A Reconstruction
by A.C. Greenspan
“I don’t give a shit when the shit hits the fan.”
George Cup, 1977
“That which is intended for the eyes can’t be explained to the ears.”
Steve Elliott, 1980
There are artists who suddenly disappear from the field of vision of the
art world, although they had an exemplary significance for their
contemporaries. The artist-couple George Cup & Steve Elliott represent
one of those cases. Only a small group of art collectors and friends,
among whom A.C. Greenspan count himself, has preserved their
memory during the last twenty years.
George Cup was convicted in 1986 for the alleged murder of his
romantic and professional partner Steve Elliott and was imprisoned in a
New York penitentiary. As a consequence, the oeuvre of these two
artists, who numbered among the founders of American Minimal Art,
was almost completely “erased.” In recent years, no one believed that
their oeuvre would experience a belated recognition some twenty-two
years after this grievous error of justice.
It is above all due to the initiative of the George Cup Research Center,
established in 2006 with offices in New York and Hannover / Germany,
that the works of the two artists have be seen in Germany for the first
time since their last exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York
in 1985.
In a dramatic manner, George Cup’s state of health deteriorated so
extremely during the preparations for the exhibition that in July 2008,
two months before the opening in Wolfsburg / Germany and barely a
year after his name was cleared and he was released from prison, he
died at the age of seventy-eight.
The family of George Cup, who was born in 1930 under the name of
Georg Anton Kupsch in Heßlingen, the city which today is Wolfsburg,
immigrated in 1936 to the United States and settled in New York City.
Steve Elliott, born in 1933 in Nordhorn / Germany under the name
Stefan Berliott, grew up at only a few miles’ distance from George Cup,
on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. The two met in
1954 at the Art Students League in New York, where Steve Elliott was
studying. At this point in time, Cup was still pursuing his ambition of
becoming an architect, but he definitively abandoned these plans in
1960. Designs dating from 1956 for a house shaped in the form of a
cube and covered in black slate slabs, however, already provide
indications of his subsequent artistic development.
As is typical for many artistic couples, George Cup & Steve Elliott were
connected by an ambivalent relationship. George Cup had an
uncontrollable temper and was known for his quarrelsomeness,
resistance to compromise, and aggressivity. Robert Rauschenberg
even described his imprisonment as the logical consequence of his hot-
tempered character.1 And A.C. Greenspan increasingly came to view
Cup as unpredictable. One time in an exhibition, he spit and urinated
on works that displeased him; during disputes he knocked glasses from
the hands of gallerists, or he stomped to pieces his own works which
had already been sold. This sort of behavior may have a positive effect
on the image of some artists, but not with Cup and Elliott. According to
Betty Parsons, “…everyone took offense at his arrogance,”2 and Andy
Warhol stated repeatedly, “He’s an asshole,” and added, “an asshole,
but a handsome one.”3
Steve Elliott, on the other hand, appeared to be the exact opposite of
the eccentric personality of George Cup. He was introverted and
always courteous when A.C. Greenspan visited him in his studio, where
he could be found day and night, whereas George to a large extent
made his appearance alone or in the company of other men in New
York’s gay and art community. Although the works almost without
exception were signed by George, many considered Steve to be the
actual creative and dynamic force of the couple. André Emmerich
described their relationship in 1974 “…as a fragile give-and-take that
had its ups and downs. George needed Steve for inner support and
Steve needed George for external representation.”4 Even if the
assignment of creatorship proves to be problematic in individual cases,
a comparison of the autonomous early works of Cup and Elliott with the
oeuvre of the artist-couple and the late works of Cup which were
created in prison demonstrates that two independent artists had found
in their mutual connection a “critical mass” which is perceptible even
today as a source of inspiration.
At the end of the nineteen-seventies, George Cup began for a while to
shift his chief place of residence to Paris. The reason for these stays in
Paris was the relationship to an “official Frenchy,” as he was
affectionately called by Cup. All the way down to today, it remains
unclear what individual was hidden behind this designation. Even the
George Cup Research Center remains discreet and speaks only of a
“respected personality from public life in France.”5 The foundation
established in 2006 by this unknown Frenchman has made available on
loan a majority of the works which are to be seen at the Kunstverein
Wolfsburg: “The French Collection.” Because the collection was stored
in a cellar in the Parisian arrondissement du Louvre and was exposed
to humidity, extensive restoration work was necessary in the run-up to
the exhibition.
“The French affair” was initially no more a burden upon the relationship
between Elliott and Cup than were the other affairs which Cup openly
conducted during his thirty-two-year relationship with Elliott, and with
which the names of John Cage, Andy Warhol and Robert
Rauschenberg have been linked. At the end of 1985, however, Steve
Elliott took what had become an inevitable step and moved out of their
common New York apartment. The separation thrust Cup completely
out of his unstable equilibrium. Attempts to clarify the situation ended
with Cup’s violent intrusion into the new apartment of Elliott, who
answered with a restraining order. The situation escalated in the spring
of 1986: Cup, who could no longer control his aggressions, was the
subject of two complaints for bodily injury after fights in New York clubs.
It was only possible to avert judicial processes through the payment of
damages for pain and suffering. These two events were of decisive
importance for Cup’s indictment and conviction when, three months
later, Steve Elliott was found dead in his New York apartment. The
media and popular opinion were unanimous in their belief that George
Cup has killed his partner. Thus even before the trial began, the New
York Post ran the headline “Cup Kills Elliott!”6 Eyewitnesses from the
neighboring building claim to have seen Cup at the scene of the crime
on the night in question. His extensively documented proclivity for
violence along with further pieces of evidence led to a lifelong
conviction, which he began to serve in November 1986 in a New York
penitentiary. During the course of his imprisonment, there began an
almost systematic “erasure” of the artistic works by Cup and Elliott.
Sculptures were disassembled and disappeared; works were removed
from the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the
Guggenheim Museum, and today they cannot even be found in the
inventory lists. Up to the founding of the George Cup Research Center,
it almost seemed as if the artist-couple had never existed. The reasons
for this radical sequence of events are puzzling and even today the
matter has not been cleared up, nor are any written statements by
responsible figures to be found.7
Even when surprisingly, at the beginning of 2007, George Cup was
able to prove his innocence with regard to the death of Steve Elliott
and, with no attention being paid by the media, was released from
prison as a free man, numerous questions remained unanswered. Why
had Cup not commented for twenty years concerning the events that
took place in 1986? Why did he continue to remain silent after his
exoneration? For whatever reasons he possibly held himself
responsible for the death of his partner, here as well he never gave us
an answer.
In the summer of 2007, the George Cup Research Center contacted
the artist and prepared, in cooperation with the two exhibition houses in
Wolfsburg and Nordhorn, Cup’s and Elliott’s respective places of birth,
a first inventory-taking of those works which, in addition to those from
the “French Collection,” were still available. Already in 1991 a storage
site in Brooklyn had been dismantled and its works destroyed. During
the course of its investigations, the Research Center became aware of
the collection of A. C. Greenspan consisting of forty-two works, most of
which are being presented for the first time in the Städtische Galerie
Nordhorn. The models and photographs of objects and installations
from this compilation were taken as the basis for the realization of the
exhibitions in Germany, which were conceived in close cooperation with
George Cup.
The large-format installation SQUARE-ROUND # 4, dating from 1973,
had been reconstructed for the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn according
to drawings and designs. Ten square wooden panels set up one behind
the other present to view a succession of ten squares cut out of the
panels, each varying by a few degrees so that in a certain sense there
is created a squaring of the circle, which is gradated from the black of
the first panel past various shades of gray to the white of the final
panel. This installation is characteristic of Cup’s and Elliott’s works from
these years. Reduced geometrical surfaces in various sizes which
nonetheless are always related to human dimensions subdivide,
individually or serially, the entire space, floor or wall. In spite of rigorous
structural clarity and monochromatic coloration, there arises a complex
interplay among open and closed volumes, internal and external forms,
object, space and viewer. In addition to the space-encompassing
installations, various wall objects combined with fluorescent tubes and
dating from the late nineteen-sixties are presented, as well as paintings
from 1956 and 1962 which are integrated into the three-dimensional
objects. They already point towards the development of a seminally
new vocabulary of reduced, three-dimensional bodies, a formal
language which is characteristic of the late works of Cup and Elliott.
The static forms of the oil paintings were set in motion in later years
with the help of animated films, so that the interplay of movement and
music, the tradition of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter and other
representatives of the early abstract film, was taken up and
reinterpreted. The connection between form and sound consists of
twenty-six animated films which were created between 1974 and 1979
on 8 mm film and which, because of their bad condition, have been
digitally remastered for the exhibition. In the experimental film Loop #
24 (1972), the camera zooms towards a photograph which Cup is
holding in his hands and which, for its part, shows Cup with a
photograph in his hands. For five minutes, the camera zooms in a
straight line through the sites depicted on various photographs on
different locations. Further animation films and kinetic objects, as well
as artist’s books and the video installation BLACK BOX # 2 from 1979
are distributed between the two exhibition houses and offer a
comprehensive view of the oeuvre of George Cup & Steve Elliott.
These first two exhibitions of the German-American representatives of
Minimal Art, George Cup & Steve Elliott, since their disappearance from
the field of vision of the art world hopefully represent only the beginning
of a new evaluation of their work. The future will show whether this
rediscovery of George Cup & Steve Elliott will remove the shroud of
silence from them once and for all and will assign to them their well-
earned status in the history of art.
