Park update: On May 7 from 7am until 3:30pm, the section of the High Line between 16th Street and 23rd Street will be temporarily closed. Visitors may exit at those streets and walk along 10th Avenue to re-enter the park. Stairs and an elevator are available at 23rd Street. At 16th Street, stairs are available.
This Mother’s Day, adopt a plant on the High Line as a sustainable gift for whoever has kept you nourished and loved.
Sturtevant
Warhol Empire State
Over the past 50 years, Sturtevant has explored the relationship between original and copy, between the act of watching and what is unwatchable. Her work is often an appropriation and repetition of works by other artists, like Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella, and Marcel Duchamp. She cites these legendary artists as catalysts for thinking about image and illusion — the experience of art and its authenticity. Sturtevant’s work is not about copying others, but rather about “summoning with sufficient intensity the memory of images viewed in order to be able to recreate and reinvent them.”
In 1972, Sturtevant completed Warhol Empire State, a black-and-white remake of Andy Warhol’s notoriously unwatchable film Empire (1964). Warhol’s original film consists of a single black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building over the course of an evening, filmed from 8:06 PM on July 25, 1964 to 2:42 AM on July 26, 1964. Empire is an ode to one of New York City’s most iconic buildings, as well as a meditation on the passage of time. It pushes the limits of resemblance and representation, shifting the viewer’s attention to what lies beneath the surface of images in order to examine the structures that give power and autonomy to the concepts of authenticity and authorship in the experience of artworks.
Photos by Austin Kennedy.
Artist bio
Sturtevant (1930 – 2014, Ohio) has shown her work internationally including solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris (2010); Galerie Neu, Berlin; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2005), and many others. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as Tate Modern, London; 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice; CCS Bard, Annendale on Hudson, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Foundation Beyeler, Basel; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Support
High Line Channel is presented by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. High Line Art Commissions are made possible by Donald R. Mullen, Jr., with additional support from Vital Projects Fund, Inc. High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.