MARS THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND

At the recent 14th Annual Conference of Poets and Scholars in Chicago, I attended an interesting symposium entitled “Jehovah’s Mooring: The Resurgence of Academic Drawing in the United States.” Among the speakers was Francois Clarel, the distinguished linguist from the Université de Cergy-Pontoise. From his privileged Val-d’Oise perch, the return of the largely discredited 19th century French pictorial aesthetic is a laughable matter. To Clarel, this is the sort of folly that makes Americans so adorable and so pitiable in French eyes.

Many attendees agreed and yet the smug nature of his assertions was rather insulting to his hosts. It was to the great credit of my friend, David Schoffman to have had the grace and presence of mind to speak on the subject with greater equanimity, unwavering dignity and sparkling erudition.

In brief, David’s argument is that the history of painting up until the mid-19th century is a story of a client-based economy. The dependence upon patrons and princes delayed the advent of “pure self-expression” till Baudelaire. Notable exceptions like Blake or Goya’s Quinta del Sordo notwithstanding, to greater or lesser degrees, the customer was always right. Perhaps the highpoint of craven subservience to the moneyed clientele was the 19th century French Academy.

Drawing, according to Schoffman, was always the exception. Renaissance and Baroque artists painted for their clients but drew for themselves and their workshop assistants. Drawing was almost never meant for public consumption and as such was always more speculative, fluid and personal. In effect, it was self-expression before this type of urging had a name.

The recent American fascination with 19th century drawing techniques such as “sight-sizing” is an unwitting retreat into creative subservience to the marketplace. The United States with its Puritanical undercurrents is the perfect breeding ground for this type of phenomenon. Distrustful of the senses and fascinated by quantifiable statistics, many of today’s revisionist artists are drawn to an aesthetic that serves simultaneously as a theology and an exam.

Schoffman’s speech received a prolonged standing ovation, a rarity among the jaded community of pointy-headed tenured know-it-alls. Later that evening at the reception hosted by the glamorous socialite Shania McBean, David, much to the astonishment of his collegues, kicked the shit out of the pompous professor Clarel.

LIVING LIKE BRUTES


Delivering a lecture at the Saur Center for Post-Graduate Studies attended mostly by young people working on their Masters degree in the visual arts, David Schoffman noted that the students in general, quoting Virginia Woolf, were “unhappy and rightly malignant.”

The dry, hot air of the auditorium held the faint odor of cabbage and not a few of the students lightly dozed during the forty-minute talk. The putative topic, as advertised in the department’s monthly brochure, was “The Delirium of William Blake,” but Schoffman, notorious for his impromptu digressions, wandered off into Dante’s depiction of Ulysses. “Considerate la vostra semenza,” Schoffman roared, stirring the somnolent and alarming the security guards who the week before had to quell a near riot after a bearded lecturer screamed something equally menacing in an equally foreign tongue.

Evoking Inferno’s 26th canto or any other canto for that matter among MFA students is typically seen as bad form. These newly minted artists do not want to be prodded into a messianic fervor by a middle-aged painter who still uses a palette knife. They want either densely packed hermetic aphorisms that include the word “conflate” or the word “disjunction” (or, preferably both), or they want practical marketing tips they can use the next time the dealers come marching through their cramped studios.

Speaking in Italian is also seen as bad form, as is French and Latin. Young artists today are linguistic nativists, preferring to communicate in the international language of mammon. Collectors, I was told rather bluntly by a professor of New Genre Studies at NYU, are uncomfortable around polymaths of any sort but are particularly put off by one with a ring in their nose. “By the time an art student reaches grad school, they are pretty well trained in keeping their erudition on the down low.”

So Schoffman, a man famously remote and inaccessible, was innocent of these niceties and stumbled, hat first, into a cauldron of cynicism. “Fatte non foste viver come bruti/ Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza,” he continued, completing the tercet. “Artists,” he went on, “remember your origins! It is not gain, but enlightenment that you are after!”

I’m not certain whether David actually managed to finish his sentence, but the pie seemed to come out of nowhere. A group calling itself “Nuevos Destructores de Imagen” claimed responsibility and later circulated a manifesto around campus entitled “Against The Color Blue.”

FLAMES ALONG THE GULLET


“Don’t misuse the gift.”

Those were Bruno Mazzotta’s last words before seeing David Schoffman off from the port of Fortaleza. Mazzotta, Brazil’s beloved poet of grief (second only to the unapproachable Prato Mauro), had just finished his long awaited volume of sonnets, “Crags and Escarpments,” and was working with Schoffman on the illuminated edition. Together with David’s lapidary illustrations, the book went on to win the coveted “Borda Dourada Prize” as 2001’s best literary collaboration of text and image.

Their creative alliance, paraphrasing the famous Portuguese proverb, was like a mosquito on an unharvested grape.

A few years earlier, Schoffman was in Sao Paulo exhibiting his flawed series of lithographs “Flames From The Eighth Crevasse” at Martin da Fonseca’s now defunct Museum of Erotic Art. At a dinner party at Guadencio’s, the trendy bistro known for spiking its Cajuzhho with marinated flaxseed, the two artists had a notorious public row.

It seems that Mazzotta’s wife Fabiola - a woman whose passion for Cachaca rum had instigated not a few South American scandals in the past – began toasting her Caipirinha’s to what she graphically described as Schoffman’s thewy sexual stamina. The poet was understandably infuriated and with great ceremony, challenged the painter to a duel.

To avoid more grievous injury, Schoffman promptly clocked Mazzotta squarely on the jaw, ending the party and sending the injured poet to the emergency room. Later, through lawyers, they agreed to settle all claims and damages by Schoffman’s agreement to work gratis on the sonnet project.

“Crags And Escarpments” sold 1,400,000 copies and was translated into 23 languages. Schoffman, who toiled in front of his easel creating 31 unique paintings for each of the 31 poems, did not receive a single cruzado for his efforts. To this day, the ownership of the actual pictures is being contested in court.