GEIST SHMEIST

Danton, Screaming Past the Furies, 2006

It is the unique misfortune of David Schoffman, that despite a thriving career as a painter, a monstrously large gambling debt - accrued through an ill advised addiction to martesh, a game of chance involving toothpicks and trigonometry – requires him to carry a near full teaching load. Though he claims to be indifferent to his students’ successes, throughout the years, many of them have gone on to become well known, accomplished artists.

None is more accomplished and well known than Dahlia Danton.

Danton’s large-scale installations have been exhibited in London, Paris, Sao Paolo and New York and have received lavish if not overly extravagant praise. At last fall’s Zagreb International Art Fair, Dahlia’s guitar string sculptures broke the sales record previously set in 2006 by René Boulet. When she showed her paintings at DCA in Los Angeles earlier this year, the entire exhibition was purchased before the opening by the screenwriter Pops LeChess.

I happened to have been in L. A. during the Danton exhibition, peddling my own screenplay, a musical interpretation of the Marquis de Sade’s Le Cure de Prato. (I’m currently contracted to do a second draft for MazeTuck Films). I found Dahlia’s paintings fascinating in their bleak and sovereign subservience to good taste. Adamant in her ambivalence to history, she sees virtue where others see a stubborn lack of originality. The credulity of the market is a popular theme in certain academic circles within the United States. Danton is expert in lyrically conveying this vacuum without recourse to irony or dialectic.

Schoffman can take pride in producing such gifted students, capable of capturing so elegantly the spirit of the age.

FAITH BASED INITIATIVE

His rigorous upbringing within the Apostolic Church of the Divine Rent has given David Schoffman a unique window into interfaith dialogue. One of three major denominations of northern Alberta, the tenets of the Divine Rent are firmly rooted within the mainstream charismatic, eschatological persuasions.

It was for this reason that David was chosen to preside over the First Annual Ecumenical Artist Convention, which was held in Las Vegas in early June. It was truly an historic event with participants from all artistic disciplines, representing every confession, from every region in the world.

There were Sufi sculptors from Turkistan, Haredi filmmakers from Boro Park, Jihadist cartoonists from Khartoum, Opus Dei muralists from Rome, evangelical lithographers from Georgia, Shinto painters from Osaka, animist enamellers from Bangkok, glassblowing Gnostics from Gondar Provence, silk-screening Sikhs from Kuala Lumpur, batiking Ba’hai from Haifa, Catholic ceramicists from Belfast – you name it, they were there.

It was rather amazing to what degree the participants saw eye to eye on core issues. For one thing, they were united in believing that God was great. Some were sure He was all knowing, others thought He might have a few blind spots but they all agreed that He was pretty terrific.

Being artists, they tended toward more liberal renderings of their respective doctrines. For example, though they disapproved of the homosexual lifestyle, they were strongly in favor of gay marriage as long as it was a union between a man and a woman.

David conducted the symposia with his usual aplomb and dazzled the crowd with some virtuosic glossolalia. Beginning with the coherent locution, “Alaska, I’ll ask her, Al-Aqsa,” he went on a searing stream of garbled tommyrot for a full twenty-five minutes. Even the Brooklyn black-hats were impressed.

The conference ended with a bagel and lox brunch and a fabulous performance by Uri Geller.

BABBA KAMMA, BABY

Together with Augustine’s City of God and Lucan’s Medea, the Babylonian Talmud has pride of place on David Schoffman’s nightstand. So taken by its legalistic whimsy, its colorful anecdotes and the musicality of its prose, that David spent an entire year of his graduate study on a Fulbright in Arbil studying Aramaic.

It was a labor of love when the publishing house of Gilgul & Neshamot invited David to design the cover of their soon to be released, 2009 edition of this classic sixth century work. (The fully annotated, twenty-nine volume, CD audiobook will be narrated by Matisyahu and Seymour “Toots” Marley).

I would urge my readers to pre-order a copy since it will be printed in limited edition and will surely become a collector’s item in years to come.

THE THRESHOLD DOWN

The temporary unraveling of David Schoffman’s career was due to events that are fairly typical in the rutty world of international art trading. The fact that he has rebounded with such alacrity and grace is due in no small measure to his rock-ribbed fortitude and his ruthless, daring cunning.

Before his eagerly awaited early death in 1988, art dealer Andreas Holbach was known as “the twelve-tongued serpent of the studio.” In his tireless pursuit of the new, Holbach would gallivant around the globe looking for the new cash cow.

In the mid-eighties, the young, bootless hooligan, David Schoffman, darling of the princes of taste and the denizens of le beau monde, was seen as that bountiful bovine. To his peers, his blustering oversized encaustic icons were shallow exercises in cloying vaingloriousness. To Holbach and his ilk they were the polished gems of early genius.

David and Andreas became the twin halves of an art-dealing juggernaut … until the day when they were not.

A drug habit and a drowsy market prompted Holbach to unsaddle a boatload of Schoffmans on the cheap and in a hurry. You don’t have to be John Maynard Keynes to figure out what happened next. With his devalued work flooding an already bloated bazaar, the paintings of David Schoffman began to be judged on their merits and were found severely wanting.

It wasn’t until 1999 that David surfaced from his self-imposed exile with the now legendary exhibition, Lenox Avenue Paintings. Both the critics and his colleagues were prepared to tear out his liver but instead were forced to acknowledge, in the words of Karl Colovito, “that a fresh wind had awakened a subtle poignancy in the former blow-hard.”

The fact that David stole most of his “new” ideas from me was not noted at the time.

“Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed”
Byron

On a recent trip to North Africa, David Schoffman found himself severely dehydrated and dangerously low on gasoline near the small village of Ksar Kibbeh. Known for its ancient granaries and its warm, hospitable inhabitants, it was the perfect place to avert a catastrophe.

Sipping mint tea and nibbling on spiced chard at the local café, David made the fortunate acquaintance of the famous ethnomusicologist, Na’im Bouteille, who happened to be in town attending a wedding of one of his nephews.

It was from Bouteille that David first learned of the Vavzayin.

Uncommonly secretive even within the clandestinely hermetic world of the sub rosa, the Vavzayin is a loosely federated faction of animistic nomads whose coded beliefs are articulated exclusively in painting. Their densely detailed cosmology is so impenetrable that scholars and anthropologists alike have quietly agreed to ignore them.

Much to his disgrace, Schoffman lifted a small astrological icon off the wall of a desert outhouse and smuggled it out of the country. It now hangs ignominiously in his kitchen.

NOBLESSE

The Comtesse de Charbot, one of the most discerning collectors of David Schoffman’s work, died last week in her country estate in Saint-Quirin. Known equally for her erudition and her caprice, the Comtesse, or “Tessileh” as she was known by her intimates, was a fixture among the Art Fair cognoscenti. Catholic in her tastes, her collection includes significant works by Gounod, Walker, Prince, Webern, Schapiro and Schoffman.

Generous to a fault, Tessilah was a reservoir of good will to scholars and curators alike. Last year’s Assemblage/Gounod exhibition in Bern was made up almost entirely of works from the de Charbot estate. Delmont Livni’s definitive monograph on Webern’s works on paper owes much of its scholarship to its access to the de Charbot Library and Archive in Levallois.

I could go on and on describing Tessileh beneficence, she was a Maecenas and a Sarasvati all rolled into one.

I believe, however, that her legacy will be her legendary support for Schoffman. She began buying his work in the 70’s when David was an obscure miniaturist, waiting tables at the Arpege and showing his work in small group shows in alternative galleries around Paris. She was among the first collectors to recognize his nascent genius as well as his infamous shortcomings. One might say that she scolded him into becoming an important artist.

Though throughout her long life she always held me and my work in contempt – she once described my monotypes as “saleté de gouttière” – I will always remember her with great affection and respect.

THE PAINS OF REDIRECTION

The Margozotti twins played a vital role in David Schoffman’s decision to drop out of divinity school and devote his full energy toward becoming a painter. Nothing, I think, is more incompatible with the vow of chastity than the arborescent glamour of Doina and Anneli Margozotti … but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Doina, the more genial of the two, could flog a full throat of bacchanalian rage even in the most peevish of curmudgeons. Her bearing was that of a double-jointed reptilian Circe, a seductress, a blight to temperance and a mocker of moderation. To know Doina was to be helplessly crushed by the anvil of infatuation.

Anneli, who dressed mostly in rubber, had a keen sense for the aesthetics of pain. She was all claws and teeth and sweat and smell and approached deviance with the piety of an imam.

Schoffman, whose will was as soft as bread was summarily flattened into an anemic pulp. His simplicity was red meat for the twins and what little chance he had to defend himself against their charms was quickly annihilated as soon as they took off their clothes.

The Margozotti twins were the first art models David encountered when on a whim and a dare, he enrolled in his first figure drawing class at New York’s Art Students League. It wasn’t long till God took a powder and David was renting a dimly lit basement studio on Elizabeth Street.

Within a few years, he had his first one-man show and his hundredth broken heart.

DIPLOMACY

The Gujerati mural, David Schoffman’s immense 1989 fresco painted on the vaulted ceiling of Qatar’s luxurious Abbasid Hotel remains one of the most popular cultural attractions of the Middle East. Brightly hued fabric airlessly held aloft in whispers of subtle brushwork fill the hotel’s lobby with honeyed luminescence. The work is a veritable alphabet of painterly effects and viewers are consistently stunned by the enormous work’s improbable intimacy.

Schoffman was awarded the commission by default after the original artist, Alexei Rouaud was tragically killed in a freak accident involving a sled and a coping saw.

Unaccustomed to working on such a large scale, David developed a unique process by which he could intermittently view the painting from a suitable distance by swinging from the scaffolding on hemp cable riggings. This apparently amused his hosts to no end and they took to calling him Numa, the name of Tarzan’s pet lion.

The hotel bar, Les Eyzie, is a favorite watering hole for Al Jazeera journalists and David’s work has become much beloved among them. Sensing an opportunity, the State Department has asked David to spearhead Operation Desert Draftsman, a soft-power ploy involving a series of life drawing workshops to take place in high schools across the Arab world.

This summer he will be studying Jebli at the Pollard Language Institute in Langley Virginia.