IN 2021, approximately 1,773 wildfires have burned across Arizona. That year, in early July, artist Scott Covert and his traveling companion, filmmaker Lex Niarchos, were driving across the state. They were on their way to Pinal Cemetery, located near the small market town of Superior, so that Covert could rub the headstone which belonged to the “Bandit Queen” Pearl Hart, one of the last known stagecoach robbers of the Wild West. . One night, the two encountered a roadside memorial featuring a humble crucifix with blue LED lights wrapped around it. Niarchos captured the modest structure in a video. Yet in this clip, we see that the mountainous terrain behind the marker is completely on fire: massive fires crackling against the dark evening sky. This extraordinary scene, practically the blink of an eye, opens the Scott Covert: so far, California. 1990-2022, a calm and meditative mini-documentary of just over twenty-two minutes, which follows the artist as he traverses our ruined world, visiting graveyard after graveyard to create his painterly rubbings of the tombstones of illustrious and infamous. (After leaving Hart, the couple traveled to Phoenix to get rubs at the graves of Barry Goldwater and Walter Winchell.) This version of the film premiered on the occasion of Covert’s first institutional investigation, organized by Ariella Wolens at Nova Southeastern University. Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Florida. The show’s tongue-in-cheek title, ‘I’ve had a wonderful life,’ was removed from the gravestone of Brooke Astor, the hard-nosed American blue blood who died in 2007 at the age of 105 – that seems to me a loving tribute from one tenacious queen to another.
In 1985, actress and novelist Cookie Mueller, a friend of Covert, saw her rubbing the headstone of Florence Ballard, the former Supreme who is buried at Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery in Warren, Michigan, and told her said he had found his calling. . (Covert was a lifelong fan of the cursed singer, who was a founding member of the legendary Motown girl band. Sadly, Ballard was fired in 1967 because of her alcoholism and died just nine years later, at the age of thirty years. two, of a heart attack.) In the February 1988 issue of Details, Mueller describes a trip to Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, for the magazine’s “Art and About” column. Covert went there to rub shoulders with Jayne Mansfield’s headstone — which is, appropriately, heart-shaped — so Mueller came round. His article, apparently a report on the Manhattan art scene, is largely a meditation on the dubious value of fame, especially on a disintegrating planet:
Forget about being immortal. Unless you have talent, like Van Gogh, plus media blitz ability like Jayne Mansfield. . . then forget your name in art or film history books. Human beings will fight for space on the globe, and space in the history books will not expand because of the decrease in pulp because all the trees have been cut down. The stories of great talented artists will float like dried brown leaves.
Covert is something of a noble gleaner for these troubling end times, a collector of all those brittle leaves that have fallen from Earth’s once mighty redwoods. Generationally related to Gary Lee Boas, that accomplished fan and photographer who spent endless hours outside crowded stage doors and near red carpets in the 1970s and 1980s, hoping to capture Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Bennett. or Barbara Stanwyck on film. Yet Covert doesn’t hang out for anyone, anywhere; the biggest and brightest stars of yesteryear await it (what other choice do they have?), with its muslin sheets and boxes of oil wax pastels in tow, to collect their autographs – in somehow – while basking in their lifeless company. I am thinking of those ancient Chinese stampings of monuments and ironwork, made on delicate rice paper, which have long survived the sources from which they were taken. Perhaps one day, when the planet lies charred and fallow, a lonely soul will stumble upon a painting by Covert in a dilapidated museum with the words BETTE DAVIS etched on it. This person, not knowing who she was, will say her name out loud, perhaps with some confusion, bringing the actress back to life for just a few seconds. It’s a strangely comforting thought.
Covert knows oblivion: “I became a heavy drug addict because of AIDS”, he told me one day. “Every morning I woke up, looked at myself and wondered when I was going to see the purple wounds,” he wrote in an essay for Ursula magazine a few years ago, referring to Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions that were often a warning sign of the disease. Covert has lost too many friends and loved ones, including Mueller, to AIDS. Surrounded by so much unbearable suffering and death throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the artist nearly wiped himself out with drugs and sex. In a group of modest-scale works from Covert’s ongoing “Lifetime Drawings” series, which he began in 1985 – their surfaces are laboriously inscribed with tiny checkerboard patterns that bleed into the edges – we see evidence of this troubled period which is nevertheless strewn with Covert. characteristic black humor.
Covert is something of a noble gleaner for these troubling end times, a collector of all those brittle leaves that have fallen from Earth’s once mighty redwoods.
In one such drawing, a dark, smudged print of Lucille Ball’s nameplate – taken from the comedian’s niche in the columbarium at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles – sits alongside a photograph of a well-endowed naked man in a cluttered room. . . the artist’s studio? Elsewhere, Ball’s plaque, captured in grimy red and lipstick, hangs above a photo of an erect rooster, who stands at attention outside the resting place of a certain Michael S. Salupo, who appears to have died in 1987. In another, the rubbing, tilted at a casual forty-five degree angle, points to a shirtless guy with a scarred, tattooed torso. Pants down and genitals exposed, he stares straight into the camera, daring the viewer to break eye contact. In the upper left corner of the composition is a postage stamp with a portrait of former US President George HW Bush, his thin, vicious lips curled back in an oddly self-satisfied smile. The piece evokes a postcard, perhaps delivered from one of the sexiest and most festive neighborhoods in hell. The words USA FOREVER are printed at the bottom of the Bush stamp. In the context of Covert’s art, the phrase has a comedic funereal quality – like something that should be written in flowers and planted on America’s grave.
These images, most of which have never been publicly displayed, came to light in 2003, when Covert learned that Ball’s cremated remains were being moved from California to land in Jamestown, New York, the birthplace of Ball. ‘actress. Prior to reburial, the artist rushed to the Hollywood Hills site and, in what must have been an adrenaline-fueled frenzy, did a thousand rubs of Ball’s plate in one day. The photographic elements, which document Covert’s period of self-destruction, were not discovered until later, after he had old film developed. The checkerboard backgrounds of the drawings, however, push the works into an eternal space. The motifs, which have their roots in millennial cultures, symbolize all kinds of dualities: life and death, good and evil, joy and pain. This pattern, a type of doodle Covert has been making since he was a child, frequently expands and contracts, twists and breaks, much like a heart, until he can’t anymore.
Alex Jovanovitch is an artist and review editor of Arts forum.
