SCHOFFMAN: PAINTER by Currado Malaspina

EVERY PATH HAS ITS PUDDLE

2012-02-12T21:47:00.000-08:00


Nara Era ritual head. Hand-carved kaya wood Like Peter Paul Rubens, in addition to being and accomplished painter, my good friend David Schoffman is an avid collector as well. Whereas Rubens had a weakness for antiquities, cameos and coins, David leans toward the mysterious cult objects of Asia and Africa.

Much of his collection was gathered while traveling. Instead of purchasing his objets d'art from conventional sources he typically finds some disreputable black marketeer and smuggles his trophies past unsuspecting customs agents and easily compromised border guards.

Lacquered Sengoku Head, Japan, 1674

He has an ungovernable passion for fine-cut Natabori single block sculptures of grotesque heads with priapic noses. Five years ago on an ill-fated trip to Japan with the obstreperous orientalist Sir Galwain Thomlinson and his wife, Dahlia Danton, Schoffman brought back no less than five-hundred such heads. Their uneven quality, dubious provenances and questionable authenticities has not deterred Collective 54 from including David in their prominent and highly regarded exhibition series, "Artists Collect."

I've previewed the show (it opens on March 1st) and the installation is truly stunning. The United States Department of the Treasury is currently investigating the collection piece by painstaking piece. If it is determined that any of the works were acquired illicitly or have entered the country improperly, Schoffman may very well be indicted.

All this makes great publicity for Collective 54, (membership has doubled just within the past two weeks), but bodes poorly for my reckless friend David.

Quelle honte.

WE SEE ALL THINGS IN GOD

2012-02-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

I hate traveling with David Schoffman.

If repose and tranquility are the purpose of a trip, David will only contribute a taut imbalance, a restive agitation and an ornery, fractious element of unpredictability.

The problem is that at this point in his contemptible career he can't go anywhere without being recognized.

Occluded Corridors Installation 2009, London

Ever since his 2009 Occluded Corridors exhibition at Froomie/Mooktza's London gallery - the show that Vivianne Sürtük of The Mail famously described as"a weightless, visionary leap into the unforeseeable gone awry" - David has become, after languishing anonymously as an august, artistic éminence grise, a ridiculously acclaimed public figure.

Everywhere he goes he is flocked, fringed, beleaguered and beset by a crush of adoring admirers. This pestering rabble with their odd sense of entitlement aren't the least bit inhibited in their asphyxiating expressions of untoward intimacy. Perfect strangers think nothing of talking to him, joking with him, touching him, pinching him, caressing him and kissing him as if he were an old friend.

He claims to hate it - and on some level I suppose he does - but I've seen David play the crowd like a panpipe. Enjoy it David, while it lasts! Your great good fortune is as chimerical as a warm winter wind on rue Malebranche.

David with an adoring fan in Parc de la Villette, 2011

BERBER BACCHANAL

2012-01-02T16:49:00.000-08:00

Rummaging through some old files the other day (Parisian winters are notorious for inspiring such mindless domesticity), I happened upon a crumpled sketch by my good friend David Schoffman.

My hardened heart was momentarily stilled at this magical aide-mémoire. It quickly brought me back to that distant quarter of my misspent, dissipated youth.

It was 1980 and David and I were retracing Delacroix's 1832 sojourn through North Africa (or something equally noble and ridiculous). We were staying at the now derelict Hotel-De-Saint Longinus whose long lost luster had something to do with Jimi Hendrix and was always a favorite among drug addled exiles. It was winter in Essaouira and the Atlantic coast was beautiful.

A quick search on the internet - keywords: Morocco, noir, sheesha, Gnawas - yielded the spectral snapshot below:


Quartier El Fath, Essaouira, Morocco

As far as the inscription on Schoffman's drawing - semel in ano licet insanire* - it was, after all New Years so I suppose it speaks for itself.

*Once a year you're allowed to go crazy

PIOUS MISBELIEF

2011-12-24T23:31:00.000-08:00

My dear, articulate friend David Schoffman has started something of a cottage industry, traveling around Latin America and the United States delivering lectures on Micah Carpentier. I find it somewhat disconcerting that not only has he converted the memory of our beloved comrade into a piddling revenue stream but he has also decided to apply a bit of revisionist art history into the mix.

from The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier 1992

I don't recall ever hearing David criticize Micah's work when Carpentier was alive. Quite the contrary. He was more of an apple polishing groupie, a fawning bootlicker, a groveling flunky, maybe even a bit of a doting yes-man.

Never critical.

The clip below strikes me as being a bit odd. Recorded recently at Gerstein Hall in downtown Seattle, Schoffman begins his talk with a bit of gentle belligerence. I'm told by a few colleagues who were in attendance that what followed was 55 minutes of uninterrupted bile.

Micah Carpentier Lecture, Gerstein Hall, Seattle, 2011 (fragment) by dschoffman

Micah Carpentier

Micah Carpentier Retrospective, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Côte-Nord

Micah Carpentier

LOWBROW MEETS LOWBROW

2011-12-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

The capacious intellect of my dear friend David Schoffman is only matched by his infinite insecurities. How little he has developed both emotionally and stylistically is in full evidence with the recent publication of Behind The Grey Tail, a heavily redacted collection of David's private journals.

"Diaries," wrote the Slavic poet Rada Mladen, "are the last refuge of the ignored," and I can think of no better description of these 756 monotonous pages of self-absorbed reflection. Schoffman's "insights" give new meaning to the word ordinary. His flat, tedious prose present a near insurmountable obstacle to even the most assiduous reader.

The only thing that kept me plowing through this turbid text were the many (I believe there are over 500) references to me.

Here are a few examples:

November 11, 1986. Paris

A low wind whispers near ... Currado and I have just returned from a short sojourn in Istanbul. I crumble under his shadow ... the littering leaves of autumn turn the sounds of Paris into a fanfare of snare drum and cymbal. Currado speaks eloquently of Gide ... I scarcely understand.

March 21, 1990. New York

Malaspina's triumph is my collapse. I am annihilated, ruined, silenced by his swaggering domination of the New York artworld. Danto, Smith, Kimmelman, Perl, Kramer, Hickey - they are all falling over themselves singing panegyric homilies, tossing perfumed bouquets at an already bumptious braggart. I can't stand it!!!!

June 1, 1992. Rome

It seems the Malaspina name still has some currency here. It got us a terrific table at La Pergola where the seared tuna with friggitelli is absolutely amazing!

Only the most devoted Schoffman fans (are there any left?) need explore this book. Save your shekel and wait till the movie comes out. No kidding! The rights were just sold to Crepuscular Pictures for a whopping six figures with serious talk of Dee Martenelli playing the lead.

THAT'S SHOW BIZ

2011-12-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Gasp of Love in Terza Rima, a tawdry exhibition I agreed to participate in with my vain and sensitive friend David Schoffman was a bit of a succès de scandale.

I'm afraid David felt a bit slighted by the critical community because ... I suppose ...

I upstaged him.

Tant pis!

THE HEBRAIDIAN MANUSCRIPT (FM XXI. BUDAPEST)

2011-12-03T21:16:00.000-08:00

What do you call a counterfeit forgery?

Tucked like a kitten in a woolsack, a strange fourteenth century document was discovered in 1983 in a dank neglected corner of the St. Vitruvius Monestary in Vitebsk. What became known later as the Herbraidian Manuscript is perhaps the oddest and most beautiful Hebrew text in the Ashkenazi world.

from The Hebraidian Manuscript, circa 1311, Courtesy of the Budapest National Archives

The authenticity of the document has been questioned for years, most recently by professor Ivan MacKaulski of Bar Ilan. In his essay The Hebraidian Hoax published last month in the Heartfelt Institute's highly regarded periodical Bididut he cites, among other things, the peculiar floral pattern which, though commonly used by Tuscan scribes in illuminated haggadot and ketubot, are rarely seen before the early 1600's. Additionally, the text, which appears to be some sort of legal contract, is written in the Havineri script, a typography popular in Bukhara and Cochin but never before seen in western Europe.

Truth be told, outside a small circle of pointy-headed intellectuals, nobody knows, much less cares about any of this obscure, hermetic Judaic scholarship. Which brings up the subject of my sneaky, sneaky friend, David Schoffman.

Schoffman is known and in fact prides himself on his uncanny ability to invent novel compositional devices using an encyclopedic reservoir of deeply original imagery. To quote Francis Peterson-Post, Dandridge-Oxford professor of Art History at Emory University, "Schoffman ... creates out of whole cloth a catalog of icons and simulacrum that never borrow, import or repeat. He alone, in the tradition of Blake, Beckett and Basnique, is an island of aberrant inventiveness and singular ingenuity."

I hate to hurl cold water over this harmless myth but the painting reproduced below, a 2004 oil on canvas by David Schoffman which was exhibited at MOCA's Sublime Particular exhibition (curated by Peterson-Post and Stephanie Borastow-Kahn) is much more than a direct descendant of the Hebraidian masterpiece/forgery.

The Wrinkled Lip of Kings, David Schoffman 2004, oil on canvas 145" x 138"

The image speaks for itself but unfortunately the liberal borrowings do not end there. Schoffman's famous Bartholomew Diptych, the massive mosaic commissioned by Grenoble International is practically a carbon copy of Batsu's Rekishi Parchment in the Okazaki Temple. At least in that instance Schoffman had the decency to cover his tracks and make his work en grisaille. Danton Was Right, the series of twelve lithographs published by the Académie Bibliothèque in 2000 was a brazen appropriation of the illustrations of Canadian artist Kaniuk Foreman.

The list goes on and on.

David Schoffman ... J'accuse!!

SPOOKY SEX

2011-11-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

My innocent, foolish friend David Schoffman has a weakness for cranky, crackpot, paranormal street prophets. Some who find the temporal world unsuited to their temperament find the consolations of philosophy and art adequate surrogates for their metaphysical urges. Not so my transcendent colleague David. He's always on the hook for some astral eccentric, some empyrean swindler or some sacerdotal grifter.

Hence his fascination with the beautiful and clairvoyant Dahlia Danton.

Schoffman and Danton at the Fénelon Seance, 2010

It started many years ago.

As a young, inexperienced artist trying to make his way in Paris and New York, David visited 'Betina,' the famously beguiling reader/advisor whose small studio on Cour du Commerce St.-André was a favorite refuge for the rudderless and homesick. Tucked away between rue Saint-André des Arts and the boulevard St.-Germain, Betina's had everything one might expect in a soothsayer's lair: crystal balls, wicca sticks, tarot decks, runes, ouija boards, show globes, Hessian crucibles, pendulums, mystic oracles, scrying mirrors, inlaid mother-of-pearl divining rods and scores of other obscure and beautiful objects.

The proselyte Schoffman was always powerless to the seductions of paraphernalia.

He put great trust in Betina and when she predicted in 1979 his future mid-career retrospective at the Musée des Objets Oubliable, he became a life-long dewy-eyed disciple of augury and the occult. (The show, in fact, did take place, though not exactly at the predicted location. In 1998, Schoffman had a fairly comprehensive exhibition at Milan's famous Museo delle Palline da Dimenticare).

Many years have past and Betina has long since retired to her ancestral village in western Romania. Schoffman replaced her with a series of equally charismatic and equally counterfeit heavenly hucksters, the latest being the wily Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.

A skeptic may attribute his newfound affiliation to this relative novice in the art of strange sacrament to Danton's soft, spectral skin, her dark hair faintly scented with saffron and rose petal, her moist pink lips which she always keeps slightly ajar, even when silent and her rough throaty voice suggestive of mutual conspiracy and unearned intimacy.

The skeptic would probably be right.

THE SLIPPERY SONGSTER

2011-11-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

Cagey and cryptic, my furtive friend David Schoffman almost never opens his Los Angeles studio to visitors. Curators, collectors and critics all clamor for an audience but to no avail. Schoffman's irrational and self-defeating petulance hold a staunch vigil to his caprice. Those who do manage to pierce the rampart are a priesthood of strange and select dissenters.

So to whom does this bald head belong?

Stopping in Los Angeles while touring with the Royal Bismark-Bialystok Radio Orchestra, Irish tenor Briac Scott Bertelsen (a mutual friend of both David and I) and his son Deverell were granted a short visit. Known for his discerning eye, wayward wit and irrepressible rendering of Ponchielli's Cielo e Mar, Bri's enviable access to Schoffman's Sanctum Sanctorum is seen by many as a provocation.

Bertelsen, whose very public profile inspires the type of speculation worthy of a Kremlinologist, is a pawn in Schoffman's perverse assault on the connoisseur class. When his recent visit was reported in the press (the anonymous source being Schoffman himself), embers of antagonism were rekindled from California to Irkutsk. The banished and the blackballed were irate at what was seen as the tenor's unwarranted access.

Deverell Bertelsen, Schoffman and Briac Scott Bertelsen, Los Angeles, 2011

When asked later about the state of Schoffman's work, the cunning crooner crowed with rapacious delight, "... not at all bad ... menacing though inconclusive... a bit strange, yes ... perhaps even revolutionary ... perhaps not."

THE COOL, COOL SOUNDS OF JAZZ

2011-11-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

It's rare but from time to time my purist compatriot David Schoffman agrees to allow one of his pieces to be used for commercial purposes. A few years back the State Department put one of David's "Imagined Spaces" drawings on the cover of its Third World Infectious Diseases brochure. The Times published a caricature he did (on a dinner napkin from Laconda Verde) of George Soros . He designed the wedding invitation for the Crown Prince of Lemuria (for his first marriage) and most recently he let legendary tenor Meyer Limon use a painting for his most recent CD, "Prevention Beats the Cure" on EPI Records.

Cover art for Meyer Limon's 2011 EPI release "Prevention Beats the Cure"

Limon is an interesting cat, a sufi mystic who practices Vedic Yoga, speaks fluent Ladino and does freelance consulting work for the IT division at Sony. He has played and recorded with all the greats, most recently touring southeast Asia with the Barry Berry Trio. His 2007 recording, "Buddha and Neruda" was nominated for a Latin Grammy and the current CD with Schoffman's art on the cover recently went platinum.


Meyer Limon 2010, (Photo courtesy of EPI Records)

I recently heard Limon play at Le Caveau on rue Renault and he was smokin'. I'm always stunned how some heroin addicts are able to retain their vital genius, remain active and actually thrive.

INSPIRATION FOR AMATEURS

2011-11-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

Nibbling on a croque-en-bouche the other day with my sweet-toothed friend David Schoffman, the subject of Jewish mysticism came up. We were seated on the terrace of Felix Café am Bellvevue, a place where old Europe strains against the pressures of western gastronomical prudery. "Zurich always brings out my thaumaturgical urges," Schoffman garbled through a tongue tied with oozing caramel, "it's a place where tallis and talisman melt into an incoherent gush of personal melancholy.


study for Birkat Cohanim II, 1997

Pressed on the issue, he continued.

"I've been rereading the essays of the great philologist Mario Robitosen. He has a great quote regarding apostasy, calling it 'the midwife of staunch assurances.' I ruminated on this strange categorization for weeks until I finally realized that it was, at its very root, utterly meaningless. It was then when the future of my work became clear to me."


Schoffman's studio - Los Angeles, 2009

This piqued my curiosity and upon returning to Paris I picked up a copy of Robitosen's seminal work The Ethics of Accident and Bad Luck.

I found it almost completely unintelligible.

Don't Encourage Him!

2011-11-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not at all sure why but there is a lingering fascination with all things Schoffman. From his sordid and sloppy personal life to his mercurial, temperamental and I dare say, simple-minded intellect, the inner workings of this most ordinary man remain vividly alive to a small sect of avid enthusiasts.

Case in point, the following:

IT DOESN'T MATTERHORN

2011-10-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

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.

DIPLOMACY

2011-09-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

People of good intention attribute to the work of my friend David Schoffman metaphors and meaning that at times stretch the limits of credulity. There is an entire cottage industry of Schoffman studies, parsing signs and innuendo from his published essays, his interviews and his lectures trying to assign a neat, fixed and coherent theory to his variegated oeuvre.

Where The Maronites Are, oil on canvas, Schoffman 2011

Some see in David's work a visual reflection of Lessing's Philotas and the moral and ethical questions of self-sacrifice. Others argue that Schoffman's obsession with patterns and repetition are simply stunning restatements of Pythagorian tetractys. I attended one lecture in Zurich by a renown art historian who claimed that David's life's work was nothing less than an eloquent refutation of Lacanian jouissance and the erogenous circle.

I have known David for over thirty years and though he remains as opaque to me now as he was when we were young I believe I have a unique window on his artistic sensibilities. Therefore I believe that the following improbable theory may indeed be the one closest to the truth.

Rachel Fax-Grote, professor emeritus of Semiotic Choreography at the University of Wales recently wrote in a much publicized paper entitled "The Poetics of Real Estate," that the obscure and idiosyncratic forms that appear in Schoffman's recent panel paintings, if read correctly, redraw the contentious maps of the Middle East.

Judea and Samaria, oil on canvas, Schoffman 2011

Ms. Fax-Grote, when discussing the piece above, was uncertain whether the dark areas were to be part of Israel or part of Palestine but she seemed reasonably convinced that the small, light, box shapes were were meant to signify either international peacekeepers or future locations of Starbuck's.

CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION

2011-09-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

In Paris, magazines aren't that big a deal. Yes, our kiosks are stocked with countless glossy editions catering to the variegated tastes of my countrymen but it is nothing like the United States. Fashion, sports, politics and gossip are pretty much all that the Gallic imagination can sustain. In America by contrast, every marginal interest has at least several periodicals devoted to it. Shrewd Investor, Video Game Review, Vegan Kitchen, Poker Chips and Tips, Farm Equipment Times and Better Triceps are among my favorite examples.

When I visit Los Angeles I love to trowel the voluminous newsstands of Hollywood hoping to stumble upon some esoteric niche. At one place I found no less than three magazines on the subject of solar panel de-installation, six colorful journals on Latin American economics and fourteen lushly photographed monthlies on the affluent Southern Californian "lifestyle."

The one that stuck out most conspicuously was a tasteful, understated issue called California Domicile. The reasons for my interest (and disappointment) are obvious.

Ethicum Perplexus

2011-08-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

In the early eighties my altruistic friend David Schoffman volunteered at the L'Hôpital St Rocco pour les Aliénés Criminels in Bastia. This picturesque asylum, directly across the street from the Church of San Giovanni Battista offers Corsica's most enviable view of the island of Elba. It was there where David conducted an unguided, unsanctioned experiment upon an entire ward of rapists, murderers, arsonists and sadists. It was there where he completed his now famous, one-hundred and twenty paneled painting "Les Cinglés de Créer."

Les Cinglés de Créer, oil on 120 panels, David Schoffman and Ward Seven, 1988

In 1988 "art therapy" was a questionable discipline in Europe and the idea of organizing an unruly and undisciplined group of criminally insane inmates into an oil painting workshop was thoroughly unthinkable. David never bothered to propose the project to the hospital's notoriously conservative director, Dr. Maurice Etourdi.

Instead, he merely smuggled the necessary material into St. Rocco's laundry facility, a place where the most violent inmates were sent to work, and secretly instructed them on the finer points of color theory and "fat on lean" paint application.

The stunning results are self-explanatory but Schoffman has kept the work secret until now. Fearing damaging litigation, the work was known only to a small group of trusted friends and colleagues. Now that Dr Etourdi is dead, Schoffman, in conjunction with the Musée des Anomalies Moderne in Arnaudville, has decided to make the work public with a comprehensive exhibition with full and complete factual (if embarrassing) disclosure.

Now it is left to the public to make a fair ethical accounting of the genesis of this amazing work of art.

FORTUNE WINKS

2011-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Fabrice Batya-Soulle, associate dean of the Collège de Maritime's School of Theology in Coutelle-sur-Marne is an estimable scholar and an original thinker. Author of 23 books and countless articles and essays, Batya-Soulle may be best known as the part-time lover of both Tanya Bar-Kochba and Dahlia Danton. He is also the world's foremost collector of the works of my friend, David Schoffman.

Fabrice Batya-Soulle, 2007 Dahlia Danton

In cannot be claimed by any standard of honest measurement that Fabrice is an attractive man. He bathes irregularly, his crooked teeth are ochred by years of chain-smoking and his disheveled appearance gives the impression of one who has just stirred from a park bench nap. His success with stunning women must be attributed to something else.

Tanya Bar-Kochba

His connection to Schoffman is even more mysterious. As most of my readers know, David is a profligate and unprincipled gambler. A frequent visitor to the lush and disreputable casinos of Corsica and Greece, David has won and lost many small fortunes throughout the years. Never one to abstain from a lively game of Lansquenet, Texas Holdem or Piquet, Schoffman is well-known for his unscrupulousness and dishonesty.

He apparently met his match in Fabrice Batya-Soulle.

I have heard at least ten different accounts of their notorious encounter, each one varying only in its details. The basic outline is as follows:

David, finding himself at a distinct numerical disadvantage at the Punto Banco table at either the Xanthi or the Rodos Casino was spotted 100,000 € by Batya-Soulle who was engaged in a spirited debate with a cocktail waitress nearby. Within minutes the ill-starred Schoffman was in hock to the esteemed theologian. Agreeing to meet the following day to settle their affairs, the two parted amicably after a late cocktail at a nearby saloon.

It is hardly worth mentioning that my afflicted friend David failed to show up at their appointed meeting - the professor held no such expectation. True to form, Schoffman contacted his new-found benefactor through an intermediary. He proposed making good his debt with a suite of small drawings newly completed for his much anticipated exhibition at Mokousis/Martin, scheduled for the following month.

The cunning academic quickly agreed, with the added condition that Schoffman include the phone number of the lovely Miss Danton.
The show was canceled, David was dropped by the gallery and the professor enjoyed a prolonged tryst with one of the most beautiful women in the artworld.

Dahlia Danton

N E I G H

2011-08-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

Few people realize that my dear,reclusive and secretive friend David Schoffman has two rather well-known siblings. Many will find it even more astonishing that in addition to a younger sister, Marie-Eleanor Duquesnoy, David is an identical twin.

Sergei Monopol(né Schoffman)Marie-Eleanor Duquesnoy

Let's begin with Marie-Eleanor.

As most of my readers will know, Duquesnoy is one of the most feared and respected investigative reporters in Europe. A regular contributor to Zurich's Die Neue Republik, Marie-Eleanor cracked the famous Hufeisen Case, exposing rampant corruption among jockeys and trainers at Bargen's Shlomit Rennstrecke. She was the first European journalist to interview rebel leader Mousa Toobi Chalifa at his secluded compound at the foot of Mount Sahand in Kandovan. And perhaps most famously she forced the resignation of Didier Crottin, chief financial officer of Paon Fréres after revealing an elaborate scheme of money laundering residuals from the sale of counterfeit birth control medication.

Sergei Monopol né Stevie Schoffman, on the other hand, has always been known as a deadbeat.

Dining out on the prestige of his twin brother, Sergei has wormed his way into the corridors of the wealthy and powerful by passing himself off as David. He once sat eyeball to eyeball nursing margaritas,smoking strong Turkish cigarettes and discussing the color red with none other than Francis Bacon. He flew in Robert Rauschenberg's private plane listening to old cassettes of John Cage chanting improvised lyrics from the I-Ching.

His greatest stunt was when he visited my studio in Paris, convinced me to lend him a small drawing and attempted to sell it to Leo Castelli's housekeeper for a fraction of its worth.
Currado Malaspina, 1981
Nobody wanted to press charges but we insisted he submit to a full psychological evaluation.

Sergei Monopol (né Schoffman) hanged himself last November in his two-bedroom apartment in Rego Park, Queens. 

My bereaved friend David Schoffman hasn't been the same since.

C'EST TOUT NAZE

2011-07-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

The first time my dear friend David Schoffman set foot in Garentoux he was horrified by what he saw.

Portrait of Pierre Bon-Humaine. David Schoffman, 2011

Founded in 1652 by the Frères de la Douleur in Villeneuve-le-Roi, the Garentoux asylum is known mostly for its famous former inmates including Émile-Jacques Partout, Latude Esquirol and the Marquis de Saint-Séploudt. The unconventional therapies that have made the hospital so controversial, have, if anything, become more irregular with time. Though the incidences of violence have decreased, the percentages of full rehabilitation have remained relatively low.

Chances are, if you enter Garentoux as a patient, you will remain interned for the rest of your life.

I have yet to make up my mind regarding the ethics of "Barjot," David's most recent exhibition. Comprised of 635 beautifully executed ink drawings, the show documents with chilling candor each and every inmate of the sanatorium. Writing in Revue Hebdomadaire Fiable, René Charcuterie called it a "scandale de premier ordre." He went on to excoriate André Quills, the director of the hospital, for allowing his patients to become a "spectacle for the prurient high-brow," (" un spectacle pour l'élite libidineux").

I, for one, am unmoved by this skittish propriety, My chief concern is that none of Schoffman's subjects received any monetary compensation for their services, a galling detail considering the fact that the show sold out before the opening!

DISTRACTION

2011-07-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

The magnificent measure of a man, especially of a painter, is the capacity to absorb the mockery of one's peers. It requires a degree of self-effacement beyond the mere necessary. It commands a pressured claim upon an artist's fragile ego, summoning him toward the frivolous and the burlesque. My comical comrade David Schoffman merits our sincerest admiration after submitting to the clownish buffoonery of Hollywood, appearing in the new reality television program, Oily Canvas.


Still from episode 5 of Oily Canvas, Connerie Entertainment Ltd, 2011

A small camera crew attached itself to David for six full weeks, following him daily through the grinds and travails of studio life. We see him fastidiously firing staples into husky, over-sized stretcher bars. We watch fixedly as he struggles to blend his buttery paint into subtle grades of dim earth greens, coffee yellows and raucous reds and pinks. We witness his triumphs and frustrations, his daily crucibles with form and his rare moments of aesthetic exhilaration.

My favorite moment captured the unexpected visit of the flamboyant, freelance curator, Antonija Celik. An unshaven Schoffman is seen working in his atelier wearing a threadbare cloth bathrobe and a bright pair of orange striped boxer shorts. Celik, claiming to be passing through the neighborhood, drops by, ostensibly to see the progress of The Body Is His Book, Schoffman's long suffering, as yet incomplete series of 100 paintings.

Antonija Celik in David Schoffman's Los Angeles studio. Connerie Entertainment Ltd, 2011

Without revealing too much ... little real work was completed that day.

DO YOU FEEL LUCKY

2011-07-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

THE DIVIDED CITY OF NICOSIA SPRAWLS LIKE THE HIMALAYAN MOSS. SWELLING LIKE A FUSILLADE OF FAT IN A TIGHT FITTING SUIT, THE CITY STRUGGLES TO CONTAIN ITS FRUCTIFEROUS GROWTH. APARTMENT BLOCKS, SHOPPING MALLS AND OFFICE PLAZAS VIE FOR VALUABLE REAL ESTATE WITH PROJECTED AMPHITHEATERS, LUXURY LOFTS, PARKING LOTS AND CASINOS. IT'S A DYNAMIC METROPOLIS, DESPITE ITS CONTENTIOUS HISTORY AND IT SEEMS FITTING THAT MY DEAR FRIEND, DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS SOMEHOW EMBROILED IN THIS COSMOPOLITAN FRACAS.

Casino Seminolé, the three story gambling emporium on Onasagorus Avenue recently commissioned Schoffman to design a set of blackjack cards. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that he will receive twenty-thousand Turkish lira per card, making it the most costly deck in history. Each card will initially appear as a limited edition lithograph and to date the most popular one is the Five of Diamonds.

Five of Diamonds, David Schoffman 2011

Few North Cypriots realize that the basis of his motif is the Acropolis Museum's much admired Ares in Repose. Perhaps it's a not too subtle poke, a measure for measure of sorts, an artistic reprisal for the decidedly unartful Turkish role in all those flotillas.

REJOICING IN FRUITION

2011-06-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

A CANNY PHOTOGRAPHER CAUGHT THE REMARKABLE MOMENT.

Schoffman accepting the Plume Puant from Shulamit Görög

UPSTAGED EARLIER IN THE EVENING BY AN ENNOBLING ALBEIT LENGTHY HOMAGE TO THE CZECH PAINTER TAVIK TRAMPOTA, MY THIN-SKINNED COMRADE DAVID SCHOFFMAN WAS PREPARED FOR YET ANOTHER PROFESSIONAL ECLIPSE.

THE OCCASION WAS THE THIRTY-THIRD ANNUAL GRU RICKRACK FESTIVAL IN TIMISOARA. RICKRACK IS A VENUE FOR SOME OF THE MOST OFFBEAT WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY "ART" AND TENDS TO CAST ITSELF AS A SORT OF "ANTI VENICE BIENNALE." A TEDIOUS AWARDS CEREMONY MARKS THE CONCLUSION OF THE TWO-WEEK EVENT AND DAVID'S SHORT VIDEO LE FRISSON ABATTU WAS THE ODDS ON FAVORITE FOR LA PLUME PUANT.

THE BUZZ SURROUNDING THIS TRULY ORIGINAL WORK DID NOT PREVENT DAVID FROM EXERCISING HIS OVERRIDING PREDISPOSITION FOR PESSIMISTIC DEFEATISM. HE WAS CERTAIN THAT CLAUDINE ON BUSH STREET BY THE INIMITABLE FILMMAKING COLLECTIVE, POSSIBLE PICTURES WOULD CARRY THE DAY, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY WON THE PLUME FOUR TIMES WITHIN THE PAST SIX YEARS.

WHEN HIS NAME WAS ANNOUNCED HE WAS VISIBLY STIRRED AND GENUINELY STUNNED. SERBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST, SHULAMIT GOROG PRESENTED THE AWARD AND LATER DAVID CONFESSED THAT FOR YEARS HE ENJOYED LUMINOUS HALLUCINATIONS AND VIVID FANTASIES OF PLANTING A CORRUPTED KISS ON THE MILKY CHEEK OF THIS LOVELY AND TALENTED WOMAN.

FATE HOLDS NO PRIZE

2011-06-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN AND I SHARE A DEAR MUTUAL FRIEND. ESSAYIST AND PHILOSOPHER, MARTA SONNETTO, HAS BEEN A CONSTANT PRESENCE IN BOTH OUR LIVES FOR MANY, MANY YEARS.

Portrait of Marta Sonnetto by Dahlia Danton, 2005

BORN IN SORRENTO IN 1939, SONNETTO INSCRUTABLY CLAIMED THAT SHE WAS NURSED ON LIMONCELLO AND LEARNED TO READ FROM A TATTERED, WATERLOGGED COPY OF TASSO'S GERUSALEMME LIBERATA, THE ONLY BOOK HER PARENTS OWNED. HER MOST WIDELY READ WORK, THE 947 PAGE DISPERAZIONE O INDIGESTIONE, A THOROUGH THOUGH DEEPLY FLAWED CRITIQUE OF HER MENTOR, LEV SHESTOV, WAS ADAPTED INTO A POPULAR TELEVISION SERIES AND MADE SONNETTO A HOUSEHOLD NAME THROUGHOUT THE MEDITERRANEAN. DAVID AND I MET HER WHILE WE WERE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI FEDERICO II. HER LEGENDARY THOUGH SPARSELY ATTENDED SPRING SEMINAR, ARRENDERSI CONTRO SFORZARSI, (PLAYFULLY REFERRED TO BY HER STUDENTS AS "CHE CAZZO E IL PUNTO") REMAINS A SOURCE OF GREAT INSPIRATION TO THE TWO OF US.

WHERE DAVID AND I DIFFER IS ON HOW BEST TO INTERPRET, OR INDEED, TO WHAT DEGREE TAKE SERIOUSLY SONNETTO'S ATTACHMENT TO THE NOTION OF INEVITABLE DESPAIR. DAVID CHANNELS HIS ANALYSIS THOUGH HIS WORK, SEEING HIS PAINTINGS AS A NECESSARY PALLIATIVE, AN ADAPTIVE CONSOLATION FOR THE INTELLIGENT RELINQUISHMENTS OF CONVENTIONAL FAITH.

I PREFER THE ANTIDOTAL BENEFITS OF BUPROPION, IMIPRAMINE AND AMITRIPTYLINE.

FALSE MODESTY

2011-06-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

IN THE SPRING OF 2002 MY UNFEASIBLE FRIEND, DAVID SCHOFFMAN, BEGAN WORK ON WHAT LATER BECAME KNOWN AS THE BODY IS HIS BOOK: 100 PAINTINGS, A QUIXOTIC ENTERPRISE THAT ENVISIONED A ROOM PACKED WITH MESMERIC, SYNCOPATED, ODDLY INTERRELATED, OBSESSIVELY DETAILED OIL PANELS. NOW, NINE LONG YEARS LATER AND THE PROJECT IS NEARLY COMPLETE.

OR IS IT?

WHILE VISITING DAVID IN HIS LOS ANGELES STUDIO LAST MONTH I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCUSS WITH HIM HIS WORK, HIS IDEAS, HIS DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS AND HIS MORE PLENTIFUL DISAPPOINTMENTS. SPEAKING IN BROKEN, RUDIMENTARY HIGH SCHOOL FRENCH (AT HIS INSISTENCE ... NOT MINE), IN TURN DEFIANT, DEFENSIVE, ELEGIAC AND EXHAUSTED, DAVID WAS MORE THOUGHTFUL THAN I'D REMEMBERED.

"J'ai raté ma vie." His sad and palpable regret would have been heartbreaking had I been more sympathetic. But his claim that he somehow lived amidst a ruin of his own design, that he had mismanaged his life and squandered his opportunities rang as hollow as a chocolate Easter egg. Before me sat a man who has been fêted by monarchs, flattered by starlets, relentlessly pursued by oligarchs and executives, written about by scholars, scorned by rivals and honored by academics and he still claims that "J'ai baisé tous."

The man lacks gratitude and has lost all perspective. And now that The Body Is His Book is almost complete, with head in hand he dejectedly deadpans "Je veux recommencer à zéro."

Start over again!!?? The paintings are ferocious in their intensity, vivid in their luster, complex in their intent and immaculate in their conception ... and he wants to start over again?

The man must be protected from himself.

A COURTEOUS MAN

2011-06-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

ROME IS ABLAZE WITH THE THOUGHTFULLY SCATHING CRITIQUE OF MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN BY THE TALK SHOW HOSTESS, SALLY VESTUTA.
AN UNLIKELY SUBJECT FOR EDIZIONI GUCCINI, ITALY'S BOUTIQUE PUBLISHING HOUSE AMONG WHOSE RECENT TITLES INCLUDE "BARISTE E SPOSE," BASED ON A POPULAR SOAP OPERA AND THE CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIR "I MIEI TESTICOLI."

OMO CORTESE OR "A COURTEOUS MAN," THIS NEW BOOK ADVANCES THE THEORY THAT DAVID'S HIGHLY AMBITIOUS WORK IS ULTIMATELY FLAWED, NOT ONLY BY ITS GOOD INTENTIONS BUT BY THE VERY DECENCY OF THE ARTIST HIMSELF. EXHAUSTIVE IN ITS REACH AND THOROUGH IN ITS ANALYSIS, VESTUTA FOCUSES ON THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE OF PAINTING AND ITS FATAL LACK OF CULTURAL IMPACT.

THE PRODUCT OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BACKBREAKING RESEARCH, VESTUTA CONDUCTED OVER NINE HUNDRED INTERVIEWS AND HAD COMPLETE ACCESS TO SCHOFFMAN'S NOTEBOOKS, DIARIES AND CORRESPONDENCES.

I MIGHT ADD THAT I AM INCLUDED IN A LENGTHY FOOTNOTE ON PAGE 343. IN IT I'M QUOTED AS SAYING "PHYSICAL EXILE AND INTELLECTUAL DISPLACEMENT ARE THE TWINNED DETRIMENTS TO THE SCHOFFMAN OEUVRE."

I'M FLATTERED BY THE INCLUSION BUT HONESTLY ... CURRADO MALASPINA SIMPLY DOESN'T TALK LIKE THAT.

PRIX DE CONSOLATION

2011-05-26T05:33:00.000-07:00

DEAR FRIEND, ESTEEMED SCHOLAR, ACERBIC CRITIC AND GENEROUS ART PATRON FABIOLA DU PLESSIS VOEUX HAS DIED.


Fabiola du Plessis Voeux, charcoal on paper, David Schoffman 2009

For over forty years Plessis Voeux was a treasured member of the Académie de l'Art et le Climat Doux in Aubechies. Her books include Crispin van der Broeck and the Guild of St. Luke, Treize à la Douzaine: Pastry and Painting in the Kingdom of Navarre and most recently, Aniconism and Ambiguity in the Work of David Schoffman.

Her work, though stunningly original in its scholarship has always been popular with the general reader. Winner of the Abrahamic Writer's Circle Prize for her weekly column in La Nouvel Philologue,Fabiola had a knack for making even the most marginal and recondite readable for the layman.

She was particularly fond of my good friend David Schoffman, whose work she misread and overly appreciated. In a 2002 interview on TF1, Fabiola called Schoffman's unfinished series of paintings, The Body Is His Book, the "most ambitious artistic project since Carracci's Farnese frescoes."

She will be sorely missed ... especially by David.

SENEX BIS PUER

2011-05-19T09:44:00.000-07:00

IT IS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH AMONG CERTAIN SECTORS OF THE ARTISTIC COMMUNITY THAT MY FAITHFUL FRIEND, DAVID SCHOFFMAN, IF NOT DOWNRIGHT CRAZY, IS DARKLY MANIACAL AND FATALLY ERRATIC.

Ab Asino Lanam, David Schoffman, 2011

HOW ELSE CAN ONE EXPLAIN THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE COMPLETION OF HIS LATEST MONUMENTAL PIECE, AB ASINO LANAM.

SHOWCASED AT THIS YEAR'S GRINDAVIK BIENNIAL, THE WORK CONSISTS OF TWENTY-EIGHT 4 FOOT SQUARE PANELS DEPICTING VARIOUS STATES OF HUMAN VITALITY AND REPOSE. ORIGINALLY INTENDED FOR THE GRAND PALAIS DE PITRERIES IN BAVIGNE WHERE IT WAS TO INCLUDE THREE TIMES AS MANY PANELS, THE WORK WAS EDITED DOWN TO A MANAGEABLE 16 BY 28 FEET.

TO SCHOFFMAN, SIZE IS EVERYTHING. I HAVE SEEN THIS WORK WHILE IT WAS IN PROGRESS. DAVID RENTED AN ABANDONED MILITARY AIRPORT HANGAR ABOUT TWELVE MILES EAST OF LAS VEGAS AND WITH THE HELP OF A SMALL ARMY OF SHOWGIRLS, DANCERS AND STRIPPERS COMPLETED NO LESS THAN 700 IMAGES IN THE SPACE OF ONLY TWO AND A HALF MONTHS.

THE MERITS OF SUCH AN ENTERPRISE ARE DEBATABLE AT BEST BUT TO THOSE OF US FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE VISITED HIM DURING THE PROCESS, IT WAS AN AWE INSPIRING PERFORMANCE OF WILL, DISCIPLINE AND MEGALOMANIA.

I ALSO GOT TO SEE DON RICKLES, THE SPINNERS AND PAT BENATAR!

INELEGANT LARCENY

2011-04-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

ARTISTIC INGENUITY IS A VALUE I PRIZE ABOVE ALL OTHERS. PERHAPS MY MOTH-EATEN VALUES HAVE FALLEN INTO DECREPITUDE BUT MY IDEAL OF CONCEPTUAL ORIGINALITY IS ONE I STILL HOLD DEAR. MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS APPARENTLY UNIMPAIRED BY THIS ADORABLY FOSSILIZED NOTION.

Interterrene, Twickenham Codex, 1786

THE IMAGE ABOVE IS FROM THE FAMOUS TWICKENHAM CODEX. THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT WHICH DATES FROM THE LATE 18TH CENTURY IS LOCATED IN THE KUHSCHEIßE ANTHNEUM IN SAARLAN. THE ENTIRE VOLUME IS RICHLY ILLUMINATED WITH WONDERFULLY ECCENTRIC IMAGES. EACH PAGE IS A SMALL UNIVERSE OF METICULOUSLY RENDERED DETAIL FULL OF COUNTERPUNCTUAL PATTERNS AND LABYRINTHINE DESIGNS.

The Body Is His Book #46, David Schoffman 2010

EXHIBIT A

THE NAKED APPROPRIATION AND INSOLENT INFERENCES IN SCHOFFMAN'S PICTORAL PURSE-SNATCHINGS ARE SLACK, DILATORY AND BENEATH THE STATURE AND DIGNITY OF THE PAINTERLY PROFESSION.

SNAP OUT OF IT, DAVID ... YOU'RE BETTER THAN THAT!

SON HISTOIRE ET SES CAUSES

2011-04-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

BACK AT WORK IN HIS RUSTIC, ROOMY, LOS ANGELES STUDIO, MY HOPEFUL ALLY, DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS DETERMINED TO PROVE HIS CRITICS WRONG.

Though the critics were enthralled by my modest offerings

at the Top Tomato show, they were far less captivated by David's overwrought and torpid polyptych. In an otherwise temperate review, Didier Sepharad of La Sonnette Hebdomadaire described Schoffman as a 'visual gasbag" (gascon visuelle). Caustically, he continued with a series of ad hominem characterizations, calling him, among other things a "bloviating Saussurian" (crieur Saussurian). Not to be outdone, Francoise Shalosh, chief cultural critic of L'Image Acoustique, France's leading literary periodical called Shoffman's (sic) work "yammering carrion" (des cadavres parlants) "unfit for public consumption" (impropres à la consommation publique).

All in all David has taken it all in stride, chalking it up to anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide between France and the United States.

Le Mauvais Rêve

2011-04-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

Displaced and disoriented by the incommodious agonies of trans-Atlantic transit, I shuffled, sore and somnolent into a gallery awash with strangers. The April 2nd vernissage at ART/SPACE LA @ Top Tomato was an oddity of the first order.


Eboli, oil on panel, David Schoffman 2011

My capricious colleague David Schoffman enjoyed all the companionable advantages of a welcoming crowd. I, on the other hand, was treated like a miscreant. The three-person exhibition was crocheted into an incoherent burble of argumentative images. While the hagiographic tabernacles from the departed Micah Carpentier vied uneasily with Schoffman's large sepulchral atrocity my subtle and understated works on paper hung on the main wall with a quiet and profound dignity.

Adding to the clumsy inadhesion was a bizarrely beautiful kabuki that arrived unannounced and departed unexplained and left the stunned spectators wondering if David's famous aesthetic indecision is an act of poetry or ineptitude.

DE METEORIS

2011-04-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

Sixteenth century Alto-Adigian artist Ezra Sangiori, a painter whose sublime frescoes grace countless villas and chapels throughout his native Rovereto has always been a favorite of my dear friend David Schoffman.

Putti Leccacazzi, attributed to Ezra Sangiori 1588

Though intellectually ill equipped and undisciplined, Schoffman has recently been entrusted to compile, collect and curate the first ever Sangiori master drawing exhibition. The task is difficult. Sangiori worked during a period of major landslides and throughout the centuries many of the structures that housed his work have suffered severe structural damage. Attribution has proven to be a delicate enterprise with all Renaissance artists of the Trento l'Adice but this is especially true of Sangiori. Schoffman's untrained eye has already stirred a brass clatter of backbiting controversy regarding Sangiori's famous Disegni di Putti, a series of particularly battered works recently discovered in the Vallagarina Geniza.

When I asked David why he got involved in the first place with a task so clearly over his head, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully and recited from memory:

"Qual è quel toro che si slaccia in quella c'ha ricevuto già 'l colpo mortale".

THE CONSOLATIONS OF PAINTING (POORLY)

2011-03-28T00:15:00.000-07:00

My somber and serious friend David Schoffman sits in his studio and reflects upon the history of hardship. Not hardship in the abstract nor hardship as a universal condition. No, Schoffman's reflections are restricted to the local, the proximal and the personal. The history of hardship to my dear friend David is the history of his own undoing and the unraveling hardships he himself has "endured."

A recent book by Lee Cuypt, a distinguished fellow at the McTeague Institute in Cambridge argues that like many creative people, David Schoffman has faced many private and professional crucibles. In his view,what makes Schoffman unusual is his unique and stubborn inflexibility and his "hubristic opacity toward introspection and growth". Cuypt patiently takes the reader through a chronology of David's lengthy exhibition record, from the first one-man show at Verdurin/Bloch in 1978 to his most recent at Alt/Space LA. He finds a disturbing pattern in that when faced with an aesthetic choice, David invariably opts for the least accommodating, the least accessible and as a consequence, the most hermetic. He has alienated his allies and armed his detractors with an encyclopedia of justifiable jibes and jeremiads.

David has skillfully constructed his own isolation and operates in a figurative jail cell awaiting his execution. He lives a fantasy where his contemporaries are cast as charlatans and knaves and he alone righteously upholds and maintains the Western Tradition. Professor Cuypt cleverly calls this the "Boethius Complex" and has written an elegantly argued polemic that will remain the standard text in Schoffman studies for a long time to come.

SIMULACRUM

2011-03-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

"I HAVE BECOME A PROBLEM TO MYSELF."
MY DEAR FRIEND AND MENTOR, THE LATE MICAH CARPENTIER WAS FOND OF CITING THE CONFESSIONS OF AUGUSTINE.

Our Lady of Charity, Santiago de Cuba

David Schoffman's studio, Culver City, California

Beside his great works, Carpentier left little behind. It was as if he had envisioned his tragic, premature death and in preparation, denuded himself of the superfluous. Among the many relics in El Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, the historic basilica nestled in the foothills of Cuba's Sierra Maestra, is a small box containing the few things Micah did not consider impedimenta. Each object is doused with significance and sentimentality, or so claims my colleague David Schoffman.

I saw an exact facsimile in Schoffman's Los Angeles studio and I suspect that David might be running a neat cottage industry in Carpentier curio of questionable provenance.

COITUS INTERRUPTUS

2011-03-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

Hokusai had his One-Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hiroshige had his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, Yahweh had his Decalogue and now, my prolific friend David Schoffman has his Twenty-Eight Rungs of Lust Deferred, a stunning graphic tour de force.

Chaste self-abnegation is a theme that has preoccupied David for many years. His 1998 lecture "Late Renaissance Religious Imagery and the Interrupted Urges of Michelangelo," delivered at l'Università di Eboli's Istituto di Ricerca Arcane and later published in the anthology Abstemious Art & Artists (Sheleg Books, 2001), posits the theory that immaculate self-discipline between 1490 and 1600 was a common and conscious aesthetic posture. Poets and painters, in direct opposition to Aretino's rakish, libertine excesses, proposed a more temperate trope and devoted their art toward an almost Tantric pre-climactic form of fulfillment. Michelangelo's Creation being the prime example of this type of erotic adjournment.

Schoffman's theories are what we call in France, connerie pur and I'm sure, at heart, he knows this. He apparently was up for tenure and felt the need to gild the scholarly lily.

La Pensée Sauvage

2011-03-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

My hapless friend David Schoffman's early attempts at systematic ethnographic research were costly though radiant failures.


Kaitabhuto Figurine - Java

As a young man, Schoffman spent months at a time trekking through unforgiving terrain in far flung countries looking for uncooked, untamed artifacts. Unlike a professionally trained researcher, David left the terra firma with a series of ideés fixes hoping to find confirmation in situ.

Chief among his biases was the assertion that any societal/cultural phenomena encoded in artisanal production has, at root, an instinctive urge for chaos and disruption. This hairbrained theory came from a dyslexic-driven misreading of Marcel Mauss' Essai Sur Le Don.

After fourteen years of sporadic dysentery, vague inflammations, assorted bug-bites and several near-death experiences, David returned to the comforts of cable tv and indoor plumbing without a single original thought but with a trove of wonderful drawings.

I'm told that in the United States, graduate school is an essential step for all ambitious artists. Though this idea is mocked here in France, perhaps David would have been better served by this more conventional rite-of-passage.

ALOOF AND FRAIL

2011-03-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS HAVE BEEN SENT OUT AND I AM PLEASED THAT THE IMAGE CHOSEN TO REPRESENT THE THREE OF US IS ONE OF MY DRAWINGS.

Carpentier of course, has no dog in this dispute but my good friend, collaborator and rival, David Schoffman, baring his irascible teeth has decided to refight the long forgotten Guerre de Clichy.

It was perhaps twenty five years ago in a small gallery on rue Truffaut, not far from l'Église Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles that I first noticed the stain of Schoffman's pestiferous predilection for competition. Making art for David is not a vocation but rather a furious and unrelenting blood sport. Unlike me and I dare say, Micah as well, he doesn't see his work as a sublime calling but more as an untamed cris-d'armes. Jousting with sheep and tilting at windmills David sees adversaries where others see colleagues and fellow-travelers.

We were involved in a group exhibition, similar to the one coming up next month in Los Angeles, and David insisted that the invitation list his name first and include a reproduction of one of his pieces at the exclusion of everyone else. The predictable outrage ensued and the festering scent of acrimonious discord followed the show throughout its duration and well beyond.

I understand that no small degree of excitement and anticipation surround the ALT/SPACE LA show. The pre-publicity has been generous and flattering. The public seems genuinely interested. Only David Schoffman is choked with suspicion and apprehension. Only David drowns in an absinthian dread.

Only David is capable of snatching collapse from within the jaws of luxury and triumph.

JOYCE AND NORA IT'S NOT

2011-02-21T22:31:00.000-08:00

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

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT

2011-02-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

DOES IT SURPRISE ME THAT MY DEAR FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS CIRCULATING ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR OUR UPCOMING EXHIBITION IN LOS ANGELES THAT EXCLUDE BOTH MICAH CARPENTIER AND MYSELF??

In a word ... NO.

David Schoffman is a joyless man. Heir to the inventors of Modernism, Schoffman is incapable of the categorical. Every assertion is twined with its adversary. Argument inhibits every assumption. Dialectic drains his capacity for the rapture of unambiguous conviction. The other-hand is tediously collated to the one-hand.

His brain is constantly in a knot of equivocation, an anagram of disquieting sophistry. It's of little import whether the issue at hand is geopolitics or personal relationships, his addiction to cognitive dissonance drains his ability to experience pure pleasure.

This explains his most glaring failures - his failed friendships, his failed attempts at securing a prestigious academic position, his failure to ascend the rungs of the artistic Nomenklatura. But it also explains why his work is so oddly original.

He agreed to our upcoming group exhibition with great reluctance. He feels his work is diminished by the presence of the work of others. It is not competitiveness - Schoffman is far too aloof to indulge in that kind of pettiness - but rather his strong preference for blundering alone, for rummaging through the archives of disinterested intellectual musings in the privacy of his own coiled and entangled brain.

David ... you are forgiven.

IN SEARCH OF FASCIA HEINE

2011-02-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

It is with no small degree of wavering uncertainty that I have agreed to exhibit, once again, with my odd and uneasy allies, David Schoffman and the late Micah Carpentier.

The last time I got roped into reclaiming this ancient alliance I flew in from Paris for the opening, lost my luggage, caught a nasty syncytial virus, got mugged on Melrose Avenue and was lured into an indecent and vitriolic argument with Schoffman so bitter that we haven't spoken since.

I also fell temporarily in love with the severely beautiful publisher Fascia Heine whose consummate antipathy for David's work I found fabulously stimulating.

SECRETS AND LINES

2011-01-30T00:53:00.000-08:00

Monique Espoirperdu and Jiro Attentat are two of the biggest unknown art collectors active today. This young couple are much better known as the founders and co-directors of Énigme Technique Français, the largest digital archive of discrete continuous range data systems in Europe. The business quarterly Richesse Tavelées refers to them as "the Pelléas and Mélisande of 21st century information marketing." They also own almost 40 pieces by my good-fortuned friend David Schoffman.


Monique Espoirperdu and Jiro Attentat: Double Portrait, David Schoffman 2011

I learned this on a recent visit to their modest villa in Cassis. I was given a tour of their collection by Monique and her extremely knowledgeable assistant Claudine and discovered the double portrait above hung prominently in the airy, light-filled salle à manger.

It is an extremely uncharacteristic work for David and the way they told the story, he needed to be aggressively urged to accept the commission. He worked from life and the right-hand section of Jiro came about fairly easily. The section of the left however, needed over eighty sittings and the process lasted for over a year and a half.

Claudine explained to me over coffee that the whole ordeal was a small cauchemar and that everyone involved was relieved when the picture was finally completed. "It was the stuff of a cheap romance novel," was how Claudine put it, "money, sex, more money, more sex, betrayal, treachery, scandal, drugs and the constant stench of turpentine everywhere!"

I wonder why David never mentioned any of this before.

Danikåa Blest

2011-01-19T19:18:00.000-08:00

A faint metallic taste of failure lingered in the mouth of my good friend David Schoffman for many years. His was a particularly bitter type of heartbreak, the kind that mixes disillusionment with a crushing, amaroidal cynicism. Ten shows in ten years and still not a glimmer of recognition. I should hasten to add that the aforementioned decapod of exhibitions involved ten different dealers, a fact that speaks more of David’s tenaciousness than of the range of his contacts.

Danikåa Blest, Currado Malaspina 1998

From the spring of 1992 to the fateful fall of 2001 Schoffman lived in seven cities within four countries on three continents. While working in Barcelona he had a show in Geneva. While painting in Prague he exhibited in Paris and while living in Paris he showed in New York.

You get the idea.

The nadir of his unfulfillment was reached in Rome. It was there that he met the choreographer cum curator Danikåa Blest.

Best known for Hirtius and Caesar, her nine and a half hour marathon radio play, Blest was a major force in what has come to be known as the “Lazio School,” a loosely configured late twentieth century collective of central Italian poets and playwrights. She commissioned Schoffman to design the sets for her 1998 production of the operetta, Against the Stepmother for Poisoning. When the show was cancelled after only three performances Danikåa secretly sold the sets to recoup her losses.

David’s luck finally changed with the 2002 publication of Dahlia Danton’s best selling memoir The Palette-Knife Cuts Both Ways. In it she described Schoffman, Apelles and Giotto as her three major influences.

The critics soon took notice.

ART HISTORY: THE MUSICAL

2011-01-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

Respected and admired throughout the U.K. David Schoffman's short art history primers have become beloved fixtures on the nation's airwaves. Underappreciated in his native country, the Brits take it as one more piece of irrefutable evidence that its former colony remains awash in narcotic provincialism. "In no other country on earth will you find the canonization of landlords and dog trainers while its artists and scholars remain stranded in an inky sea of obscurity," is how former MP Alban Montquinsberry put it.

You decide

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH

2011-01-08T09:56:00.000-08:00

THE PLANS AND PREPARATIONS FOR MY DEAR FRIEND'S FIRST LOS ANGELES EXHIBITION IN OVER TWO YEARS HAS BEEN A CLOSELY GUARDED SECRET ... UNTIL NOW!

This coming spring, at the venerable gallery ALT/SPACE LA,

home to some of Southern California's most idiosyncratic artists and performers, David will stage what will undoubtedly be seen as his most unusual spectacle to date.

BELIEF AND THE WHIMS OF EXISTENCE

2011-01-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

THE DEBATE THAT RAGES BETWEEN THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DEVOUT HAS SEEPED INTO THE ARTWOLD

I am comforted that my rhetorically gifted compatriot David Schoffman was invited as well to participate in this unusual forum. This coming March, at East London's Church of Saint Timinus the Deliverer between Bethnal Green and Shoreditch a symposium will be held to settle once and for all whether God exists.

The decision to feature three artists rather than the typical cast of theologians, philosophers, scientists and academics is an interesting one whose genesis lies in a casual remark tossed off at an informal reception at the Canadian embassy in Berne. Christian Harpaz, chargé d'affaires of the Swiss department of counter-terrorism, provoked by an off-color joke about an imam, a silent monk and a transvestite, lamented the poverty of imagination and lack of humor among atheists and agnostics.

"Things are more lively when artists altercate," offered the renown Catholic mime, Blathe Arket, "get a bunch of creative types in a lecture hall and then see what happens."

See what happens indeed!

CALLING ALL CARS!!

2010-12-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-15T21:46:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

"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?

2010-11-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-11-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-04T12:03:00.000-07:00


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

2010-09-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-08T23:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-03T11:21:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-18T09:09:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-08T09:05:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-31T22:49:00.001-08:00

"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.

2010-01-26T16:36:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-01-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-12-11T05:41:00.001-08:00

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.

2009-11-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-09-03T11:26:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-08-14T00:09:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-30T10:05:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-08T08:46:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-30T22:45:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-28T10:10:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-18T08:54:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-28T23:22:00.001-07:00

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.”

2009-04-17T10:14:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-31T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-04T12:25:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-20T10:50:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-02T09:33:00.001-08:00

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.