IT DOESN'T MATTERHORN

The Guttenfarbenhiet, Zermatt

The Guttenfarbenhiet is one of the oldest and dustiest libraries in the world. Located in Zermatt, Switzerland, the Guttenfarbenhiet boasts the largest collection of Bezae Papyrological Manuscripts in the Northern Hemisphere.  It is said that Honoré Freiberg, author of the greatly admired though seldom read "Notes on Feigned Melancholy" (Hinweise zur Gefälschte Melancholie), holed up in the library's windowless tower, developed a fatal urinary tract infection, denying nature's call for hours on end, immersed in his study of the Septuaginta.


My good friend, David Schoffman is currently serving as scholar in residence at this historic and august locale. He is allegedly doing research on the history of 18th century Northern Italian underdrawing, a deservedly neglected area of expertise.

I doubt very much if David is denying himself the reliable pleasures of micturition, his being of more sustainable eccentricities. He would just as soon luxuriate within the library's vertiginous gardens, sipping Xellent vodka disbursed in shallow ponds of fresh Turkish cranberry juice.

Danton & Schoffman 2011

I heard from multiple sources that a turbulent tryst is raging beneath the Alps. Dahlia Danton, just "passing through," has parked her dazzling derriere at the luxury Hotel Musil in Salgesch, just a few lazy kilometers from David's delectus.  

Dahlia + David - Delectus = Distraction

FOUL PLAY

The Lubyana Biennial is a hodgepodge of pladitudinous trifles, yet for some inexplicable reason most artists would press their first-borns into forced farm labor in order to be featured in this sprawling, rudderless exhibition. My dear friend David Schoffman is, unfortunately, no exception.

David Schoffman's Slominsky's Revenge, winner of the 2011 Principium Sapientiae

Through an intensive lobbying campaign engineered by his Paris dealer, Claude Doulachet-Vichy, David was represented in this year's extravaganza with a small room of six new paintings. Included in the group was not only the image above (Slominsky's Revenge) but also the much admired monumental picture Preponderate Deliverance.

It should come as no surprise that with a curatorial team rigged with Schoffman apologists that David was awarded the enviable Principium Sapientiae Prize, a distinction that comes with a handsome honorarium of 10,000 rubles.

It is no secret that Felix Anaximander, in addition to being the chief art critic of the Salonika Times is also an avid collector of Schoffman's work. Meno Hesiodic is the author of Schoffman, Carpentier and the Envy of Innocents (Crayfish Press 2008). Raquella Sans-Gabon was David's Montossori middle school principal before she reinvented herself as a specialist of contemporary art at Sotheby's.

This illustious trio can scarcely claim dispassionate objectivity!

The Curators from left to right: Felix Anaximander, Raquella Sans-Gabon, Meno Hesiodic 

This sort of insider wheeling and dealing must stop!

THE LURIANIC JOURNALS

Like many Latin American avant-gardists of the 1960's, Micah Carpentier held an irrational yet insatiable fascination with all things mystical. From the bleating orthodoxies of Madame Blavatsky and the bifurcated "Fourth Way" of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to the Shemtovian ecstasies of the lame and thaumaturgic Dovber of Mezritch, Carpentier was all over the metaphysical map. Every impulse and every epiphany was duly notated and illustrated in small, secret sketchbooks, hidden away in a dusty corner of his Havana studio.


Discovered in 2004 by his nephew Miroslav Carpentier-Mirabel, what later became known as the Lurianic Journals have finally been made public.

My good friend David Schoffman and I are currently in Montenegro devouring this new trove of Micah's work. We are thrilled to be reassessing and debating our impressions as well as revisiting our rivalries and mutual suspicions. We have resolved old conflicts only to cultivate new and equally passionate resentments. We are drinking heavily and eating rich, Slavic foods.


We are having a great time.