Friday, December 03, 2010

UNEARNED LENIENCY


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


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

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

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

Sunday, November 21, 2010

SCHOFFMAN STOPPED IN EBOLI


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

I Left My Nudes in Cala Gonone. Date unknown

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

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

On the back of each drawing he wrote the following instructions in six different languages:
"IF FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO 'POSTAMT KASTEN NO. 31299,  6304 ZUG'"

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

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

   

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

ENCOMIUM TO A GENTLE SWINDLER


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

Dimitri Kholashpah 1947 - 2010

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

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

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

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

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



Friday, November 05, 2010

CHATTER OR SLANDER?

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


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


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


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


I hope they're happy.

Monday, November 01, 2010

THE BELL CHIMES TOO LATE FOR TEARS


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


Dahlia Danton and David Schoffman, Svoge, Bulgaria 2010

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

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

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

I have my doubts.
 

Friday, October 29, 2010

BAILANDO CON LOS ARTISTAS


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

Hippolyte doing the cha-cha at the Flamingo Room, 2010
Comically, my dear friend's great pleasure is never diminished by his hopeless ineptitude. No matter what form his tireless gamboling takes, the result is invariably oafish, knock kneed, abject failure. Whether it's a waltz, a rumba, a quickstep or a paso doble, it's as if sandbags were tied to a pair of swollen ankles.

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


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





 

Friday, October 22, 2010

FROM THE COLLECTION OF GENERAL TSO

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

Micah Carpentier, Caja de Arroz 1975




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



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

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

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

Sunday, October 17, 2010

THE DULL DOUGH SOURS


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

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

But what sane man could blame him?

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

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

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


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


Monday, October 11, 2010

The Torturer's Horse




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

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

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

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Micah Carpentier and unknown, 1970
 
 The presumption that David Schoffman is the heir apparent to Micah Carpentier's artistic legacy carries an interesting burden. Though unquestioningly vital to any full understanding of the Latin American avant-garde, Carpentier's virile hallucinations have come under serious question of late, a question that sheds light on Schoffman's much ballyhooed "ethic".
Using the kind of precision infra-red scanners typically used to locate grenade launchers within urban battlefields, Professor Jai Tot Olivares of Universidad Peruana de los Hechos has recently uncovered glaring stylistic inconsistencies within Carpentier's drawings from the early 70's. His research found that when Carpentier was a visiting artist at the Instituto de Arte de Sevilla he collected the sketches of his students and with barbarous audacity drew directly over them, claiming them as his own!

It is difficult to discern the ripened hand of the master from the callow artlessness of the acolyte and that is precisely what gives this work so much charm. He exhibited these "collaborative" works on paper at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneos, Vizcaya in 1974 and Moisés Montanoro, principal art critic of the well-regarded weekly publication, Arte Boletín described it as "the cryptic ashes of lust and the frayed threads of a long preserved virginity".
Several years ago, shortly before his famous exhibit at Philippe Léchage I saw Schoffman rummage through the trash behind the  École des Beaux-Arts. I thought nothing of it, other than it being more evidence of David's bizarre habits as a tourist. With Olivares' new findings, I now see both Schoffman's and Carpentier's work with much greater skepticism.

Monday, October 04, 2010

THE REBIRTH OF MICAH CARPENTIER

Micah Carpentier in his Havana studio, 1969



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

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


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

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

Could it be a rare moment of Southern Californian aesthetic discernment? In a place and a time where anything goes, has Hollywood actually answered to its better angels? Or is Schoffman saving the most outrageous for last?
Micah Carpentier, Havana 1969







Thursday, September 23, 2010

LA VITA NUOVA

 

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

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

Quelle bêtise!!

The Body Is His Book #54

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

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

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

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


Friday, September 17, 2010

FOUR-HUNDRED DRAWINGS

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

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

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


Thursday, September 02, 2010

VACATION

August 2010, on the terrace of دراسات الكتاب المقدس
In his decrepit Los Angeles neighborhood, a perennially gray place of abandoned storefronts, vacant lots, toothless whores and teenage runaways, my dear friend David Schoffman works tirelessly, oblivious to the surrounding blight. In an odd way, he thrives on decay and is attracted to trash like others are drawn to spectacular landscapes and dramatic sunsets.

With one exception.

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

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

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

THE ARCHIPELAGOES OF ART


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


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


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


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


Some wouldn't.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

REASON IS NOT ALWAYS CONTEMPTIBLE

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


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

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

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

I dare you to read it!



Thursday, June 24, 2010

CONTROVERSIAL SCHOLARSHIP

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

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

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



Wednesday, June 09, 2010

GONE FISHING - DON'T BE ALARMED

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

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

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

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

He'll be back.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

MISREAD & MISUNDERSTOOD (EVEN BY HIMSELF)

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

Saturday, May 08, 2010

THE DRAWINGS OF MICAH CARPENTIER



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


 

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

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

Thursday, April 22, 2010

THE EMPYREAN DEBATE


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

Thursday, April 08, 2010

CONTRITION



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

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

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

Monday, March 22, 2010

UNRULY OBSESSION WITH MEANINGLESS DETAIL



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

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






Monday, March 08, 2010

ENCOMIUM FOR A FORGOTTEN MASTER


 
 El Fresco que se Arremolina, Micah Carpentier 1971
On a recent trip to Cuba, David Schoffman and I paid a courtesy call to Wilgefortis Carpentier, widow of the late painter Micah Carpentier.  Over a delicious lunch of churrasco estilo cubano and fufu de plátano Wilgy shared loving reminiscences of her dear departed soul-mate. Laying around her modest apartment on Calle Mercaderes are some of Carpentiers finest paper bags. Señora Carpentier maintains what little remains in Cuba of her husband's work with great devotion and care.

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

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

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

CLOAKED IN CIRCUMSTANCE



 


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

In short, he is an eccentric.

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

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

Thursday, February 18, 2010


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.

Monday, February 08, 2010

THE DUSTING OF EARLY ACCLAIM



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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, January 31, 2010

PREPARATORY SKETCH




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

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

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

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



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


Tuesday, January 26, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010


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.



Friday, December 11, 2009



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.

Monday, November 02, 2009

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.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

THE BELLS AND DUST OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT




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?

Friday, August 14, 2009


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.


Sunday, July 19, 2009

PERISHED BY HIS PRIDE



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.

Monday, July 13, 2009

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!