VENTRILOQUIST AT LARGE

The Ethics of Desire

David Schoffman’s work is seen by many as a lambent explication of post-stucturalist theory. The Ethics of Desire, was seen as Schoffman’s visual tone poem, a fingered dance of painterly destabilization which ruptured the notion of self, replacing it with new, non-objective signifiers.

A paper by Gramsci Professor Newton Suzuki of Bryn Mawr referred to The Ethics of Desire as the seminal “object lesson of value-laden, binary opposition”.
He went on to describe Schoffman’s “cunning appropriation of Western ‘moments’, misaligned with the vernacular of the East, creating fictive Euclidian spaces few contemporary artists seem intellectually capable of.”

Cloistered as I am in my Rue Gabriel Lamé studio, a place cluttered with books and periodicals, I read these descriptions of my good friend’s work and only one word comes to mind:

"Connerie!"

BLACKENED IN OBSCURITY

Unkempt, with parched wrinkled skin the color of rust, David Schoffman shows the wear of long nights in the studio. It has been his habit for many years to work as others rest, and sleep, only briefly, and only in the light of day.

He owns neither telephone nor computer, and those with whom he is in contact understand that he reluctantly welcomes visitors on Sundays only.

He prefers the company of writers and is particularly close to Janco Rasa, author of Sesso the Fool and Shapeshifters.

Once, after a long period of fallow inactivity, David tried to reverse his circadian meter, but failed miserably. The California sun’s brilliant luminescence and the unabating urban din confused him. It was the closest David ever came to madness.

Few have seen his new work, but countless rumors are circulating. Some have openly speculated that there is no work to be seen, that David hasn’t lifted a paintbrush in years and that his eccentric schedule is but a rueful dodge. Others think he is writing a memoir or drawing detailed maps of his native Canada.

In an interview last year in Hmm, David spoke elliptically about plans for an illuminated edition of Paradise Lost.

I think he is just flat out of ideas.

TROUPE DE CINQ

The predominant theme behind the School of Pestilence’s flurry of manifestoes in the 1980’s was the general rebuttal of post-structuralist meta-linguistics or what Stanwyre simply called “Gebisse.” At the time, Paris was a lexical Valhalla, a hotbed of hypotheses, a theorist’s shanga-la. Together with David Schoffman, Micah Carpentier, Darius Frommel and Yvette Chabanais we antically argued that the only enduring value worth fighting for was sensuality.

In our shabby, tin-roofed Théâtre du Risible on rue Joseph Liouville, we staged weekly roundtables consisting primarily of drinking cheap Alsatian wine and arguing loudly, deep into the night, until the concierge next door called the police.

We weren’t taken very seriously until the Sans Voix Immobile exhibition where Schoffman first showed his now famous Rattling Traffic paintings. The critics were generally lukewarm but Nannette Fabriquant, at the time the doyenne of French art journalism, raved in a two-page review in Centaur Gaullist, calling Schoffman “le prochaine sauvage de notre epoch.”

Fabriquant was soon appointed French ambassador to Burkina Fasso, Schoffman moved to Tel Aviv, the Théâtre du Risible was condemned as a “threat to public hygiene” and the School of Pestilence disbanded in typical, artistic acrimony.

LINOLEUM

Kimberly Roberts of the New York Critical Review called David Schoffman’s new sculptures “playful assaults on Cartesian uncertainties.” Shabu Caldéron, writing in Splatt described the work as “artifacts from the rosy smoke physics of practical chaos.” Dobrynyn used just one word: “combustible!”

Few knew that Schoffman worked in three dimensions, but for many years, he has been secretly laboring on the series of pieces now on view at Teresa Odena Modern.

The work most discussed and debated in the salons and saloons of New York has the cumbersome title: “The Dagger of Abraham Refuses To Think.” It is a life-size facsimile of a badly bruised Toyota Camry, constructed entirely from wood flour, burlap and linseed oil. Dangling from the crippled rearview mirror is a miniature Mount Moriah that inexplicably sways as if from a breeze. The license plate reads Soren 1843 and on the backseat, scattered like confetti are Ike Turner album covers. A Post-it on the pretzeled steering wheel has the phrase “the child strikes in combat” written four times.

Some called the work unnecessarily obscure. Others insist that it is clumsily overdetermind. The vast consensus however is that the exhibition is one of the most challenging of the season.

It is rumored that the reclusive Russian collector, Vlad Dracolya purchased almost every piece in the show.

CALYPSO

The lamentable year teaching life drawing at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków was a year David Schoffman would prefer to forget. The rivalries among the singularly ungifted faculty were mind numbing in their petty insignificance. The students were incorrigibly lazy, preferring to spend their afternoons drinking Wisniak and eating bigos. The models were torpid and fat.

Like all the decisions in his life, both bad and good, this one was motivated by a woman. Malgorzata Tuwim was by all accounts, an enchantress without peer. She was like a Celtic queen with her green-hazel eyes and bright copper hair. David referred to her as his Thracian Nereid.

She was also as toxic as bromine.

I think David did something like two thousand drawings of her. Before moving back to New York, he buried them in a shallow ditch on the outskirts of Opatów behind the now defunct saddle factory.

These drawings have recently come to light and after six months of restoration, fifty-five of them are being exhibited at Knoblauchgalerie in Berlin.

Malgo was at the opening and she remains as beautiful as ever.

THE AROMA OF MERCY

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Peder Bayer, Norway’s most pessimistic poet (a designation coveted by many talented competitors). He goes on to write in his famous essay “On Second Thought” that “intimacy leads to betrayal more reliably than remedy leads to cure. Like the vibratory night call of the wood thrush whose song beckons as it laments, we sigh through life’s tenuous filaments, craving fixity within the groves of impermanence.”

Bayer’s words come to mind as I meditate upon the growing enmity between David Schoffman and myself. The mounting distaste for Schoffman’s fickle conceits has affected my wellbeing, making me vulnerable to odd agonies of both of body and mind. Sadly, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him, even as an adversary would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

If I think about this dispassionately, which of course I cannot, I am resolved to Hobbes’ observation that "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe." Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” identified certain hostile impulses as stemming from “the narcissism of minor differences” and if anything, Currado and I are cousins of the same stained cloth.

I am guilty.