Monday, October 20, 2008

THE CRISIS AND THE FUTURE OF ABSTRACT PAINTING




In a small hotel overlooking the picturesque beaches of Porto Corsini, a small group of painters, poets and scholars held what has been described as the liveliest and most important conference on abstract painting in fifty years. Dennis Carioca, Dahlia Danton, Fritz Mahon and Soutelle D’Auberville were among the luminaries participating in the event.

Among the papers submitted were, “Malevich: Cups and Saucers,” “Stella!!” and “Flatness and Beyond.” It was the latter that created the most excitement. Few subjects stir the partisan passions of painters more than the issue of space.

Dahlia Danton, in her dual role as advocate and surrogate, shocked the assembled luminaries with the presentation of David Schoffman’s uproarious video which is posted above.

The remainder of the conference dealt exclusively with the alleged limitations of the shallow.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

THE BODY IS HIS BOOK



David Schoffman labors over his paintings with a prolonged and maddening patience. It literally takes him years to complete a small work. Finnish filmmaker, Risto Arwidsson documented the progress of a piece for the duration of three full years. He recently distributed this video which includes Bobby Layton's strange song "Knights of Pain."

Thursday, September 25, 2008


MICAH CARPENTIER AND THE SONG OF DEGREES



I wept when I saw this short, lovely tribute to my dear friend, the legendary artist, Micah Carpentier

Saturday, September 20, 2008


DYSLEXIA



The 1992 Micah Carpentier exhibition at the historic Grand Theater in central Havana was one of those shapeless events that inadvertently spin fortune’s wheel toward adversity. Carpentier filled the theatre’s vaulted antechamber with over seven-hundred of his hand-drawn bags, calling the show The Song of Degrees, invoking William Blake.

It was a time of artistic repression in Cuba’s capital and the work was greeted with bouquets of vitriolic scorn. “Formalist self-indulgence”, sniveled El Habanero’s Mariano Bayo, himself a formidable though overly competitive painter. Carlida Piñera, the bleating apologist of socialist kitsch called the show “… a salty cup of bourgeois pessimism.” Even the Minister of Agrarian Well-Being, Mike Guillén weighed in, saying the work “carried the fetid stench of northern winds’, a common refrain for anything remotely evoking the European pictorial tradition.

Carpentier was crushed.

The original poster advertising the exhibition was recently sold in New York’s Diomeda Gallery for an undisclosed five-figure sum. The famously misspelled “November” was the consequence of having the unschooled David Schoffman scrawl out the text.

Monday, September 15, 2008

GRACE




Lizhi Jin, Paying Men to Talk Peace, 2008


Lizhi Jin's monumental paintings are creating a Cretan maze of hyperbole in the French press. Many critics have noted the zigzag crackle of his liquid lines suspiciously resemble those of David Schoffman.

I called David the other day and asked for his reaction.

"I could sound like a drooling, drifting, whitehaired mole rat and say that the guy is a silverheeled thief ... but I won't. Jin is a legitimate artist who can pack all of his ideas into two small suitcases. He's likeable and plays a wicked game of table tennis but a Sardanapalus he ain't."

I thought that was generous, considering the circumstances.

Schoffman is a classy bloke.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

I WHIMPER THE BODY ECLECTIC


Lizhi Jin, Peasants Wrestling and at Rest, 2008


Lizhi Ji, the young, celebrated painter from Tianjin was recently in Paris attending the opening of La Nouvelle Dialectique Chinoise, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at Gallerie Claude Beaudoin. I’ve known Ji for the past few years, ever since I started performing at the biennial Gu Gung Arts Festival in Beijing. I’ve always admired his work.

His new series of monumental paintings (the largest measures 5 x 6 metres) combining encaustic, tar and white chalk are truly dazzling. Though they share a suspicious affinity to David Schoffman’s Annunciation pieces, both artists claim complete ignorance of each other's work.

Dr. Sonya Hesse, Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory at UNLV and author of the definitive Lizhi Ji and the Captive Mind (Dobrus Press, 2007), insists that while Schoffman shares many of the new Chinese artistic sensibilities, he does so merely to capitalize on its recent commercial currency. Ji’s biting depictions of political displacement are authentically rooted in his family history during the Cultural Revolution, while Schoffman is merely rehashing tired expressionistic idioms and outdated formalism.

Thursday, September 04, 2008





Annunciation 112, 1998


David Schoffman and I have many mutual friends and a few shared enemies. Our flames both burn without wood, our passions can be devouring. Captive to the enchantments of Lita Abruzzi, we both obstinately claimed her as an abiding afflatus.

In 1998, when Lita was working as a contortionist with the Cirque Roman à Clef in Paris, I would meet her after every performance. I think we sampled every bar à vin in the city. Late one night over smoked duck and a bottle of Château Guiot Costière de Nîmes rosé at Willy’s in the 1er arrondissement, I was so bewitched by the sorcery of her gentle mouth that I stole her spoon and kept it as an amulet to this day.

Not to be outdone, Schoffman appropriated my muse for his infamous Annunciation drawings. That same year David, in a frenzy of pious sacrilege, completed 260 small works that were described at the time by Liberation critic Anselme Bellegarrigue as “the untongued supplications of monastic pain.”

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

THE GOOD MOUTH SMILES



TRENCH CONFESSIONS IV, 1998


Arteries of her granite will were dried and drained the day Dahlia Danton entered my class at the Abruzzo Art Institute in the summer of ’84. For her it was a junior year abroad. For me it was a few months in Sulmona, doing research on Ovid and teaching a course in egg tempera.

I punished her with work and wit and made her treat her talent with greater leniency. I told her to look up my good friend David Schoffman upon her return to Los Angeles and to continue her apprenticeship under someone even nastier than myself.

I did not tell her to fall in love. That she did on her own.

The Danton retrospective, currently up at the Kunstmuseum in Stassen, shows a shameless debt to Schoffman’s 1979 Battered Books paintings, a debt made more obvious by the title of the work featured above.

Love prompts David to turn a blind eye toward the lack of anxiety Dahlia finds in his influence. Or has he been weakened by her censure?

Monday, August 25, 2008

PAPER TIGER



There is a solemn, incorruptible naïveté that belies David Schoffman’s reputation as a knife-grinding harbinger of artistic indecency. Universally recognized as a coarsened, embittered intellectual, to his friends, David is closer to what Dreiser called “a waif amid forces.” His heart is a trickle of pain that is softly expressed in his voluminous correspondences.

In a letter that I received just a few days ago, David wrote:

Emerging late one night from a darkened tavern in downtown Los Angeles, I glanced at the hidden peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains and saw an apparition of Saint Matthew the Evangelist cloaked in his publican robes. I saw a basin of tears shimmering like blue sapphires and the brilliant tail of slow moving rain clouds slithering through the tree line like a winged serpent. I was touched to tears but could not cry.

I drew a picture instead.


Though his prose is typically an arpeggio of near nonsense, the sentiment is authentic, pathetic and sweet.

Schoffman’s sensitive soul is unfit for these overly muscular times.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

VACANCE


The month of August, as my readers all know, is the month that my countrymen retreat to the south and idle away under a sun that favors France.

I too am on vacation and have little inclination to be bogged with blogging or even painting for that matter.

My dear, overworked, North American friends: I will leave you with a part of David Schoffman's juvenilia, a drawing he made when he was fifteen that was given to me by his darling mother.

Please take this opportunity to read the many posts you have missed.
I will return in a few weeks


À Bientôt
Currado

Saturday, August 02, 2008

PUBLIC RELATIONS

The word résumé is suitably French and fits handily with our classist past. The American obsession with credentials however, seems vaguely inappropriate in the land of the “self-made man.”


A painter receiving an advanced degree is a comic notion here in Europe where the authority of the academy was soundly defeated about a hundred years ago. The American art community's quaint nostalgia for diplomas is one more example of its robust quest for self-confidence.

My good friend David Schoffman has been tapped by the American Association of Fine Arts Graduate Studies to participate in a series recruitment videos designed to encourage college students to pursue Masters Degrees in the visual arts. They are being aired around the country with mixed results.

See below for one of the most popular examples:


Courtesy of the American Association of Fine Arts Graduate Studies. All rights reserved 2008

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

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.

Friday, July 25, 2008

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.

Monday, July 21, 2008

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.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

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.

Sunday, July 13, 2008


“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.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

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.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

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.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

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.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

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!"