story goes; everyone else laughed at the point scored. The lesson here: Sturtevant always has the last word, and she is anything but nice."

— David Velasco