When his cage is rattled by the rabble of public scrutiny, David Schoffman has a tendency to recoil. When the critical sparrows peck at the fine edifice of his various fictions, he bristles. To say that Schoffman's skin is translucent is to generously endow it with additional tuft. Ever since our first encounter some thirty years ago, David's ego was as delicate as well water.

Now, with the opening of his wildly uneven mid-career retrospective, David's pale protective dermis is in tatters. Pepo Cendrars, writing in Cinéma et Culture called the sum of Schoffman's work "les idées majeures dans les clefs mineures." The typically sympathetic Manon Ovidier described his drawings as "le chat griffe maculé dans l'encre." And these were among the less calumniatory reviews.

David is now on vacation, which is to say he is in hiding. He has declined all requests for interviews or public appearances. I for one have abstained from this feeding frenzy. Considering his modest talents, David Schoffman has done fairly well.

Study for Rattling Traffic #3

During his Paris years, David Schoffman was warmly welcomed by the reigning cadre of mid-level French intellectuals of the time. It was the early 1980's and among that crowd the gales of sycophantic bootlicking were matched only by the gusts of venomous backstabbing. In the literary journals, vacuous screeds refused to subside and in the art magazines the senseless reams of verbiage would rarely peter. Frank and moderate discussion was considered weak, detestable and above all, boring.

Schoffman fit right in.

In his very first essay published in France, David provoked a mild monsoon when he suggested that Guillaume Fovea's close reading of Dutronc's Trompette Trichée as an allegory of incest was "aussi plausible que le Père Noël." He was forgiven as "le jeune Américain espiègle et méchant." A few months later people were a bit less lenient when he publicly accused Lefevre of plagiarism.

The honeymoon came to a definitive end when he had his first one-person exhibition at Deronda- Ouest. Showing his large scale charcoal studies for Rattling Traffic, (the well-known series of paintings exhibited many years later in Rome and Los Angeles), the critical response was universally pernicious. The settling of old scores has always been a blood sport in the Parisian art press but the level of vitriol in the now famous cas de Schoffman drove David into the depths of an infathomable despair.

Some say he is yet to fully emerge from the vapors of his melancholy.

THE BELLS AND DUST OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT

What follows are two incompatible yet highly plausible stories regarding my comrade and competitor David Schoffman. That I have great affection for this imperfect man should be of little consequence.



The first story is about how Schoffman, after unexpectedly winning the 2009 Zacharias R.Koenig Short Book Award, was emboldened to make a short film. He subsequently entered that film in the Omphalos of Unreason Film Festival where he was awarded the Silver Medal. What struck Alou N'batwa, one of the principal jurors of the competition, was how he was able to "spankingly reanimate the surrealist idiom without the musty opulence of 'un mouvement recherché.'"



The second story is about how Schoffman mockingly turns language into a puppet show of contempt. To call The Broken Mandolin bad poetry is to dishonor the entire category of Bad Poetry. His short film, with its faint echoes of Moravagine's 1929 silent feature Z.Z. is a blathering tangle of supercilious aposiopesis'. Will the floodtide of Schoffman's ineptitude ever reach its crest?

Travaux de l'été

Every summer, David Schoffman partially puts down his paintbrushes and spends two months tending the acreage of his sumptuous vineyard in Martignas-sur-Jalle. I love it when he’s in France. Nobody butchers the French language with greater comic ignorance than my good friend David. (Or as he put it the other day while futilely attempting to rent a bicycle: “je casse mes dents avec cette espace de merde.”).

The terroir in Martignas-sur-Jalle allows David’s grapes to remain on the vine till they are fully ripened. If a phylloxera epidemic can be averted, David has time each year to do some drawing in his rustic little studio. Last year he completed a series of over a hundred small watercolors illustrating scenes from Paradise Lost. This year, inspired by the biblical story of Levite’s Concubine, David, using his ouvriers agricoles as models, made a stunning suite of wash drawings entitled Sinners & Street Prophets.

Last year’s vintage lacked a certain structure. Blackberry and burnt hazelnut vied cloyingly on the palate. An unbalanced acidity didn’t help either. But the drawings, as usual, were ripe, robust and unquestionably mis sur le chevalet au château.

PERISHED BY HIS PRIDE

In a recent shoot for the Canadian Magazine Cloud/Cover, award winning photographer Michelle Denton Ross, best known for her work chronicling the Phoenician Diaspora and the Thule of Nanavut, captured a side of David Schoffman rarely seen by the public.

Typically, Schoffman shuns the ephemera of his inconsequential rank. He appraises the marrow of his worth by a private barometer, an august audit of achievement measured against the distant and unapproachable Great Masters. Ross captured a man in an imperial panic. Note the mournfully mistrustful eyes, the impiety of his uneven grimace, the subtle venality of his chin, weakened by resentments and unfulfilled vendettas. Something is broken in that man, possessed as he is by silent tantrums, grudges and indignation. There is an artless ignobility closing in like a noontide, around his thin corrugated skin. The air around him is perfumed with the fetid ineluctability of his obsolescence. His head is swimming with the certainty of his decay and he is coming apart.

I congratulate Ms. Ross on her prescient and penetrating psychological portrait of this notoriously opaque man.

from Postcards from Charybdis: David Schoffman and Gouache

APOLOGISTS

Few people recognize the moral universe represented in the works of my good friend David Schoffman. His wide circle of friends include a fair number of well-known poets, including Damian July, Malo Flannigan, Darine Joković and Hakan Silverman. He seems to have found in them some real sympathy.

The poets understand Schoffman’s infantile effulgence, his willful and cupiditous obscurity and even his anguished, taciturn and far from ennobling resentments. They see in his work a mocking abdication of high-mindedness. They understand how the languorous luminosity of his pictures act as clumsy surrogates for seriousness. With fawning forgetfulness they blink at his vaporous deceptions and his unctuous equivocations.

In her introductory essay to the catalog Postcards from Charybdis: David Schoffman and Gouache, Lelli Kabiri, (whose own work is a spit-gob of hyperbole and cant), tells of her first encounter with Schoffman some 25 years ago.

He had the voice of a dead man. His soft, dewy breath whispered like a fading melody. He was more liquid than solid, more courtly, more kingly and as elegantly self-assured as Death itself. My loud heart knuckled under his loathsome silence. He was an artist of the first order, mute, impertinent, careless and invincible. A Mayakovsky with crayons.

Feh!

IMMORTALITY

Clumsy and disheveled, to see David Schoffman at work in his studio is to witness a stately scrimmage of a man struggling against the first principles of his nature. His meticulously crafted paintings are created in an unholy atmosphere of chaos and disarray. Costumed as a serf in tattered trousers and yellowed t-shirts stained with the vague remnants of sauces and solvents he brutishly tends to the alchemy paint with an infatuated frenzy.

Two years ago, (on one of my regular visits to Los Angeles to meet with my American publisher), I visited Schoffman and photographed a panel he had started that day. Last month, I returned to find him polishing the same piece into an anti- climax of completion. Clutching a cup of lukewarm coffee he sadly studied the finished painting, shook his head and hissed his disapproval.

I quickly snapped a picture.

Juxtaposed above are two states - from beginning to end – of one of the projected 100 paintings of “The Body Is His Book”.

At this rate, he will finish his project at the age of 160. Bonne chance mon vieux!

MOSES NEVER ENTERED THE PROMISED LAND

No one ever accused David Schoffman of possessing any undo discretion. To call him edgy would be to discredit whatever precipice is suggested by this hackneyed designation. His is not a world of academic transgression, commodified misbehavior or aesthetic misdemeanor safely enacted under the jaundiced jurisdiction of critical analysis.

David Schoffman is the unimpeachably uncompliant artistic insurgent, the proud solitary, scrupulously authentic subversive whose place in the artworld is as galling as it is secure.

I was reminded of this on my recent visit to his Los Angeles studio where the pains of unidle drudgery are evident in his obsessive refinement of his 100 Paintings series. What he is doing has simply never been done before. Not even Tintoretto’s San Rocco paintings reach Schoffman’s level of manic indifference to moderation.

A 100 paneled polyptych! What a stunt!

My competitive nature is tranquilized by the soothing confidence that he will never finish!

TEST CASE

The impregnable bliss of drawing was the subject of a recent study conducted by the New England Conference of Cognitive Orthography. Though laborious and broadly infuriating to most artists, the assembled scientists concluded that the wreckage incurred from the gruesome task of rendering illusions two-dimensionally were abnormally though not unfavorably effecting electrolyte rhythms.

The panel of researchers wired six artists to a systole displacer in order to track the impulse vectors of the sinoatrial node. They found that the brain, though disdaining most pains rather welcomed the atypical discomforts accompanying drawing.

David Schoffman was one of the participating artists and chose as his subject the traditional practice of drawing the nude. Though his QT levels were consistent with the other artists, his augmented limb leads, based on the standard European hexaxial reference system, were way off the charts.

The scientists reached the conclusion that the drawing of the unclothed resulted in an “inarticulate pleasure” unique, singular and myocardially unquiet.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The San Francisco Bay Area art-collecting consortium Lysidas is one of the west coast’s most vigorous supporters of contemporary art. Chaired by Milton Edward of Goldman Sachs, this group of discerning visionaries has pooled their considerable fortunes in support of some of the best young California artists working today.

Having recently opened a Los Angeles office in Century City, Lysidas wasted no time raking through reams of unsolicited disks and slides, acquainting themselves with the local lay of the land. Iris Tehila, CEO of Herodotus Systems and the longest sitting member of the Lysidas board was quoted in the Art Newspaper, remarking on the “…wealth of untapped talent, the nascent brilliance, the dauntless dexterous intelligence” she found in particular among Los Angeles painters.

They recently hired my scrupulously mercenary friend David Schoffman to guide them on May 30th through the galaxy of Culver City galleries during its annual ArtWalk. He will undoubtedly begin his trek in the back room of DCA Fine Art at 5797 Washington Blvd where a cache of his very own works on paper will be prominently displayed.

Quel malfrat!

FLAGITIOUS TIMES

The life of many painters is buried in unease. Repairing daily to the devotions of the studio, tending the bitter, artisanal trade in solitude, the painter’s fatal meeting with self is a ritual of terror.

How David Schoffman remains so vacuously superficial is one of life’s great mysteries. A flashy, spry bon-vivant whose handmade shirts from Astor & Black and suits from Warwick Hall betray a clawing refinement and a Galilean lake’s-worth of thin-skinned vanity.

His character does not square with his painting.

The same beaked promontory from where he clasps his cuffs come the most complex, poetic and moral pictures of our century. The image above from his “Body Is His Book” series is a miraculous excavation from the unplowed grit of our contemporary discourse. Its high seriousness is unembarrassed and unapologetic.

Will the real David Schoffman please be revealed!

ACADEMIC RIVALRIES

The faculty at L’Institute d’Art Chronique du Havre includes such luminaries as Zeno Peter, Frank Lazarelli, Claudine McAuliffe, David Shaar Yashuv and Monique Manet. David Schoffman and I have lectured there on several occasions, both together and individually. I think we both agree that as art schools go, L’Institute is better than most.

They recently staged a most novel and unique exhibition. While hosting the cumbersomely titled Fourth Annual Symposium on Contemporary Commentary and Dialectic, they asked all the invitees to spend 20 minutes drawing their colleagues. The results were an eccentric compendium of radically divergent notions of both drawing and portraiture. Each of the 284 participants submitted a work that was ultimately hung at the Institute’s Goddard Gallery.

The show was called Non Possono Disegnare from the Jacko Barbu song of the same name.

Schoffman’s rendering of critical theory professor Louis Versuchend and me is posted above.

INFLATION

Humphrey Delmore, theatre critic for the Sussux Mail recently quipped: “Good drawing is like bad sex. Both are unconsummated exertions.” He went on to name his three favorite contemporary draftsmen.

Terry Bodoya, known for her mural sized watermelons rendered in tar, Alfred Leslie whose portraits en grisaille stirred a skeptical generation weaned on abstraction and David Schoffman.

Reviewing the recent survey of 21st century works on paper at Ribald & Tiles, Delmore described Schoffman as a “peripatetic visionary whose nomadic aesthetic defies classification.”

Personally, I find it relatively easy to describe Schoffman’s drawings:

“Comme Ci, Comme Ça.”

Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis

At the risk of appearing to be a hair-splitting contrarian, a feisty old effigy desperate to animate the embers of a lost eminence, I take issue with Dahlia Danton’s recent revelation concerning Micah Carpentier’s 48 Stations of Ecstasy.

With briny assurance she claims to have happened upon the original copy of Carpentier’s famous chapbook. What she saw in Havana was most certainly a specious facsimile.

The original, handmade copy of Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis is nesting in a flatfile in David Schoffman’s incorrigibly lambent Los Angeles studio. It was given to him as a gift shortly before Carpentier’s death and has been available to scholars for years.

THE STONES OF MAHAVIRA

Dispersed throughout the icy floor stones of the Mahavira Monastery in Ko Kong, Cambodia, lay the most peculiar images of the Buddha in all of Southeast Asia. This 10th Century architectural puzzle, situated on the western bank of the Kah Bpow River narrowly survived both the relentless American bombings as well as the bloodletting purges of the Khmer Rouge.

To walk thorough the dim halls of the monastery, lit only by the rusty glow of scented handmade candles, is to walk through an enchanted and innocent past. The serene, almost otherworldly atmosphere is transforming.

After half a dozen visits and countless hours of interviews and documentation, David Schoffman has completed his film about the Buddhas of Mahavira. Recently screened at the Boina Film Festival, it was awarded the Égout d’Or.

Below is a short clip.

SOAP OPERA

An unusual call to duty forced David Schoffman to suddenly drop everything and hop on a plane to Davos, where, waiting for him on the tarmac were Ambassador Terentius and his improbably fetching bride Nita. Whispers, suppositions and scuttlebutt have always provided a tattling basso continuo whenever Nita Terentius and David Schoffman were linked, the ligaments of lechery follow Schoffman like a late evening shadow no matter who his accomplice might be, but in this particular case the prattle was especially scurrilous. The Grand Opera Company of Davos’ production of Handel’s Tamerlano was scheduled to open on February 28th. The Terentius’ were heavily invested in the success of the production, in part because they were secretly backing it under the cover of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches and in larger part because Nita had been commissioned to design the sets.

The day was approaching and Nita was clearly over her head.

Remembering that years back Schoffman had done a torpidly received series of drawings based on the theme of famous suicides, he was summoned to offer his input. Rendering Bajazet’s demise with greater tact was of particular importance.

He saved the day and received no credit but when photographed at the opening gala sharing a toast with Terentius whose copious décolletage was exquisitely governed in a charcoal Monique Lhuilier, the International Herald Tribune ran the picture with the caption “Life Imitates Art As Cosi Fan Tutte Outshines Tamerlano At Davos Premiere.”

Tamerlano Study No. 27
2009

CHEBSHI OR SCHOFFMAN

On most nights from a small fishing village nested on the southern spine of Turkey, half way between Antalya and Mersin, a lighthouse can be seen with a faint flicker of yellow light illuminating the small room cupped beneath its aging crest. With grave indifference, Sevket Serbes sits hunched over a weather beaten oak worktable painting meticulous patterns on stiff muslin sheets.

He calls these patterns “chebshi,” an Eteocypriot word that roughly translates as “spent seed.” Over the course of forty years as keeper of the Acik Kapi Lighthouse, Serbes has painted over seven hundred chebshi paintings. They cover the rounded walls of his priapic home like an hallucinogenic gauze of unperturbed madness. The effect, upon seeing this riot of color and detail, is that one is in the presence of something frighteningly strange and urgently important.

David Schoffman, in a recent BBC interview mentioned in passing that he had once seen a black and white reproduction of the Serbes Chebshi and that it may have informed his work in some oblique way.

David Schoffman is a liar.

In 1981, Schoffman and I were on our way from Tibilisi to Ephesus in an asthmatic two-door, Zastava Koral when we stopped in Tarsus to join some Italian college students on a Mediterranean day cruise. We docked at the Acik Kapi Lighthouse for a light lunch and a tour of Serbes’ paintings, a common destination for tourists at that time. Schoffman was mesmerized by the works and whispered to me (we were in our 20’s at the time), “Malaspina, je volerai ceci tient des idées et il me fera célèbre.”

LITERATURE

The publication of Melissa DeTourney's recent critical tour de force David Schoffman: Subverter of Grave Horizons represents a significant contribution to the already bloated sub-catagory now known in our graduate programs as Schoffman Studies.




In her new book, DeTourney, associate professor of semiotics at Coglihn University in Newgrange, argues that Schoffman’s early close reading of Becarrie’s Amoureuses Volcaniques marked a decisive realignment of his aesthetic objectives. She further insists, and here she differs with both Obé and Castel, that Schoffman’s Body Is His Book: 100 Paintings is a shill for an occult and far more complex body of work based on Duchamp’s Étant donnés.

At a recent signing at Seattle’s Tall Order Books, DeTourney was physically assaulted by a disturbed young painter and puppeteer who strenuously objected to what he called “the cultish clique of Schoffmanerites.”

SCANDALO

Marina Samuela Carati, one of Italy’s most respected art collectors, recently commissioned David Schoffman to paint her portrait.

David Schoffman never paints portraits and never works on commission.

Last month, David Schoffman made a spectacular exception.

For twenty-one consecutive days, Schoffman, working from his suite at the Hotel Zurigo, just a few blocks from the Duomo di Milano, drew 250 preparatory studies of his courtly and statuesque subject. Patiently, for 10 to 12 hours a day, Carati submitted to David’s exacting demands. She stood, twisted like a ribbon in classic contrapposto; she sat like Agatha of Normandy, regal and serene, trundled in silks and small fluffy cushions; she reclined with the half-smile of a pliant maja wearing nothing but a garland of gaudy counterfeit pearls; she leaned chastely against a full-length mirror, her eyes cast downward, staring blankly at her open-toed velvet slippers; she tied ropes around her ankles and dangled gently from a towel-rack; she posed in all the available postures and when those were exhausted, she drew deeply from her native carnal melancholy and assumed an ingenious array of unconventional positions with the precision of a seasoned Bhangra dancer.

Marina Samuela Carati has never been known for her spontaneity. To friends and colleagues alike she is thought of as a decorous, dignified, even stiff grande dame, despite only being in her mid-forties. After her month as the hapless prop for David Schoffman’s lurid pencil, Carati has suddenly discovered her pulse. At a recent early evening cocktail party at her nine thousand square foot Sardinian summerhouse and to the utter astonishment of her assembled guests, Carati exhibited all 250 drawings.

The Italian press is still picking the bones of this most delicious scandal.

BREAKING FAITH

More photographs, stealthfully snapped in David's studio are surfacing in Europe. The Italian magazine L'Animo Mio published the pictures above with a caption that read: "Under-appreciated in his native country, David Schoffman is something of an icon here in this part of the world. His series of 100 paintings, The Body Is His Book, remains incomplete, mysterious and inaccessible."

I wasn't at all aware that David was under-appreciated in the United States. To listen to him one would think they minted a coin with his image on it, named boulevards and hospitals after him, made his studio into a shrine and closed the banks on his birthday.

THE VEIL OF SECRECY

David Schoffman is as reclusive as a prairie dog in winter, a solitary artistic egghead, an introvert of the first order. In our thirty years of friendship, I’ve visited his studio maybe a half a dozen times. He is famously secretive about his work. To see his paintings, one must wait for his intermittent exhibitions.

To follow the progression of his ideas one must rely on rumor. One such rumor circulating recently is that Schoffman has embarked on a singularly impractical project of such quixotic magnitude that most agree will never see the light of day. I am referring, of course, to the bizarre compendium of small paintings collectively known as “The Body is His Book.” It has been reliably reported and confirmed elliptically by Schoffman himself in an 2005 interview in ArtContext that the plan is to complete 100 pictures using only a double zero kolinsky sable paintbrush.

Sean Van Belge, the former Sotheby’s intern whose infamous tell-all memoir “Branding and the Credulous Collector: My Life in the Art World,” earned him the ire of just about every human involved in contemporary art, recently snuck into David’s studio posing as a UPS delivery man and snapped a few hasty pictures. The photographs above, originally published in Missile, appear to add credence to at least some of the speculation.

CLUES

In the spring of 1985, David Schoffman disappeared. By some accounts, he was missing for 18 months. According to other accounts he was sighted twice during that period of time, once on the Saronic island of Salamina and once in Barcelona where he was spotted playing a dangerous drinking game at a bar called Panchitos.

By all accounts, his absence suspiciously coincided with the disappearance of Fayette Lombardi, an art student who regularly attended David’s lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute. Fayette was a highly regarded performance artist whose senior thesis had something to do with prolonged sunbathing while covered with stenciled quotations from Lord Byron.

Today, Lombardi is a news anchorwoman at WKIA in Indiana City and has recently published a memoir titled “When I Was Naked”, about her years as a “near-professional extrovert.”

The unattributed drawing above appears among the book’s many illustrations with the caption, “Here I am, in post-coital repose, drawn by a friend, during my ‘lost years’.