GEIST SHMEIST

Danton, Screaming Past the Furies, 2006

It is the unique misfortune of David Schoffman, that despite a thriving career as a painter, a monstrously large gambling debt - accrued through an ill advised addiction to martesh, a game of chance involving toothpicks and trigonometry – requires him to carry a near full teaching load. Though he claims to be indifferent to his students’ successes, throughout the years, many of them have gone on to become well known, accomplished artists.

None is more accomplished and well known than Dahlia Danton.

Danton’s large-scale installations have been exhibited in London, Paris, Sao Paolo and New York and have received lavish if not overly extravagant praise. At last fall’s Zagreb International Art Fair, Dahlia’s guitar string sculptures broke the sales record previously set in 2006 by René Boulet. When she showed her paintings at DCA in Los Angeles earlier this year, the entire exhibition was purchased before the opening by the screenwriter Pops LeChess.

I happened to have been in L. A. during the Danton exhibition, peddling my own screenplay, a musical interpretation of the Marquis de Sade’s Le Cure de Prato. (I’m currently contracted to do a second draft for MazeTuck Films). I found Dahlia’s paintings fascinating in their bleak and sovereign subservience to good taste. Adamant in her ambivalence to history, she sees virtue where others see a stubborn lack of originality. The credulity of the market is a popular theme in certain academic circles within the United States. Danton is expert in lyrically conveying this vacuum without recourse to irony or dialectic.

Schoffman can take pride in producing such gifted students, capable of capturing so elegantly the spirit of the age.

FAITH BASED INITIATIVE

His rigorous upbringing within the Apostolic Church of the Divine Rent has given David Schoffman a unique window into interfaith dialogue. One of three major denominations of northern Alberta, the tenets of the Divine Rent are firmly rooted within the mainstream charismatic, eschatological persuasions.

It was for this reason that David was chosen to preside over the First Annual Ecumenical Artist Convention, which was held in Las Vegas in early June. It was truly an historic event with participants from all artistic disciplines, representing every confession, from every region in the world.

There were Sufi sculptors from Turkistan, Haredi filmmakers from Boro Park, Jihadist cartoonists from Khartoum, Opus Dei muralists from Rome, evangelical lithographers from Georgia, Shinto painters from Osaka, animist enamellers from Bangkok, glassblowing Gnostics from Gondar Provence, silk-screening Sikhs from Kuala Lumpur, batiking Ba’hai from Haifa, Catholic ceramicists from Belfast – you name it, they were there.

It was rather amazing to what degree the participants saw eye to eye on core issues. For one thing, they were united in believing that God was great. Some were sure He was all knowing, others thought He might have a few blind spots but they all agreed that He was pretty terrific.

Being artists, they tended toward more liberal renderings of their respective doctrines. For example, though they disapproved of the homosexual lifestyle, they were strongly in favor of gay marriage as long as it was a union between a man and a woman.

David conducted the symposia with his usual aplomb and dazzled the crowd with some virtuosic glossolalia. Beginning with the coherent locution, “Alaska, I’ll ask her, Al-Aqsa,” he went on a searing stream of garbled tommyrot for a full twenty-five minutes. Even the Brooklyn black-hats were impressed.

The conference ended with a bagel and lox brunch and a fabulous performance by Uri Geller.

BABBA KAMMA, BABY

Together with Augustine’s City of God and Lucan’s Medea, the Babylonian Talmud has pride of place on David Schoffman’s nightstand. So taken by its legalistic whimsy, its colorful anecdotes and the musicality of its prose, that David spent an entire year of his graduate study on a Fulbright in Arbil studying Aramaic.

It was a labor of love when the publishing house of Gilgul & Neshamot invited David to design the cover of their soon to be released, 2009 edition of this classic sixth century work. (The fully annotated, twenty-nine volume, CD audiobook will be narrated by Matisyahu and Seymour “Toots” Marley).

I would urge my readers to pre-order a copy since it will be printed in limited edition and will surely become a collector’s item in years to come.

THE THRESHOLD DOWN

The temporary unraveling of David Schoffman’s career was due to events that are fairly typical in the rutty world of international art trading. The fact that he has rebounded with such alacrity and grace is due in no small measure to his rock-ribbed fortitude and his ruthless, daring cunning.

Before his eagerly awaited early death in 1988, art dealer Andreas Holbach was known as “the twelve-tongued serpent of the studio.” In his tireless pursuit of the new, Holbach would gallivant around the globe looking for the new cash cow.

In the mid-eighties, the young, bootless hooligan, David Schoffman, darling of the princes of taste and the denizens of le beau monde, was seen as that bountiful bovine. To his peers, his blustering oversized encaustic icons were shallow exercises in cloying vaingloriousness. To Holbach and his ilk they were the polished gems of early genius.

David and Andreas became the twin halves of an art-dealing juggernaut … until the day when they were not.

A drug habit and a drowsy market prompted Holbach to unsaddle a boatload of Schoffmans on the cheap and in a hurry. You don’t have to be John Maynard Keynes to figure out what happened next. With his devalued work flooding an already bloated bazaar, the paintings of David Schoffman began to be judged on their merits and were found severely wanting.

It wasn’t until 1999 that David surfaced from his self-imposed exile with the now legendary exhibition, Lenox Avenue Paintings. Both the critics and his colleagues were prepared to tear out his liver but instead were forced to acknowledge, in the words of Karl Colovito, “that a fresh wind had awakened a subtle poignancy in the former blow-hard.”

The fact that David stole most of his “new” ideas from me was not noted at the time.

“Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed”
Byron

On a recent trip to North Africa, David Schoffman found himself severely dehydrated and dangerously low on gasoline near the small village of Ksar Kibbeh. Known for its ancient granaries and its warm, hospitable inhabitants, it was the perfect place to avert a catastrophe.

Sipping mint tea and nibbling on spiced chard at the local café, David made the fortunate acquaintance of the famous ethnomusicologist, Na’im Bouteille, who happened to be in town attending a wedding of one of his nephews.

It was from Bouteille that David first learned of the Vavzayin.

Uncommonly secretive even within the clandestinely hermetic world of the sub rosa, the Vavzayin is a loosely federated faction of animistic nomads whose coded beliefs are articulated exclusively in painting. Their densely detailed cosmology is so impenetrable that scholars and anthropologists alike have quietly agreed to ignore them.

Much to his disgrace, Schoffman lifted a small astrological icon off the wall of a desert outhouse and smuggled it out of the country. It now hangs ignominiously in his kitchen.

NOBLESSE

The Comtesse de Charbot, one of the most discerning collectors of David Schoffman’s work, died last week in her country estate in Saint-Quirin. Known equally for her erudition and her caprice, the Comtesse, or “Tessileh” as she was known by her intimates, was a fixture among the Art Fair cognoscenti. Catholic in her tastes, her collection includes significant works by Gounod, Walker, Prince, Webern, Schapiro and Schoffman.

Generous to a fault, Tessilah was a reservoir of good will to scholars and curators alike. Last year’s Assemblage/Gounod exhibition in Bern was made up almost entirely of works from the de Charbot estate. Delmont Livni’s definitive monograph on Webern’s works on paper owes much of its scholarship to its access to the de Charbot Library and Archive in Levallois.

I could go on and on describing Tessileh beneficence, she was a Maecenas and a Sarasvati all rolled into one.

I believe, however, that her legacy will be her legendary support for Schoffman. She began buying his work in the 70’s when David was an obscure miniaturist, waiting tables at the Arpege and showing his work in small group shows in alternative galleries around Paris. She was among the first collectors to recognize his nascent genius as well as his infamous shortcomings. One might say that she scolded him into becoming an important artist.

Though throughout her long life she always held me and my work in contempt – she once described my monotypes as “saleté de gouttière” – I will always remember her with great affection and respect.

THE PAINS OF REDIRECTION

The Margozotti twins played a vital role in David Schoffman’s decision to drop out of divinity school and devote his full energy toward becoming a painter. Nothing, I think, is more incompatible with the vow of chastity than the arborescent glamour of Doina and Anneli Margozotti … but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Doina, the more genial of the two, could flog a full throat of bacchanalian rage even in the most peevish of curmudgeons. Her bearing was that of a double-jointed reptilian Circe, a seductress, a blight to temperance and a mocker of moderation. To know Doina was to be helplessly crushed by the anvil of infatuation.

Anneli, who dressed mostly in rubber, had a keen sense for the aesthetics of pain. She was all claws and teeth and sweat and smell and approached deviance with the piety of an imam.

Schoffman, whose will was as soft as bread was summarily flattened into an anemic pulp. His simplicity was red meat for the twins and what little chance he had to defend himself against their charms was quickly annihilated as soon as they took off their clothes.

The Margozotti twins were the first art models David encountered when on a whim and a dare, he enrolled in his first figure drawing class at New York’s Art Students League. It wasn’t long till God took a powder and David was renting a dimly lit basement studio on Elizabeth Street.

Within a few years, he had his first one-man show and his hundredth broken heart.

DIPLOMACY

The Gujerati mural, David Schoffman’s immense 1989 fresco painted on the vaulted ceiling of Qatar’s luxurious Abbasid Hotel remains one of the most popular cultural attractions of the Middle East. Brightly hued fabric airlessly held aloft in whispers of subtle brushwork fill the hotel’s lobby with honeyed luminescence. The work is a veritable alphabet of painterly effects and viewers are consistently stunned by the enormous work’s improbable intimacy.

Schoffman was awarded the commission by default after the original artist, Alexei Rouaud was tragically killed in a freak accident involving a sled and a coping saw.

Unaccustomed to working on such a large scale, David developed a unique process by which he could intermittently view the painting from a suitable distance by swinging from the scaffolding on hemp cable riggings. This apparently amused his hosts to no end and they took to calling him Numa, the name of Tarzan’s pet lion.

The hotel bar, Les Eyzie, is a favorite watering hole for Al Jazeera journalists and David’s work has become much beloved among them. Sensing an opportunity, the State Department has asked David to spearhead Operation Desert Draftsman, a soft-power ploy involving a series of life drawing workshops to take place in high schools across the Arab world.

This summer he will be studying Jebli at the Pollard Language Institute in Langley Virginia.

VENTRILOQUIST AT LARGE

The Ethics of Desire

David Schoffman’s work is seen by many as a lambent explication of post-stucturalist theory. The Ethics of Desire, was seen as Schoffman’s visual tone poem, a fingered dance of painterly destabilization which ruptured the notion of self, replacing it with new, non-objective signifiers.

A paper by Gramsci Professor Newton Suzuki of Bryn Mawr referred to The Ethics of Desire as the seminal “object lesson of value-laden, binary opposition”.
He went on to describe Schoffman’s “cunning appropriation of Western ‘moments’, misaligned with the vernacular of the East, creating fictive Euclidian spaces few contemporary artists seem intellectually capable of.”

Cloistered as I am in my Rue Gabriel Lamé studio, a place cluttered with books and periodicals, I read these descriptions of my good friend’s work and only one word comes to mind:

"Connerie!"

BLACKENED IN OBSCURITY

Unkempt, with parched wrinkled skin the color of rust, David Schoffman shows the wear of long nights in the studio. It has been his habit for many years to work as others rest, and sleep, only briefly, and only in the light of day.

He owns neither telephone nor computer, and those with whom he is in contact understand that he reluctantly welcomes visitors on Sundays only.

He prefers the company of writers and is particularly close to Janco Rasa, author of Sesso the Fool and Shapeshifters.

Once, after a long period of fallow inactivity, David tried to reverse his circadian meter, but failed miserably. The California sun’s brilliant luminescence and the unabating urban din confused him. It was the closest David ever came to madness.

Few have seen his new work, but countless rumors are circulating. Some have openly speculated that there is no work to be seen, that David hasn’t lifted a paintbrush in years and that his eccentric schedule is but a rueful dodge. Others think he is writing a memoir or drawing detailed maps of his native Canada.

In an interview last year in Hmm, David spoke elliptically about plans for an illuminated edition of Paradise Lost.

I think he is just flat out of ideas.

TROUPE DE CINQ

The predominant theme behind the School of Pestilence’s flurry of manifestoes in the 1980’s was the general rebuttal of post-structuralist meta-linguistics or what Stanwyre simply called “Gebisse.” At the time, Paris was a lexical Valhalla, a hotbed of hypotheses, a theorist’s shanga-la. Together with David Schoffman, Micah Carpentier, Darius Frommel and Yvette Chabanais we antically argued that the only enduring value worth fighting for was sensuality.

In our shabby, tin-roofed Théâtre du Risible on rue Joseph Liouville, we staged weekly roundtables consisting primarily of drinking cheap Alsatian wine and arguing loudly, deep into the night, until the concierge next door called the police.

We weren’t taken very seriously until the Sans Voix Immobile exhibition where Schoffman first showed his now famous Rattling Traffic paintings. The critics were generally lukewarm but Nannette Fabriquant, at the time the doyenne of French art journalism, raved in a two-page review in Centaur Gaullist, calling Schoffman “le prochaine sauvage de notre epoch.”

Fabriquant was soon appointed French ambassador to Burkina Fasso, Schoffman moved to Tel Aviv, the Théâtre du Risible was condemned as a “threat to public hygiene” and the School of Pestilence disbanded in typical, artistic acrimony.

LINOLEUM

Kimberly Roberts of the New York Critical Review called David Schoffman’s new sculptures “playful assaults on Cartesian uncertainties.” Shabu Caldéron, writing in Splatt described the work as “artifacts from the rosy smoke physics of practical chaos.” Dobrynyn used just one word: “combustible!”

Few knew that Schoffman worked in three dimensions, but for many years, he has been secretly laboring on the series of pieces now on view at Teresa Odena Modern.

The work most discussed and debated in the salons and saloons of New York has the cumbersome title: “The Dagger of Abraham Refuses To Think.” It is a life-size facsimile of a badly bruised Toyota Camry, constructed entirely from wood flour, burlap and linseed oil. Dangling from the crippled rearview mirror is a miniature Mount Moriah that inexplicably sways as if from a breeze. The license plate reads Soren 1843 and on the backseat, scattered like confetti are Ike Turner album covers. A Post-it on the pretzeled steering wheel has the phrase “the child strikes in combat” written four times.

Some called the work unnecessarily obscure. Others insist that it is clumsily overdetermind. The vast consensus however is that the exhibition is one of the most challenging of the season.

It is rumored that the reclusive Russian collector, Vlad Dracolya purchased almost every piece in the show.

CALYPSO

The lamentable year teaching life drawing at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków was a year David Schoffman would prefer to forget. The rivalries among the singularly ungifted faculty were mind numbing in their petty insignificance. The students were incorrigibly lazy, preferring to spend their afternoons drinking Wisniak and eating bigos. The models were torpid and fat.

Like all the decisions in his life, both bad and good, this one was motivated by a woman. Malgorzata Tuwim was by all accounts, an enchantress without peer. She was like a Celtic queen with her green-hazel eyes and bright copper hair. David referred to her as his Thracian Nereid.

She was also as toxic as bromine.

I think David did something like two thousand drawings of her. Before moving back to New York, he buried them in a shallow ditch on the outskirts of Opatów behind the now defunct saddle factory.

These drawings have recently come to light and after six months of restoration, fifty-five of them are being exhibited at Knoblauchgalerie in Berlin.

Malgo was at the opening and she remains as beautiful as ever.

THE AROMA OF MERCY

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Peder Bayer, Norway’s most pessimistic poet (a designation coveted by many talented competitors). He goes on to write in his famous essay “On Second Thought” that “intimacy leads to betrayal more reliably than remedy leads to cure. Like the vibratory night call of the wood thrush whose song beckons as it laments, we sigh through life’s tenuous filaments, craving fixity within the groves of impermanence.”

Bayer’s words come to mind as I meditate upon the growing enmity between David Schoffman and myself. The mounting distaste for Schoffman’s fickle conceits has affected my wellbeing, making me vulnerable to odd agonies of both of body and mind. Sadly, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him, even as an adversary would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

If I think about this dispassionately, which of course I cannot, I am resolved to Hobbes’ observation that "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe." Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” identified certain hostile impulses as stemming from “the narcissism of minor differences” and if anything, Currado and I are cousins of the same stained cloth.

I am guilty.

THE WILTING OF THE GREY WOLF

David Schoffman insists that the two or three unsold drawings from Live Draw are emblems of virtue. He maintains that had his work lost its edge, he would have sold every last scrap. The fact that he failed to delight everyone equally refutes my contention that he has migrated from the avant-garde to a populist, decorative mode of expressive denial.

He deludes himself.

I was told by a friend who was in attendance at Saturday night’s bacchanal that Schoffman’s work flew off his pad like ravens and that collectors vied for position with ham-fisted greed and ungainly enthusiasm. This friend, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told me that David concealed several drawings, looking toward DCA Fine Art’s follow-up exhibition, “Live Draw Detritus” where “unsold” works from Live Draw would be displayed.

How cunning my friend has become! This former lion of perilous artistic experimentation has calcified into a leathery reminiscence of hard-earned achievement. He is now content to be the pharisaical apologist for tinsel and frippery.

Oh David …. What lovely drawings … and so inexpensive!

Les Ficelles Silencieuses de Dessins

Something is most assuredly amiss.

For twenty-two years I have greeted each new day with a pain au chocolate, hot milk and the early edition of Le Vers L’Avant, the Midi’s finest newspaper. I rely on its inky pages for a mature, dispassionate rendering of the world’s events. Free of idle speculation, puerile gossip, tendentiousness and hype, L’Avant is an artful relic of a non-existent past.

I was therefore irritably confounded when today’s Art and Culture section led with the following headline: “The Sorcery Of Chalk: David Schoffman Stuns California Crowd With The Silent Strings Of Drawing.”

What a half-lunged, nimble-tongued burlesque! Empty of analysis, vacant of scrutiny, Schoffman could not have received better press had he paid for it! Sending a journalist to DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica to cover the farcical “Live Draw” was bad enough. The toadying servility of the reporting, comparing Schoffman to the likes of Dominique Pécuchet and Veronique Bouvard, two of the Republic’s finest living artists, was a rancid exercise in American style public relations.

I have cancelled my subscription.

LIVE DRAW
EIGHT ARTISTS - THREE MODELS - LOTS OF PAPER

I detect a weakening in David Schoffman’s convictions. His normally strident tones have turned dulcet and accommodating. He seems battle weary and tentative. There is neither thrill nor frenzy in his carriage and those of us who have grown accustomed to his ardent theatricality are now left with only the gaunt niceties of respectable politesse.

Could this signal the curfew of his creativity or merely the solemnity that comes with age. His former self was a shapeless ecstasy, an intellect inflamed, a noisy chorus of urgent enthusiasms. Now he is a vacant precinct of predictability and habit. Where he once sought provocation, he now strives toward effortless geniality.

Perhaps this explains his flirtation with “public drawing”. Maybe Live Draw signals the tug of an inevitable decay, a muffled retreat into the featherbed of pleasing picture making. It could be that the false calm of insouciant color and nimble line are precisely the ideals toward which Schoffman currently leans.

The public will have a chance to evaluate all this on Saturday night, May 24th at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica.

I’m grateful that I can’t attend.

LIVE DRAW

What shapeless buffoonery! What ill-timed chicanery! Has age yielded no wisdom? Has profit fouled all perspicacity? Has throbbing Mammon thrusted the former vicar of the avant-garde into the cozy innocence of FIGURE DRAWING!!!

David Schoffman is about to break artistic wind, betraying the finely crafted monuments of his illustrious career, by participating in what is mockingly called “Live Draw.” When I read about this carnival of paltry exhibitionism in the otherwise respectable periodical Art Ltd, I was stunned into a state of pagan speechlessness. The former valor of my dear friend David has now been crushed by the common cause of gain.

In our early days together, David and I forswore the antiquated exercise of life drawing as a relic. For thirty years we honored our vow to pursue the new and relinquish the grizzled clichés of the Academy.

And now this!!

If only for their rarity, I would love to purchase one of his drawings. Though the camel-dunged products of his perfidious treachery will undoubtedly be lovely, (David was always a gifted draftsperson), their real value will be as documents of decay and artistic discourtesy.

THE KISS OF THE MARKETPLACE

David Schoffman‘s career reflects the immense disorder of his peculiarly peripatetic ambitions. He tries to find merit in everything equally. He wanders like a tramp from exhibit to exhibit, packing his résumé with a trail of incompatibles.

In 2008 alone he has shown his lucid watercolors at Camillo Galeani’s Galleria Cavallo Puzzolente, his Gunwale lithographs at Kunstsheide Berlin and his unfinished series of encaustic medallions at the Nijmegen Art Fair.

I admit that commercially his kettle continues to boil but he is reaching boat-bottom in ideas and execution.

And now, in Santa Monica, California, he is about to participate in the madman’s mission of drawing in front of a gallery full of spectators. On Saturday evening, May 24, David will be featured in DCA Fine Art’s rekindling of its popular Live Draw exhibition. Three fabulously naked models will apparently gambol about the gallery while a group of eager artists attempt to render them without distraction. Schoffman’s impromptu works typically sell (at absurdly low prices) while he’s in the midst of making them.

It’s all terrifically crass, though I would advise coming early.

CLANKING TOWARD IMMORTALITY

Humble as brine and bashful to a fault, David Schoffman dodges the sinless bouquets of acclaim with dignity and grace. The turbulent spank of celebrity is something he eschews. Disarmingly chaste in matters of self-promotion, he prefers to remain unseen and have the radiance of his work speak for itself.

I was therefore stupefied to find my good friend David splayed shirtless on the cover Doucement magazine, the mint of Parisian middlebrow journalism. Sandwiched between an incurious puff piece about Jacques Dutronc and an over-exposed photo essay on Palestinian medical students in Havana was a five-page interview with Schoffman. In it I learned that he climbs a rope ladder for exercise, that he hates cabbage and that as a child he tried to teach himself Greek by memorizing the folk songs of Vasilis Karras.

Perhaps in an effort to burnish his image, David has decided to venture into the cloudy realm of bourgeois respectability. Maybe he is trying to correct the prevailing image people have of him as the fastidious roué, charmed equally by invidious caprice and naked intelligence. Maybe he feels the need to dispel the rumors of his encroaching madness. Maybe he is dissatisfied that the central hymn of his legacy is a cadaverous fable of unrequited appetites.

Or maybe he is in a waking dream, rattling the cage out of boredom.