CALLING ALL CARS!!

A STUNNING AND FLAGRANT CRIME, WHAT LARCENOUS GRANDEUR! 
A FUTURE FOLK TALE, AN EPIC POEM. GALERIE ENDROIT DOUX, IN THE NAKEDNESS OF MIDDAY, AMID THE TUSSLE OF L'HEURE DE POINTE  IN THE 19TH ARRONDISSEMENT, SWINDLED AND DECEIVED BY THE LEGENDARY ART THIEVES BÉGUCHET & POUPARD.

"The Body is His Book #36"

My luckless friend David Schoffman was the subject of a small scale retrospective appropriately titled "Plus du Soleil S'Approchent." On the third day of the exhibition the wily Béguchet dressed as a common bricoleur entered the gallery and abruptly turned off the electricity. Within seconds David Schoffman's "The Body is His Book #36" had vanished.

The following day Tito Poupard entered the gallery and placed a hand-written note into the palm of the receptionist's hand that read: "excusez-moi, we had over estimated the worth of Schoffman's painting. It is hardly worth our time. ... close the gallery tomorrow one hour early, meet us in back of the hippodrome in the Bois du Boulogne and we will return the work to you with our regrets."

Murry Scève, who until recently was David's principle Parisian dealer, arrived at the Hippodrome de Longchamp at exactly 16:00. He was met by a beautiful young woman who gave him a wrapped parcel tucked into a Printemps shopping bag.


Exactly forty minutes latter Scève returned to his completely empty gallery.

 

DOOR OF DECEPTION

The Sefdala N'Dmowiaw claim the ancient Hebrews as their ancestors. While I am skeptical my dear credulous friend David Schoffman takes them at their word.

The batwing door of the Fifth House of Worship or the Ikktambaqi of the Sefdala is an ornate, colorful contraption that swings with a mild croaking sound. Located in the southern Gambian village of Jali, this beautiful artifact caught our eye when David and I traveled there as students some thirty five years ago. We returned to Jali a few months ago during the Kiapa Festival and the door had been beautifully restored.

The Alkaloo, or village chief, explained to us that the inlaid door was sent to Eaton, Pennsylvania where, what he called a "mazugaka" or what we might call an art conservator, performed acts of extraordinary magic to radically change the appearance of the door. He seemed to be rather pleased.

He called the star in the center of the door the "twall dwa dawide" and is certain that it signifies his people's origin in the old testament tribe of Reuvan. It is for that reason that every male member of the village carries the name Reuvan. His name was Abla Enkomo Reuvan Dok. His son was Koki Reuvan Dok Daldal. Our driver's name was Reuvan Botu Reuvan Daikono. And so on and so forth. 

When the door mysteriously fell off its hinges during our stay a minor uproar ensued. The Sefdala are deeply superstitious and read the mishap as an augury of some vague catastrophe. David made himself a small hero when he "selflessly" offered to take the fallen portal back to Pennsylvania for some further remedial treatment.


The Swinging Door of the Fifth House of Worship of Jali now hangs above David's dining room table in Los Angeles.


It really is quite beautiful.

IN ADVANCE OF AN ADVERSARY

MY FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN RARELY LEAVES HIS STUDIO FOR FEAR OF DISAPPOINTMENT. "LES CHOSES NE SONT PAS COMME ILS ETAIENT UNE FOIS," HE CONSTANTLY LAMENTS AND INDEED, EVEN HERE IN PARIS THINGS DON'T ALWAYS STAY THE SAME. "TOUS SONT LAIDS," "EVERYTHING IS UGLY" AND INDEED, WHERE HE LIVES IN LOS ANGELES, THAT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE.

I once asked him why he was so devoted to rendering the intricacies of West African fabric design. "It's busywork," he quickly replied without thinking, "it keeps me cloistered, insulated and hopefully inoculated from the terrors of boredom."

Visionary or self-satisfied subverter of forgotten conventions?

TOWARD FIERY PHLEGETHON

After "La Grand'Inondazione" the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Alghero commissioned a trio of international artists to create new works to replace those lost in the famous disaster. Together with Albertina Pechorin and Melchior Stavrogin, my over-worked colleague, David Schoffman devoted two full years to this obscure project. 

Toward Fiery Phlegethon, studio view

The sum of his unprofitable efforts can be seen in the church's north transept. The minutely painted panels betray the torments of solitary time spent in fruitless endeavor, tucked, like a lame kitten, in a bleak, underlit studio.

Renovating this impoverished house of worship was a wanton, ruinous enterprise. How appropriate to have hired someone so accustomed to dishoner.

UNEARNED LENIENCY

Life's accessories, scrupulously observed, are the corn and crumb of David Schoffman's photography.

 

Few people are aware of the vast trove of images my good friend has amassed over the years. Rarely exhibited, David's pictures are breviloquent summaries of everyday life.  From the inconsequential to the hilarious happenstance, his unadorned black and white prints reveal a charming sympathy that his paintings and drawings gravely lack. It is in his photography where the operatically pessimistic David gives way to the flâneur and the aesthete.

The larger public will now have the opportunity to see this work in a recently published coffee table tome entitled "Things I See: Slipshod Snapshots from Batavia to Bensonhurst." The formidable text is by cultural critic Izzy Ashwari and the introduction is by the American artist Dahlia Danton.

Notably absent from the book is any serious assessment of the artistic merits of the work itself. That's probably fortunate.

SCHOFFMAN STOPPED IN EBOLI

FROM JUNE, 1988 TILL NOVEMBER, 1993, DAVID SCHOFFMAN TRAVELED THROUGH EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST LEAVING THINGS BEHIND.

I Left My Nudes in Cala Gonone. Date unknown

During those five years, from Sana'a to San Tropez, Damascus to Deauville, Ramla to Rotterdam my restless colleague David Schoffman  mischievously and systematically deposited trifling little doodles in hotels, hostels, brothels, ashrams, bed and breakfasts, fleabags, cruise ships and camp sights. With the generous assistance of the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs and L'Association d'Idées Légitimement non Essayées, Schoffman spent those years working on a piece of performance art that later became known as "The Itinerant Scribbles."

Schoffman traveled, mostly by foot, for 262 consecutive weeks. In each place he stopped he left behind a small drawing and placed it in a drawer or buried it within the pages of a book or folded it into a menu and in one case even tacked it into a shower stall. In total he drew over six thousand drawings on hotel stationary, restaurant napkins, receipts, business cards, discarded faxes, post-its and parchments. 

On the back of each drawing he wrote the following instructions in six different languages:

"IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO 'POSTAMT KASTEN NO. 31299,  6304 ZUG'"

It has taken over twenty years to collect these tiny treasures. Amazingly, about 950 drawings were sent to the Swiss post office box. Now, after extensive cataloging, annotating and authenticating the Itinerant Scribbles are ready for exhibition.

The show, appropriately, will be a traveling one with its first stop in Pisticci in the southern Italian region of Basilicata where David began his peregrinations 22 years ago.

   

ENCOMIUM TO A GENTLE SWINDLER

"AN HEROIC HUCKSTER OF THE SUBLIME FELLED IN TRAGIC TRAIN WRECK"

Dimitri Kholashpah 1947 - 2010

 So read the lead obituary in the Times and the Tribune. The sudden death of Dimitri Kholashpah sent a shock through the artworld. It especially stunned and saddened my dear inconsolable friend, David Schoffman.

Kholashpah was instrumental in promoting David's career long before his work had any merit. Unearned advocacy was in fact the Kholashpah genius. Dimi, who claimed to have acquired a doctorate in art history from the Sorbonne, was a master prevaricator. He perfected the art of the well placed review and the finely crafted catalog essay. It's been said that Dimi could write a glowing tribute to a piss stain if the price was right.

In 1981, Schoffman showed a series of half-baked encaustic paintings at the Artois-Dean Gallery, then located on West Broadway in Manhattan. Dimi, a recent immigrant from Azerbaijan, was conveniently ignorant of the ethics of both commerce and journalism. Not only did he write a glowing appraisal of David's work, comparing his thinly conceived trifles to "the metaphysical effulgence of Morandi," but under the guise of an adult education class in contemporary art at Hunter College, he brought to the gallery legions of eager dowagers, urging them to purchase the  inexpensive work of "an unquestionably rising art star."

"Double dipping Dimitri" always insisted on a 20% kickback form the art dealer and 5% from the artist.

To paraphrase Robert Musil, he was a character without actually having one.

CHATTER OR SLANDER?

Waiting in Orly for a flight to Cadiz I wandered through a newsstand looking for the latest issue of Le Monde Diplomatique. My jaw literally dropped to the tiles when I saw the cover of ARTRASH, a publication I normally ignore.

Though typically unreliable, this headline carries with it the tragic knell of fact. David Schoffman and Dahlia Danton - theirs is an attraction as fatal as it is inevitable. An ugly, textbook pair of amorous narcissists. 


Their modest gifts as artists always seem to diminish whenever their stars are crossed. Clinical psychologist Dr. Gustavo Thisbe of Pyramus College in Teaneck describes this particular kind of serial romantic dysfunction as "bleating contentment." When two parties "willfully submit to libidinous equanimity with the full knowledge that in so doing, author their mutual demise."


The last time they were "romantically linked" David wasted sixteen months illustrating Madame Bovary on tissue paper and Danton composed the now infamous Eglantine Manifesto.


I hope they're happy.

THE BELL CHIMES TOO LATE FOR TEARS

FIRST IS WAS THE PILLS. THEN IT WAS THE BOOZE.
Then it was the pills and booze.

Dahlia Danton and David Schoffman, Svoge, Bulgaria 2010

David Schoffman has a decided weakness for vixens and succubi. First there was the dark eyed Agrat Hinojosa who's ex-husband nearly killed him in a comical bar fight in Tuscon. Agrat was beautiful and crazy and Schoffman was powerless in the face of her ludicrous amatory commands. Then there was Na'ima Zenunim, the coffee complected exotic dancer from Rio who had a limbless amphiptere tattooed along the length of her back. She chain-smoked Han Cao clove cigarettes and wore nearly fifty handmade silver bracelets around both her wrists and her ankles. And then there was Dahlia Danton, the hard drinking, pill popping sot. She managed to maintain a high profile international career as an artist while plunging herself into the gutter of squalid dissipation. David was willingly corrupted by this legendarily irresistible coquette.

It's been years since my dear, weak friend David has allowed himself to be seduced by temptresses and jezebels.  He lives alone and ascetically in Cartago, California, rising each day at 4AM to meditate and chant. His quotidian routine includes fifty push-ups and a six and a half mile run in the desert. 

He recently ran into Danton at a conference in Bulgaria and he sent me the picture posted above. He claims their meeting remained cordial and chaste.

I have my doubts.

 

BAILANDO CON LOS ARTISTAS

DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS A POOR BUT AVID DANCER.
(HIS EFFORT AND ENTHUSIASM  UNFORTUNATELY GO UNREWARDED)

Hippolyte doing the cha-cha at the Flamingo Room, 2010

Comically, my dear friend's great pleasure is never diminished by his hopeless ineptitude. No matter what form his tireless gamboling takes, the result is invariably oafish, knock kneed, abject failure. Whether it's a waltz, a rumba, a quickstep or a paso doble, it's as if sandbags were tied to a pair of swollen ankles.

Fortunately, David's nights out are never a total loss. He charms his collaborators, if not by his grace than by his delicately practiced pencil. He typically takes to the ballrooms and dancehalls a ream of drawing paper and a canvas bag filled with charcoals and exotic inks. He's known by the habitués as "scribbling samba" because of the giant drawings he makes between forays on the dance floor.


It's an odd addiction and a quirky hobby for someone so shy and retiring and outside his small circle of fellow frolickers, this practice is a well guarded secret. I look forward to the day when he decides to go public and exhibit these wonderfully inconsequential artistic trophies.





 

FROM THE COLLECTION OF GENERAL TSO

The foul indignities suffered by the late Cuban artist Micah Carpentier at the hands of petty bureaucrats and third-rate pedants are too numerous to enumerate. His faithless enemies were many. His scattered allies were qualmed by cowardice His rivals were all spies. For a time he couldn't afford art materials and was reduced to making small drawings on Chinese food containers

Micah Carpentier, Caja de Arroz 1975

With undisguised impudence my eccentric colleague, artist David Schoffman has decided to create an homage to these oddly charming trifles. Now on view at 死魚, one of Taipei's newest "hip" galleries, the work has met with both bewilderment and scorn.

Though I admit, it must be difficult to draw well on food containers, one should not receive points merely for the expert execution of such an inconsequential gimmick. The great Carpentier acted out of necessity, Schoffman acts out of a rowdy attempt at naked self-promotion.

The show sold out at the opening. A formally four dollar box of shrimp and black bean sauce is now valued at NT$ 30,000.

And it doesn't even come with a fortune cookie.

THE DULL DOUGH SOURS

Fortune frowned upon my dear friend David Schoffman the day he met Dahlia Danton. 

Danton & Schoffman during happier times.

Fate, the cruel mistress of diligence and step-child to caution brought only wretchedness and distraction to Schoffman at the precise moment when he needed only peace. His undoing was midwifed by a perilous passion and a weakness for concupiscent danger. 

But what sane man could blame him?

Deadly Dahlia is both beautiful and unstable and nothing attracts the demiurgic man more than glamor mixed with madness.

Rapture was regularly followed by agony and melodrama chaperoned nearly every climax. Dahlia's derangement, always in convulsive heat was a restless synthesis of Molly Bloom and Lady Macbeth.

It didn't help that as an artist of unquenchable ambition, her lustrous and meteoric professional breakthrough occurred during David's watch. 

After her appearance on the cover of ARTSTRIDENT in the fall of 2006 Schoffman fell into a deep depression soothed only by the intermittent, sub rosa sojourns to the joyhouses of Place Pigalles.

The Torturer's Horse

Micah Carpentier's moral authority remains the dying fire that flares. Pitilessly he illuminates the trembling truth of my good friend David Schoffman's poverty of purpose.

The short clip above from Katia Stopulos' 1989 documentary film Forgotten Painters and Poets is a taut, blunt reminder of Carpentier's grim reckoning.

Oh Micah ... how I miss your fatidic baritone ...

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Micah Carpentier and unknown, 1970

 

 The presumption that David Schoffman is the heir apparent to Micah Carpentier's artistic legacy carries an interesting burden. Though unquestioningly vital to any full understanding of the Latin American avant-garde, Carpentier's virile hallucinations have come under serious question of late, a question that sheds light on Schoffman's much ballyhooed "ethic".

Using the kind of precision infra-red scanners typically used to locate grenade launchers within urban battlefields, Professor Jai Tot Olivares of Universidad Peruana de los Hechos has recently uncovered glaring stylistic inconsistencies within Carpentier's drawings from the early 70's. His research found that when Carpentier was a visiting artist at the Instituto de Arte de Sevilla he collected the sketches of his students and with barbarous audacity drew directly over them, claiming them as his own!

It is difficult to discern the ripened hand of the master from the callow artlessness of the acolyte and that is precisely what gives this work so much charm. He exhibited these "collaborative" works on paper at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneos, Vizcaya in 1974 and Moisés Montanoro, principal art critic of the well-regarded weekly publication, Arte Boletín described it as "the cryptic ashes of lust and the frayed threads of a long preserved virginity".

Several years ago, shortly before his famous exhibit at Philippe Léchage I saw Schoffman rummage through the trash behind the  École des Beaux-Arts. I thought nothing of it, other than it being more evidence of David's bizarre habits as a tourist. With Olivares' new findings, I now see both Schoffman's and Carpentier's work with much greater skepticism.

THE REBIRTH OF MICAH CARPENTIER

Micah Carpentier in his Havana studio, 1969

The lubricious bevel between fondness, fealty and idolatry is an oily channel of ignominious self-sacrifice. Is it obeisance or abnegation that has compelled my truly talented friend David Schoffman to devote so much of his time to the legacy of Micah Carpentier. 

Grafico en la Cartarra, Carpentier's celebrated 1971 performance, though witnessed by only 200 people at the time, has become part of Latin American folklore. The ailing artist was miraculously revivified by his rapturous coupling with the great flamenco dancer Amalia Curati. For five consecutive days within the 100 square meters of the Berenjena Aplastado Gallery on Plaza de Armas, Carpentier followed the luscious, wanton contortions of "el bailarín de los Dioses" with his avid eye and his eloquent hand. Together they produced over seven-hundred magnificent drawings which were subsequently confiscated by the State.

 Schoffman has been rambling around the globe, recreating this legendary performance. Together with prima ballerina Hanna Betti he has re-enacted Grafico in Madrid's Galería de Nave Espacial de Arte, Rotterdam's Kunstruimteschipgalerij, Tel Aviv's אמנות חללית , Berlin's Sehr schlechte Kunstgalerie, Lyon's Galerie Pets de L'Art, Athens' τέχνης από ποσότητα απορριμμάτων and Tokyo's Cute among others.

Why hasn't this breathless apotheosis appeared in David's native Los Angeles?!

Could it be a rare moment of Southern Californian aesthetic discernment? In a place and a time where anything goes, has Hollywood actually answered to its better angels? Or is Schoffman saving the most outrageous for last?

Micah Carpentier, Havana 1969

LA VITA NUOVA

 

Pity the forlorn painter, the drudge of daily introspection, the constant rumble of doubt and indecision. I wisely gave that up years ago in favor of the more socially forgiving undertaking of what has been dubiously called "conceptual art".  Not so for my long-suffering confederate, David Schoffman.

He typically spends his entire day applying moist, oleaginous layers of expensive oil paint over carefully prepared linen panels until the surfaces sparkle with phosphorescent luminosity!

Quelle bêtise!!

The Body Is His Book #54

 Does he really live with the delusion that anyone cares? Is he not aware of how marginal the ancient art of painting is to our times? Is he ignorant of the intelligent truth that the arts are a mere superfluity, a piddling trifle, a curious but irrelevant relic of a no-longer near-past? 

And above all, Painting, that narcoleptic métier of interest only to  students and retired old ladies. 

It is only the spectacle that matters now! David should surrender his soft sable brushes and join the world of the living. He should emerge from the depths of his private meditations and wade in the shoals of superficiality. There is still hope for this reasonable man. There is space in his imagination for the comprehensible and the entertaining.

I mean ... the guy doesn't even own a cellphone!!!! 

FOUR-HUNDRED DRAWINGS

A year's worth of frenzied toil and a sea-wind of indefatigable labor has delivered a harvest of literally hundreds of significant works-on-paper by my learned friend David Schoffman. For once I approve the efforts of this self-approving, humorless menace. 

He has always had an intellectual hatred, a veritable commonwealth of terrors that have obstructed the mature development of his paintings. This formidable cache of recent drawings is an entirely different story. Wild, urgent and iridescent, these new works astonish with their sheer variety and range.

Combative and competitive bastard that I am, I confess that my joints ache as I compose this (for once) honest assessment of my arch-rival's efforts.

VACATION

August 2010, on the terrace of دراسات الكتاب المقدس

In his decrepit Los Angeles neighborhood, a perennially gray place of abandoned storefronts, vacant lots, toothless whores and teenage runaways, my dear friend David Schoffman works tirelessly, oblivious to the surrounding blight. In an odd way, he thrives on decay and is attracted to trash like others are drawn to spectacular landscapes and dramatic sunsets.

With one exception.

August of each year David spends a month in the beautiful port city of Tyre. Though the prophet Ezekiel foretold of its demise, this ancient city thrives to this day, attracting a small summer community of international artists and writers. The Dutch critic Aleydis Eden, whose sprawling villa overlooks the ruins of Al Mina calls it the "Montmartre of the Middle East".

On any given evening, David and his coterie of misfits can be found sipping arak with black rum and nibbling on sambousak, kallaj and moutabal on the terrace of دراسات الكتاب المقدس one of Tyre's trendiest restaurants. It's a far cry from L. A. and I remain mystified to this day why David chooses to live there.

THE ARCHIPELAGOES OF ART

David Schoffman's life has been soaked in the half-joys of worldly resignation. Somewhere between the barefoot tranquility of Buddhist detachment and the poisonous lake of incompetence lies the flawed bell of Schoffman's life.


In a word, he lacks all agency for anything outside the consecrated esplanades of his art. To David, the material world is a dry cake of necessary transactions, a death-cough of tedious repetition. Only in detail can David quiet the throbbing clatter of living. His studio is a cataract of half-finished gullets. With breathtaking sublimity, each picture reflects the intimate embrace of painterly engagement. Every gesture is deliberate. Absent are the loitering flints of accident or afterthought. 


And yet his life is the sum of his neglects. It is a wreckage of random outcomes, a product of his rootless passivity. 


Some would romanticize this as the quintessential "artist's life", the wages of genius, the steady sacrificial candle-drip of a visionary.


Some wouldn't.

REASON IS NOT ALWAYS CONTEMPTIBLE

Coursing with fervid wheels along the tenure track, harvesting fair fruit of putative surmise and allegorizing with the extravagant conjectures and hypotheses of a seasoned conferee, professor Aylar Naderi of Kandovan University has produced a tome of near-hysterical hyperbole.

The book is gorged with volleys of unsubstantiated assertions, ingratiating blandishments and abject lies. It is nothing short of a craven exercise in servile hagiography.  

The Day's Arches Are Crumbling renders my friend David Schoffman as a vatic genius sublimed by an allegedly unprecedented visionary beneficence. His life and work is alternately described as "untainted", "autochthonous", "resplendent" and "kindled toward the highest pitch of facundity". 

This poorly written book, released only last month, has somehow become an unlikely classic within the academic church of critical theory.

I dare you to read it!

CONTROVERSIAL SCHOLARSHIP

An unaccountable listlessness, a crippling ennui and a plague of world-weariness gripped my good friend David Schoffman  from early 1991 till the famous summer of 2000. Arpeggios of misfortune draggled him in misery. Unforeseen professional debacles were relieved only by crushing calamity and ruinous bad luck. When asked by Beatrice Alberghati chief art critic for Credenze Voluminoso why his work from that period showed no outward signs of his inner turbulence he famously answered "sono un professionista."

And so it comes as no small surprise to learn that a recently published essay by Schoffman in the Journal of Relational Aesthetics discusses in great length the relationship between disruptive innovation and temperament. Citing a recent study from the Polytechnical Institute of Neuchatel, Schoffman argues that "Cubism had more to do with Braque's rapture than the gnawing influence of Cézanne and the fingerprint of Uccello's gout and bleeding ulcer weighs much more heavily upon Prato's Birth of the Virgin than Jesus ever did."

So in addition to his designation as "the claw of the art-world," David is now the bête noire of the academic community as well. The intellectuals smell blood and David anticipates a glamorous execution as well as a boat-load of free publicity. 

GONE FISHING - DON'T BE ALARMED

Shortly before his disappearance, poet, painter and dear friend David Schoffman stunned and humbled his ever expanding circle of admirers with the following provocation: "Stretch the brackish straits of your preconceptions and follow the splintered flight of the fantastic."

Most were taken by these enigmatic words, uttered in the prophetic trope that has become the annoying emblem of David's enlarged pretensions. Few took it as a premonition of his own personal exit.

I honestly don't know where he is. Some think he is staying at Jeff Robbers' cabin just above the Veneta Creek. Others predict he'll turn up at Malebolge where David can rely on the love, honor and  hospitality of his former mistress, Layla Griffiacane.
I think he's probably surfing in Costa Rica.

He sent me a drawing just before he left. Scratched on the back was a cryptic message:  "Currado, time's hand presses heavily upon the tiger tooth of life's inevitable trials. Stay true, my brother ... ars longa"

He'll be back.

MISREAD & MISUNDERSTOOD (EVEN BY HIMSELF)

Gleason Hayworth of TD2 Television has released a strangely entertaining short video in which he manages to malign me while concocting a bizarre theory about David Schoffman. Rafaella Lacroix, the sexiest scholar in academia spars with the scorchingly beautiful travel writer Fascia Heine like a wrestler on a well-oiled mat. Gleason, whose playful touch does lessen the sting a bit, will nonetheless become the object of a bitter and enduring grudge.

THE DRAWINGS OF MICAH CARPENTIER

On a recent short trip to L'Estartit on the north-eastern coast of Spain I enjoyed one of the most artistically fortuitous events of my life. This wonderful town between the foothills of Montgri massif and the Mediterranean annually celebrates what the guidebooks call La Semana de Coincidencias Raras. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, by celebrating coincidence from an epistemological perspective, the week's festivities invariably attract all types of spontaneous and unanticipated episodes in synchronism, parallelism and concurrence.

 

This former fishing village on the Costa Brava 140 kilometers from Barcelona is not necessarily known for its antiquarian bookshops and yet it was at the southern tip of the Bay of Roses where I found the long out of print catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Micah Carpentier!

The volume was in mint condition and was reasonably priced at only 400 euros. It's a delight to leaf through its crisp and beautiful pages and it is a suitable tribute to one of modernism's great draftsmen.

THE EMPYREAN DEBATE

Some call it a dispute. Others refer to it as a chatty dialectic. I see it as an amusing splitting of whiskers. My dear, dear friend David Schoffman has been vapouring in the breath of bickering controversy for nearly ten years - ever since The Body Is His Book: 100 Paintings confined him to the silent seclusion of his secret studio. 

And the debate rages on:

CONTRITION

I was recently interviewed by a young American filmmaker whose name, if I remember correctly was either Miroslav Pruven or Glenn Reuvenni, about my thoughts on my friend David Schoffman. This Pruven or Reuvenni character is a loathsome purveyor of calumnious inaccuracies! His skillfully selective editing thoroughly misrepresents my heartfelt feelings and carefully considered opinions.

In their proper context my comments were harmless, friendly, laudatory taunts, good-natured brickbats and minor quibbles lubricated with wit. In Pruvenni's film one sees only a burning throat of vituperative bromides, a less than slender intelligence, ventilating damp, scornful platitudes with unseemly bitterness.

If you are reading this David .... me pardonner mon frère.

UNRULY OBSESSION WITH MEANINGLESS DETAIL

The work of my dear colleague David Schoffman has been publicly rebuked by yet another member of the exalted art academy. No less an authority than the esteemed scholar, Dr. Chantalle Bograve, best known for her seminal work, Sacred Awe: The Fotzekunst Movement 1920 -1922, has appeared recently on television opining with her usual bluntness.

"Unruly obsession with meaningless detail," is how she summed up Schoffman's recent work. A fair assessment perhaps, but an unkind cut nonetheless. David has been laboring  for the past ten years over a series of  100 paintings turgidly titled The Body Is His Book and to concede the points made by Professor Bograve would render Schoffman's life work a hopeless sham.

ENCOMIUM FOR A FORGOTTEN MASTER

 

 El Fresco que se Arremolina, Micah Carpentier 1971

On a recent trip to Cuba, David Schoffman and I paid a courtesy call to Wilgefortis Carpentier, widow of the late painter Micah Carpentier.  Over a delicious lunch of churrasco estilo cubano and fufu de plátano Wilgy shared loving reminiscences of her dear departed soul-mate. Laying around her modest apartment on Calle Mercaderes are some of Carpentiers finest paper bags. Señora Carpentier maintains what little remains in Cuba of her husband's work with great devotion and care.

The great revelation of this most recent trip was our discovery of El Fresco que se Arremolina at the Instituto Vocacional Ezra Pound. On the northeast main wall of the student lounge, poorly lit and partially obscured by two sofas and a small magazine rack is a majestic mural painted by Micah Carpentier shortly before he died. Measuring approximately 7 feet by 28 feet, it is an impressive performance of painterly bravura by a man, addled at the time by arthritis and mental illness.

At this writing, a team of researchers, curators and restorers are busy arranging for the work's transfer to Havana's Museo del Arte Agradable. It goes without saying that Wilgefortis Carpentier receives no compensation for anything of her husband's work that generates any income.

CLOAKED IN CIRCUMSTANCE

 

The oddities of human nature can be uncomfortably observed in the conduct of my dear friend David Schoffman. He is both a gregarious social animal and a detached, withdrawn hermit crab-like recluse. His imprint is at times as silent as a scout. Other times his grassy tongue insinuates itself with unmodulated bluster. He is the classic flaneur and as chaste as a cleric. He has a persistent longing for the luster of artistic immortality as well as an unhealthy penchant for needless self-abnegation.

In short, he is an eccentric.

While he broods within the warm breast of his poorly lit studio he regularly formulates groundless surmises about the future of art.  He is the author of countless unpublished treatises and manifestos portending our cultural pratfalls, delivery from which only he can provide. 

He is the subject of an upcoming film by Pepo Cendrars whose last effort was a blood libel of inaccuracies about me and my career. I doubt David will fare better in the hands of this invidious documentarian.

I Prefer The Pagans, 2001, oil on panel, 72 x 122 inches

The lion's jaw of unearned acclaim has foiled far finer souls than my dear friend David Schoffman. His well-known triptych I Prefer The Pagans was recently exhibited at Chichikov West as part of a group exhibition spuriously aligned around the theme of "Belief".

In tandem with the exhibition, a panel discussion, moderated by art historian Manon Ovidier took place at the gallery. Together with Schoffman the panel included artists Dahlia Danton, Felix Tillage and Vanessa Trefortunat. Each were pressed by a mosaic of knotty questions and though they handled themselves with professional aplomb, no one composed any memorable arias.

Until the very end ....

Spines were collectively tensed when the scraping sound of a young man's voice claimed the attention of the restless audience. "Mr. Schoffman," he began, "why do all your pictures seem so featherless? Why do they consistently promise prophecy or revelation but deliver only the dazzling effects of painterly accomplishment? Is it an intellectual idleness, a poverty of concept or merely the wages of your many years of groundless esteem and unjustified renown?"

Tillage, Trefortunat, Danton and even Ovidier could scarcely conceal their purgative snickers.

THE DUSTING OF EARLY ACCLAIM

While still in the wilderness of his awkward apprenticeship David Schoffman hatched an unorthodox plan. He was living in a tiny tenement on New York's lower east side and was scraping together a graceless living delivering wedding cakes for Manhattan's famous Patisserie de Cheval.

On a fateful spring morning, David was balancing a traditional two-tier white chocolate confection on the back of his bicycle on his way to Gramercy Park. White lillies and Singapore orchids fluttered gently in the breeze as he carefully wove his way around the rush hour traffic. The idea hit him like the burnt fury of an augurous premonition.

Wedding cake ornaments are either nauseatingly kitschy or sentimentally floral with little in between. Why not design more memorable baubles using the skills he so expensively acquired in art school?

That's how Undecked Decorations started. "Classically nude cake toppers tastefully rendered with unbridled finesse", was how he put it in his brochure. It was an instant success and was even the subject of a cover story in City Citizen magazine.

He eventually sold the business in order to devote all his time to painting but not before branching out into hood ornaments, sport trophies and porcelain figurines and changing the company's name to Idolatries Plus.

PREPARATORY SKETCH

"There is no more perfect witness to the pains of painterly deliberation than the preparatory sketch."

So wrote the late Burbery Slater in Amaryllis: Painting's Secret Sequence (2004), his encyclopedic art historical tour-de-force. His thesis can be summed up as follows:

Painters have always suffered a particular infirmity of the mind. From the blind fury of inspired impulse to the mortal calculation of careful forethought, the honeyed Muse visits artists in a variety of forms. Painters possess the unique ability to recognize what he calls "the eupnea of solemn arousal" enabling them to assume the prophetic diction of color and form.

It's a sappy theory to say the least and it's a disservice to my friend David Schoffman that he used two reproductions of his work to illustrate his idiotic argument.



Slater mentions no less than 200 contemporary painters to summon his false surmise. I am pleased that I am not among them.

Micah Carpentier, "The Song of Degrees" 1972

To this day David Schoffman is devoted to the memory of Micah Carpentier. David's obdurate and earnest fidelity to Carpentier's legacy has become, of late, something of a fetish. When he died, Carpentier was working on "The Song of Degrees", a series of drawings scrawled in a tempest of perverse fanaticism on discarded paper bags. His goal was to complete 1000 bags and he scavenged the streets of his native Havana in search of the perfect refuse. From Miramar to Vedado, no dumpster was left unexamined.

Currado Malaspina's short film on the subject is a classic and those interested in a deeper understanding of Carpentier's life and times can view it on YouTube

Perhaps Carpentier was the visionary that Schoffman canonized in a recent essay in Pribeus. I have my doubts but one thing is indisputable: The two of them are the most eccentric artists I have ever met.

David Schoffman's alarming essay, "Machines That Speed Too Slow," published in 1992 in Olympus Quarterly is as appurtenant now as it was prescient then. Triggered by the appointment of Jerry Embudo as director of CCMA, Schoffman's infamous jeremiad is now required reading in most graduate programs in Museum Studies.

Embudo, as many people in the art world remember, was a veteran commercial art dealer and notorious kingmaker. Sterns/Embuto in its heyday represented the likes of Caeiro, de Campos, Carpentier and Danton. The idea that the cultural and pedagogic mandate of a major art museum was handed over to a merchant was highly controversial, to say the least. Schoffman scathingly exposed this brazen betrayal of principles in a 3000 word screed of such vitriolic eloquence that even the barons of the agora (those, of course who could read without moving their lips) were moved.

Some saw Schoffman's catalog of grievances as a naive tilt toward the windmills of wishful thinking. They took particular pleasure in believing that the publication precipitated the ruin of his robust career. Others, by contrast, saw it as a courageous cri de coeur that catapulted a critically acclaimed painter into a wealthy one.

I remember thinking that it was just another self-serving pageant of David's pharmacopia of adjectives coaxing some trivial succès de scandale into personal gain.