If I were ever in the navy, I would serve on the USS Sturtevant, just for the swag.
Then after three years of command and successful torpedo destroyer training maneuvers off the coast of Virginia, maybe my fine crew would present me with an engraved silver trophy vase like the one they gave Lt Cmdr Freeland Allyn Daubin at the end of his command, a hundred years ago this summer.
But alas, the USS Sturtevant is no more. While patrolling the waters off Key West in 1942, the Sturtevant hit a mine the US Navy had not disclosed to itself, exploded, and sank, killing fifteen.
This trophy vase is being sold by the heirs of an antique store owner in Tampa, and the uncertainty about the weight of its weighted base vs the 10, 15, or 20 troy ounces of silver the auctioneer speculates it might yield when it is melted down.
If I were to make it into an artwork, a found readymade that namechecked one of Duchamp’s great interrogators and one of my own heroes, and which turned out to have a previously undiscovered familial connection to lay alongside Sturtevant’s ex-husband Ira, who went on to sexually revolutionize the world by introducing his next partner Meg Crane’s home pregnancy test to market, we could lock in a more prolonged cultural appreciation, for this battered uterus diagram-shaped trophy vase, if not a greater market value.
But a genealogical search yields no apparent relation between the home pregnancy test/conceptual artist-divorcing Sturtevants of New York and New England and the family of Ensign Albert Dillon Sturtevant of Washington DC, after whom the destroyer was named. And my art practice is unlikely to produce a five-figure object in the next two weeks. So unless and until I end up having to repeat this vase in the future, this blog post will soon be the only thing holding this concept together, and this will be [yet] an[other] artwork whose object has ceased to exist.