JOYCE AND NORA IT'S NOT

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, high profile, high octane creative couples are rare and powerful phenomena. Rarer still is the durable conjugation that triumphs over egoism and sustains the participant pair into greater and greater artistic achievement.

If this blog were a work of fiction I would continue by describing the truly inspiring partnership of my good friend David Schoffman and the gifted and charming Dahlia Danton. Unfortunately the truth is rather tawdry. Friction and discord wrapped their torrid romance in a shroud of unnecessary misery. Alarming salvos of hysteria and turmoil were their preferred vernacular. Their verbal violence was legendary as was their concomitant concupiscence and perfidious disloyalty.
The imminent Los Angeles exhibition, The Gasp of Love in Terza Rima promises to be a contentious affair. I'm told that Danton will be in town for the opening and has made it plain that she fully intends on asserting a deliberately provocative presence. This may prove to be awkward. As has been amply documented, Danton and I,  like Paolo and Francesca, have been bested by the appetites and my friendship with Schoffman has scarcely recovered. The work I intend to exhibit at ALT/SPACE LA happens to be a lurid, graphic chronicling of our miscellaneous adventures. The delicate and faint-hearted would be well-advised to avoid the April 2nd vernissage.                                          

Schoffman, Danton. 2007