SCHOFFMAN: PAINTER by Currado Malaspina

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.