Scott Covert: Why one artist has made it his life’s mission to hunt down dead celebrities

Pilgrimage often involves the creation of a personal map. Whether one is going in search of holy wells, cult film locations, rare birds, or feats of Victorian engineering, it provides a series of connecting threads that overlay the usual borders and terrains. One gets the sense that Covert’s whole world is oriented by cemeteries – each a beacon, its potential depending on who is buried there. It’s easier now in the days of Google Maps and online records, but graves used to be hard to locate. Covert tells me about how he met someone who became a dear friend graveside in Culver City, next to Rita Hayworth’s resting place. Part of the so-called Hollywood Underground, a loose group devoted to finding the graves of those celebrities whose whereabouts have been kept under wraps, he was an invaluable source of information.

Although this might all sound rather macabre, there is a sprightly, curious quality to Covert’s work and attitude: a sense of single-minded devotion and obsession. He has been described as Warholian in his approach to pop culture and celebrity, but there is something immensely sincere to these paintings. Some of them might be naughty and others dark (he says that the graves of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, convicted of the murders of the Clutter family and the focus of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, made him feel “repulsed”), but many are reverent – even loving. Covert says he developed his way of working because he wanted to make abstract paintings. A name is just another kind of mark – one in which “each brushstroke” holds a lifetime. It also becomes evidence of having been somewhere. The paintings themselves are maps. In being made, they prove that the maker travelled all that way, driving for 14 hours or getting on a plane, to get to that particular grave, and to the particular person it memorialises. It is, as another friend once pointed out to him, the opposite of graffiti. He does not leave his mark. Instead he diligently acquires it, amassing a series of numbers and letters summarising a whole history.

The power of the gravestone

In her book These Silent Mansions: A Lifetime in Graveyards, the poet Jean Sprackland writes about her own lack of interest in famous gravestones. Instead, she is drawn to “the unremarkable and forgotten, whose names can no longer be deciphered”. She likes them, she says, because they remind her of “the span of human life – how one may be longer than another but all are finite – and how I and everyone around me is part of the inescapable repeating pattern so explicitly demonstrated here.” There is something humbling in being in a graveyard, in being reminded of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. Everything must come to an end, including us. British artist Nathan Coley’s 2010 work In Memory featured a series of gravestones that had, for a variety of mysterious reasons, been removed from the place they were intended to stand. On each, the name was chiselled out: a blank square in its place, leaving behind only messages of rest and loving memory. In their anonymity, they became something that could belong to anyone’s dear father or beloved wife. Unmoored from their specific commemorative function, they also morphed, according to the work’s accompanying notes, back into objects: shapes hewn and carved from stone or granite, rather than reminders of someone specific, a whole life compressed between two dates.