In 1992, Chloë Sevigny, then 18, was just becoming a downtown–New York It girl while Rob Pruitt, 10 years her senior, was already a fallen art star, following his infamous show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. With his collaborator Jack Early, Pruitt had explored the marketing of African-American culture; their exhibition consisted of shrink-wrapped posters of famous African Americans accompanied by a rap soundtrack in a room covered in gold foil and spattered with paint. Political correctness ruled the day: The duo’s work was dismissed as racist, and they soon received the art-world’s heave-ho. Pruitt eventually found his way back: In 1998, at a group show in New York’s Meatpacking District, he presented Cocaine Buffet, a line of cocaine that viewers were invited to sample. And in 2010, his huge solo exhibition “Pattern and Degradation,” a study of cultural excess at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Maccarone, sealed his return to the firmament. Pruitt is perhaps best known now for his glitter panda paintings, first shown in 2001; but in the past few years, he has also transformed a Victorian house in upstate New York into a Goth art installation, created a diaristic mural using pictures of his Facebook friends, and hatched the Guggenheim’s annual Art Awards, the contemporary art world’s version of the Oscars. All the while, he’s kept up his friendship with Sevigny, who has long maintained her indie cred despite an Oscar nomination for her role in the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry and five seasons as sister-wife Nicki on HBO’s hit series Big Love. This winter she tackles yet another provocative character: a preoperative male-to-female transsexual contract killer in the new miniseries Hit and Miss. In advance of the program’s February debut on DirecTV—and in time for Pruitt’s new solo show, currently on display at Dallas Contemporary, in Texas—W invited the pair to collaborate on a photographic art project.
How did you two meet?
PRUITT: It was around the time my career had just kind of ended. It was
the early nineties, and I wasn’t getting any shows, so I took a job in
SoHo at the Anna Sui store. I had seen this young woman around town, and
I figured out that she worked at Liquid Sky [a downtown boutique]. That
young woman was Chloë. I developed a mini-obsession; it really was like
being a stalker. I’ve always been a very nervous and shy person, but I
would go into Liquid Sky and buy things I didn’t necessarily want just
so that I could have a few words with Chloë at the counter. To me, she
was like a walking embodiment of art—just the way she dressed and the
way she behaved.
SEVIGNY: We met through my good friend, the artist Rita Ackermann. She
was my doorway into this whole world. I was really young and shy and
just working in a shop and figuring out my place. And she exposed me to
all these incredible artists who were doing insane things.
PRUITT: Then fast-forward a couple of years after Chloë finished filming
Kids [the 1995 cult film directed by Larry Clark, starring Sevigny], and
I ended up cutting her hair in a downtown loft.
SEVIGNY: I was really sad about the haircut—I thought it was pretty bad.
But because of Rob’s voice and his nature, I fully trusted him. That was
the first time I saw his panda paintings—in that apartment.
PRUITT: Yeah. The building was painted, like, a bubblegum pink on the
outside. And a lot of interesting people went in and out of that space
while I lived there.
SEVIGNY: Seeing how all the worlds were kind of meshing—fashion, art,
and music—and that you didn’t have to do only one thing had a big
impact on me.
PRUITT: Maybe every generation has this romantic period when it seems
like everyone is working together and everything feels new and fresh.
But it did seem to me that everything was multidisciplinary—more so than
10 years before, when I was Chloë’s age and becoming acclimated to New
York. I experienced a certain amount of success at a very young age in
the art world, and I always thought it was a fluke. My early success
lasted only two or three years, so it wasn’t really too painful when it
was suddenly stripped away. Of course, I also found a good therapist.
