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