Why not just stop?
Why not just stop?
An interview with Barry Covats
In December 2005 Barry Covats (Colorado, 1931) returned, albeit more in the form of an arts patron than an artist, launching the first annual Barry Covats Award for Future Promise at the HISK. He divides his time now between Brussels and Amsterdam. Maxine Kopsa spoke with him about the downfall of pretty pictures, the myth of palpable achievements, inaction and insurrection.
For some reason visiting the Robert Smithson website this morning made me realise that we are in fact here, on this earth, in order to achievements. Something about seeing that ‘died 1973’ after just having clicked away from the very professional home page showcasing his Spiral Jetty. You knew Smithson. Would you say that life is about tangible achievements?
‘Do we have to talk about achievements? Or art? I don’t like to call things “art” I prefer to call it all “exercise”.
Robert Smithson used to say: mistakes and dead-ends are more important than any proven problem. ‘Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content. Just as problems are unnecessary because problems represent values that create the illusion of purpose. The problem of ‘form vs. content’, for example, leads to illusionistic dialectics that become, at best, formalist reactions against content. Reaction follows action, ‘til finally the artist gets ‘tired’ and settles for monumental inaction.’ I knew I needed to do something and painting, for a while, seemed like the only solution. I didn’t really question why I was painting. Robert Smithson used to say: mistakes and dead-ends are more important than any proven problem. ‘Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content. Just as problems are unnecessary because problems represent values that create the illusion of purpose. The problem of ‘form vs. content’, for example, leads to illusionistic dialectics that become, at best, formalist reactions against content. Reaction follows action, ‘til finally the artist gets ‘tired’ and settles for monumental inaction.’ I knew I needed to do something and painting, for a while, seemed like the only solution. I didn’t really question why I was painting.
You say it’s all you could do. You make it sound as though you had no control over what you made.
‘I didn’t. I mean, of course I did. Everyone does. But I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to paint. I’d wake up in the morning and ask whoever I woke up with what they thought I should paint that day.’
Is that when you decided to change?
‘Yes. Well, almost. I was in between modes, you could say. I wanted to look in the mirror and see someone else. I had already said yes to the Clement Sonnabend show but was feeling strange about it. And one morning I woke up and asked Bonnie, my girlfriend at the time, what I should paint and she said why don’t you just stop. I guess I was thinking too much as you say of achievements. I had the paintings done for the show, enough to fill the space, so I started to concentrate on what it was I really wanted to say. I decided to hire an actor and had him walk around during the opening pretending to be me. He even looked a bit like me. A journalist from the Oklahoma Morning Standard came round the gallery and did an interview with ‘me’. It was published a few days later.’
Do you still have a copy of the interview?
‘No. I threw all of that stuff away when I decided to move to New York.’
But I remember reading somewhere that you had declared the fake interview to be the real artwork and not the show at all.
‘I did. And I still do. But that doesn’t mean I have to hold on to it, frame it, keep it like it was a painting.’
In the early 60s, you decide to go to NY, where ‘it’ -being Pop art- was all ‘happening’. But you decide this after you officially stop painting. What was ‘it’ then that you were looking for in NY, if it wasn’t a continuation of painting?
‘I was sick and tired of Oklahoma. Howard (Barry shared a studio with Howard Kanovitz –ed.) was driving me up the wall, Bonnie had left and the gallery couldn’t sell any of my paintings because of what I had said about them and the interview. I thought I’d find people to talk to in NY.’
In NY you began what people have called your ‘conceptual parade’ –you broke into galleries where the works of Pop artist celebrities were on view and would replace one of theirs with a work of your own, signed ‘BC, not present’. It took a while before The New York Times republished the piece from the Oklahoma Morning Standard and made the connection between BC and Barry Covats. But you did become a craze and the ‘BC, not present’ paintings began selling, and selling quickly. What prompted you to break into those New York galleries? What I mean to ask, somewhat awkwardly, was it a conceptual conviction or an artists’ frustration?
‘Well, as I told you, I decided to stop painting. I don’t know if this was out of frustration or because I really thought it was over -for me. But I know when it really hit me: Howard called me up one day -by that time he had also moved to NY- and invited me to a preview of one of his shows, it was the Painting Annual at the Whitney. He kept going on about his Sable show two years prior and flaunting his plans for his Jewish Museum show the year after. And I was walking around at the opening of the Whitney and trying to block out Howard and it dawned on me: I needed to infiltrate this on-going system of shows and works and shows and works and critics, and get in on my own terms. I knew I wanted more of that freedom and subversion I felt with the Sonnabend show but wasn’t sure how to get it. It wasn’t just about being clever or getting a one-up, it had a lot to do with a kind of insurrection. I didn’t want to shit on the art world, I wanted to get more space, so that I or the ‘other’ me could make a point. I couldn’t have known it would all become so commercially successful. It was quite a paradox when some of the galleries started leaving their doors unlocked at night. I remember one of them was even cleaned out.’
What do you mean by ‘get more space’?
‘People aren’t made up of just one characteristic all the time. There are different people in a single person. Art business has been functioning on the absurd requirement and expectation that only one personality can be present in an artist. Franz Kline is usually characterized in one way and he isn’t given the room to be known for different work. Someone else is allowed to make a different style of work than his but after 10 or 15 years they are doing the same thing again and again. It’s a bunch of autograph collecting and stamp collecting.’
So the space you refer to is a ‘freespace’. One outside of the power of the market. You were though consciously working with the mechanisms of the art market when you decided to ‘get in on it’ -even if, as you say, on your own terms- when you ‘stole’ those works. What did you really think about the paintings you were replacing? They weren’t all Howard Kanovitz, some were by Tom Wesselmann, Allan D’Arcangelo, Robert Indiana…And what did you do with them?
‘I didn’t have anything against them, if that’s what you mean. Their pictures were writing history, whether they knew it at the time or not. Their worked stopped doing that when we all got used to it. Look at what Howard’s making now for god’s sake. I think I was just in time. I gave the paintings back of course, to them, not the galleries.
When you signed the works you left behind in the galleries with ‘BC was here’, you were in a sense taking on a ‘fake identity’, or maybe better put, a ‘fictional identity’. Of course you had played with posing before, as early as the Sonnabend show. There seems to be quite a lot going on now in terms of fake identities: the artist and gallerist Reena Spaulings in NY; Gagosian Gallery in Berlin, hijacked for the Berlin Biennial 04. People like John Tylo, Kathy Acker, Ilya Kabakov. Others you may not have heard of like the Dutch artist Barbara Visser who has been working with blurring her own identity for years; Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen who still does in his films and someone like Marcel van Eeden who has made up a whole character. This all is a playing with fiction and reality, keeping us on our toes as to whether the author is sincere. How do you see these situations today? Why do you think there’s so much of it going on?
‘There’s a lot of making-up going on today and you’re not the first to ask me what I think of it. People have asked if I would want to return so to speak, undercover. There’s a recovery from the outer fringes that brings one back to a central point, as Robert (Robert Smithson –ed) once said. And returning within this model would just mean restating the model, without pulling back just enough, without changing anything.
On another note, you have to be careful with a list like this. What you call posing or taking on a fake identity is different to working under a pseudonym, or can be. Sincerity is related to the freespace of the fake identity, I think. Gilbert and George, though they fall into the slightly different category of ‘pose’ using the pose as a mechanism, so well that you wonder whether it is a pose at all, also bend the truth. For that matter so does Jeff Koons. Like his art, in interviews you never quite know if he’s serious or making fun of us all. Not dissimilar is Cosey Fanni Tutti who posed as but in so doing ‘became’ a porn model in the 70s. Related, but also different, are the strategies of disappearance, people like Ian Wilson who holds his ‘discussions’ and Lee Lozano who physically removed herself from the artworld –they’ve explored not only the ephemeral but also the total negation of the author. On another note, you have to be careful with a list like this. What you call posing or taking on a fake identity is different to working under a pseudonym, or can be. Sincerity is related to the freespace of the fake identity, I think. Gilbert and George, though they fall into the slightly different category of ‘pose’ using the pose as a mechanism, so well that you wonder whether it is a pose at all, also bend the truth. For that matter so does Jeff Koons. Like his art, in interviews you never quite know if he’s serious or making fun of us all. Not dissimilar is Cosey Fanni Tutti who posed as but in so doing ‘became’ a porn model in the 70s. Related, but also different, are the strategies of disappearance, people like Ian Wilson who holds his ‘discussions’ and Lee Lozano who physically removed herself from the artworld –they’ve explored not only the ephemeral but also the total negation of the author.
The crux lies in whether you’re running scared or running towards danger. There’s a very fine line between being boring and interesting when it comes to faking. That’s why Hollywood banks on: “this is based on a true story.” We pay more attention when we think something is real. Or maybe we look closer when we doubt whether something’s real.’ The crux lies in whether you’re running scared or running towards danger. There’s a very fine line between being boring and interesting when it comes to faking. That’s why Hollywood banks on: “this is based on a true story.” We pay more attention when we think something is real. Or maybe we look closer when we doubt whether something’s real.’
Would you say that the fake identities being created now are more a curator and gallery pleasing-construct than say a critical mechanism motivated by the artists themselves?
‘First of all, things that motivate artists are never really on the surface as they are with curators and dealers. And the things that motivate artists are really none of your business. I keep changing my mind. And I can allow myself to do that – it’s fundamental to my life as an artist and I will uphold my right, any artist’s, to constantly change his mind. I don’t know if a curator can. A curator has to suggest coherence and clarity where there often isn’t any. They have to form opinions and present them to a wider audience, maintain a position even temporarily that can be readily understood. The artist lets this happen, because he’s not in the business of mediating what he produces for public consumption -unless he becomes someone else. That’s the pull: A fake identity lets you be both, or at least lets the curator and the artist meet somewhere in the middle. The curator gets to be whoever they want -even the author- and the artist gets to be in curatorial or editorial control.’
And if you successfully become your fake identity you are able, in real time, to edit your own life?
‘Exactly. Like mother nature.’
Thanks to the Clement Sonnabend Gallery in Oklahoma City, Bruce Conner, Howard Kanovitz, Emily Feathers, Harry Crumb, Ann Demeester, Joachim Koester, Will Holder. Thanks to the Clement Sonnabend Gallery in Oklahoma City, Bruce Conner, Howard Kanovitz, Emily Feathers, Harry Crumb, Ann Demeester, Joachim Koester, Will Holder.
Maxine Kopsa
