{"id":156868,"date":"2022-02-04T03:35:31","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T08:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156868"},"modified":"2022-02-09T10:29:34","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T15:29:34","slug":"if-theres-a-rip-in-it-a-conversation-with-scott-covert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/02\/04\/if-theres-a-rip-in-it-a-conversation-with-scott-covert\/","title":{"rendered":"If There\u2019s a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Scott Covert in 1981.<\/p><\/div>\n

The artist Scott Covert is easy to spot in a crowd by his thick-framed glasses and mop of blond hair. <\/span>I met him at a party at the <\/span><\/em>Review<\/span>\u2019s Chelsea office, where I noticed him slipping behind the makeshift bar to swipe a slice from a tower of pizza boxes piled in the corner. \u201cI\u2019m thinking of moving to Paris,\u201d he later told me, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t speak the language.\u201d <\/span>Born in 1954 in Edison, New Jersey, he began making after-school trips to New York City at the age of thirteen, catching the bus or stealing unattended cars to get there. After a couple of studio courses at Indiana University and a semester at San Francisco Art Institute, Covert dropped out of school and taught himself to paint. In the late seventies and eighties, he became a fixture of the East Village arts scene that came to be known as \u201cDowntown,\u201d cofounding Playhouse 57 with the theater artist Andy Rees, at the storied performance venue and nightclub Club 57 at <\/span>57 Saint Marks Place<\/span>. Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, there in 1979. He has since exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris; his work appears in collections around the globe.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Covert leads a peripatetic life. For some four decades he has crisscrossed the country in his car and flown across hemispheres in search of the graves of composers, rock stars, poets, serial killers, and other cultural totems. From their headstones, he makes on-site rubbings with oil wax crayons, using myriad pigments and varying amounts of pressure. The canvases that make up the Monument Paintings, an ongoing series, are laden with text\u2014layers of names, birth and death dates, epitaphs, and fleur-de-lis\u2014and topped with scribbles and swaths of color. Covert renders some celebrity names nearly indecipherable through the sheer density of their replication; others appear alone in the limelight of the canvas. The paintings showcase his acute sense for depth and texture, as well as his attunement to death\u2019s magnetism and absurdity. His work has taken him to Detroit, Montparnasse, Moscow, Luxor, Cairo, and Geneva. Soon, he intends to visit the Trinity nuclear testing site in New Mexico dubbed ground zero: <\/span>\u201cI\u2019m hoping the government will give me some help. Get some soldiers out there to lift things for me.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

When you were a teenager growing up in Edison, were you already hoping to pursue visual art?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

No, I was more of a dancer. I took classical ballet, jazz, tap. I got to meet faggots because they were all there. And then I realized it was all goofy, and I ran to New York.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

So dance fed naturally into performance art?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah. I always felt I was special. I never felt inferior, even though the kids in Edison hated me, they banged me up. I have scars all over my body. I was really tortured there\u2014head banged against the curb. I was pretty. You know what I mean? But they didn\u2019t make me dress butch\u2014if anything it made me react against them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve described attending your grandfather\u2019s open-casket funeral service when you were eight years old. There\u2019s so much pageantry in the Catholic Church.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMary, we crown thee with blossoms.\u201d I loved the May Crownings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Did Catholicism and its extravagant treatment of death leave a mark on your work?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

In eighth grade, I was told by a nun that I was going to burn in hell\u2014I was a homosexual and there was no hope for me. So I went through life with that attitude\u2014I\u2019m going to be burning in hell, what the fuck makes the difference? It didn\u2019t make me a mean person. I didn\u2019t feel like I could go out and kill people or anything like that, because I didn\u2019t want to kill people. But that\u2019s what Catholicism did for me. I was always going to die. I was going to be condemned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But then, my brother\u2019s a priest. He\u2019s a very, very cool priest. When I was a kid and I was a faggot, he was the one who said, \u201cGod has preached that he is the son of man. That means man is God. If you feel no guilt for what you are doing, then you are not going to be in trouble.\u201d I was taught that I was the eye of judgment of my life. I\u2019m a part of God, and who knows more of what I\u2019ve done in my life than me?<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Club 57 was located in the basement of a Polish church.<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

An excommunicated Polish church.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Excommunicated for what reason?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Because it was basically just getting people into the country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Playhouse 57 get started?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Andy Rees was my best friend. He was a genius. He knew everything about every movie, every Broadway musical. He had videotapes\u2014which was unusual back then\u2014to show me. He turned me onto Lana Turner and <\/span>Ziegfeld Girl<\/span><\/i>. And he was like me. I am a person of action, I don\u2019t sit around and talk about things. It\u2019s just part of my nature. \u201cWe should clean the house.\u201d I don\u2019t say that. I clean the house. Not recently, but \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I know there was a ladies\u2019 wrestling night and a film series at Club 57.<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Monster Movie Club. I was the first person to put Kenneth Anger\u2019s whole Magick Lantern Cycle together and show it. Because we were a church group, we could rent different films from the collection at MoMA at almost no cost.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

And you were acting as well. Did you go to the theater a lot?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I loved the ballet, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go to New York City Ballet for free. At that time there was a doorman and elevator-man strike at the building I worked in on West Sixty-Seventh, where George Balanchine lived. Everybody had to have their turn at the elevator. I got out of work one day, and there was Balanchine, working the elevator. I said, \u201cNo, Mr. B. I will do your shift. You go and do what you\u2019ve got to do.\u201d So I did his shift, and the next thing you know, whenever I wanted to, I could go to the viewing box.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

That First Covid Spring<\/em>, Sag Harbor, 2020. Wax oil crayon, acrylic, spray paint on paper. 29 x 23 in. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

The East Village of that period has been heavily mythologized as \u201cDowntown.\u201d What was it like to be there?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

There were three hundred people in society. Everybody else was other people that you didn\u2019t get involved with. But there were only, like, three hundred people that would go to the Mudd Club, that would go up to Hurrah, that would go to Danceteria. Everybody knew each other, and everybody was making art. No matter what kind of drugs you were on, everybody was making something.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was a drag queen, too. I would do things at Club 57, quick little numbers. Andy Rees and I would go out, and he would be Martha Stevens, Connie Stevens\u2019s second-oldest daughter. And he would wheel me in a wheelchair. I swear to God, one day, we were walking down the street like that and Richard Sohl, the pianist for Patti Smith, was walking by in drag pushing a baby carriage. You didn\u2019t do things because you needed applause. You did things because you needed to do them. You had fun. It wasn\u2019t about the recognition.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was this group of kids in lower Manhattan, and the rest of Manhattan was something else. I felt like it was a family. Even if you didn\u2019t like each other\u2014you didn\u2019t like everybody in your family. Cookie was very much a mother figure for me. Rene Ricard was, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you meet Cookie Mueller initially?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Drugs. Just from being around. After I made my first rubbing at the grave of Florence Ballard, the Supreme, I ran back to Cookie. And she loved it. She told me to quit acting to do this<\/span>,<\/span> because this was very modern. She said I had to focus on one thing, that I couldn\u2019t do everything. Cookie is the one who made me do this.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You started to focus more on painting then, in 1985, and I wonder how influential that downtown environment was on your work?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I guess it was. Though I never associated it with all my friends dying and going to cemeteries. Because I really suffered, I lost so many people during the AIDS<\/small>\u00a0epidemic. I became a full-blown alcoholic, a drug addict, because I was sure I was the next one to die. So who the fuck cares? Pour me another vodka.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t relate that to my work at all. I just related the work to what I liked doing, and going to cemeteries got me out of the city. So I started traveling. I liked that. I was making abstract paintings my own way, but I was making abstract paintings. I thought they would be the last paintings of the twentieth century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

So the journey to find the graves was always an important part of the work. You\u2019ve written about \u201cthe moments between the brushstrokes.\u201d What are your routines? Do you prefer to work in the morning?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I like to get out there and just spend a full day. I don\u2019t stop. The driving is a part of the process. I don\u2019t listen to music in the car. I have no problem sitting with my own thoughts. When I drive, I like to make my thoughts rest. I notice the landscape. I enjoy seeing how it changes from going through the flatlands into the hills to the tall grass to the woods.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

This makes me think of David Wojnarowicz\u2019s memoir <\/span>Close to the Knives<\/span><\/i>. There are these beautiful, hallucinogenic descriptions of driving through the desert, below \u201cthe domed curve of the heavens.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll have to read those. <\/span>On the Road<\/span><\/i> was the most boring thing I\u2019ve ever read. I thought, Ugh. Heterosexuals, ew.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How do you select your subjects? Do you decide spontaneously while you\u2019re standing in a graveyard, or do you have an idea before you arrive?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

No, nothing is planned out in my life. I\u2019m here in the moment. Let\u2019s see what happens when I get there, because it might start pouring rain. It\u2019s always about what\u2019s going to happen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first time I went to Andy Warhol\u2019s grave, it was a big deal. At the time, I would do local cemeteries in New York\u2014Woodlawn, or Leonard Bernstein in Green-Wood. I was working for this company, D.\u2009F. King, persuading people how to vote on their stocks. I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was very good at it, so I saved up enough to get an airline ticket to Pittsburgh. I took a train out to Castle Shannon, where Andy\u2019s buried, and it was a windy day. I\u2019d brought my paintings in a suitcase, and I was sitting on the grave with them next to me. Then I saw all of my stuff\u2014and I was working mostly on paper then\u2014blowing across the cemetery.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of getting upset, I said, Well, this is the way it\u2019s going to be. Things are going to get beaten up. Several months later, there was Julian Schnabel carrying his canvases across the beach to get them beaten up. So, I said, Oh, I\u2019m on the right track. If there\u2019s a rip in it, it\u2019s okay.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you ever abandon a canvas?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I leave them behind, but then I return. I have a whole bunch of paintings now that I could put thin layers of oil paint on top to see what\u2019s underneath. There\u2019s always something you can do with something. Right now, I\u2019m getting into collage. When I was in Paris, I couldn\u2019t bring as many canvases as I wanted, so I took stationery from the hotel and just started doing rubbings of <\/span>Schiaparelli<\/span>\u2014you know, the smaller names. Now I\u2019m starting to glue them onto larger pieces of paper, with other ephemera, and see what that becomes.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Can you tell me about the piece you\u2019re working on now?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s Jacques Rigaut and Raymond Johnson. Two suicide people. And I just found Barbette\u2019s grave in Texas. She also committed suicide\u2014the trapeze artist who was in drag. Man Ray photographed him a lot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to put in Andrea Feldman, the Warhol superstar, but she was in an unmarked grave. I\u2019m going to see if I can find a headstone for her. Andrea Feldman was a hero. She was just the coolest chick. Whips, they called her. And in an unmarked grave. It was just sad to me. I\u2019d just write, \u201cAndrea Feldman, Warhol Superstar,\u201d and the years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you end up thinking a lot about what happens to a person\u2019s body after they die\u2014whether they are buried, cremated, placed in a mausoleum?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah. Who was it that was just cremated that I was really upset about? Someone always gets cremated and it just ruins everything. Christine Jorgensen.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

The first woman to have gender-affirming surgery. Given that you spend so much time in graveyards, does the work ever feel morbid to you?<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

To me, it\u2019s beautiful. I\u2019m in beautiful gardens. I would like to live at the end of my life somewhere with a pet cemetery, just taking care of a garden around little animals that are loved. And people could come visit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

That sounds restful, but you seem to have chosen a practice that involves a lot of challenges, technical and otherwise. There must be complications that come with working outdoors, for instance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I have to worry about sundown. I have to worry about how when it\u2019s too cold, the canvases freeze, and the crayons don\u2019t melt onto the canvas. They flake off easily. It\u2019s always worrying about the weather, or if people are going to be there, or where the grave is located relative to the cemetery\u2019s office. There are those kinds of things that I always get around. When we were at Rimbaud\u2019s grave, it was right by the office, but the man didn\u2019t mind because he saw I wasn\u2019t hurting the grave.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What would you say is the most difficult part of making a painting?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

COVERT<\/span><\/p>\n

I have to sneak to do everything that I do. I can\u2019t get in trouble for doing it, but the cemetery can get in trouble for letting me. It\u2019s private property. That\u2019s what happened at P\u00e8re Lachaise. They kicked me out of Gertrude Stein\u2019s grave, but I\u2019ll go back. They put plastic around Oscar Wilde\u2019s grave. But I\u2019ll be back, with a locksmith.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An exhibition of Scott Covert\u2019s work will open this fall at Off Paradise, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jay Graham is an editorial intern at <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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