THE STONES OF MAHAVIRA

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

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

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

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

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

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.

THE VEIL OF SECRECY

David Schoffman is as reclusive as a prairie dog in winter, a solitary artistic egghead, an introvert of the first order. In our thirty years of friendship, I’ve visited his studio maybe a half a dozen times. He is famously secretive about his work. To see his paintings, one must wait for his intermittent exhibitions.

To follow the progression of his ideas one must rely on rumor. One such rumor circulating recently is that Schoffman has embarked on a singularly impractical project of such quixotic magnitude that most agree will never see the light of day. I am referring, of course, to the bizarre compendium of small paintings collectively known as “The Body is His Book.” It has been reliably reported and confirmed elliptically by Schoffman himself in an 2005 interview in ArtContext that the plan is to complete 100 pictures using only a double zero kolinsky sable paintbrush.

Sean Van Belge, the former Sotheby’s intern whose infamous tell-all memoir “Branding and the Credulous Collector: My Life in the Art World,” earned him the ire of just about every human involved in contemporary art, recently snuck into David’s studio posing as a UPS delivery man and snapped a few hasty pictures. The photographs above, originally published in Missile, appear to add credence to at least some of the speculation.

CLUES

In the spring of 1985, David Schoffman disappeared. By some accounts, he was missing for 18 months. According to other accounts he was sighted twice during that period of time, once on the Saronic island of Salamina and once in Barcelona where he was spotted playing a dangerous drinking game at a bar called Panchitos.

By all accounts, his absence suspiciously coincided with the disappearance of Fayette Lombardi, an art student who regularly attended David’s lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute. Fayette was a highly regarded performance artist whose senior thesis had something to do with prolonged sunbathing while covered with stenciled quotations from Lord Byron.

Today, Lombardi is a news anchorwoman at WKIA in Indiana City and has recently published a memoir titled “When I Was Naked”, about her years as a “near-professional extrovert.”

The unattributed drawing above appears among the book’s many illustrations with the caption, “Here I am, in post-coital repose, drawn by a friend, during my ‘lost years’.

PRAGUE

My infrequent trips to Prague are almost always unpleasant. I find the beautiful cityscape bleak, cloying and quaint. The intersecting chimneys that line Kaprova Boulevard reflect a sickening sapphire light that tint the clouds with dread. Lazarska Street, where common life bustles with resignation is like the filthy tail of an elegant animal. And the much-admired view from Strelecky Ostrov is simply a postcard from Purgatory.

The one shining light, the landmark that makes any trip worthwhile is the small, smoky jazz club across the street from the Mustek metro station known to the locals as Veleslavina’s. Every Thursday night the place is packed to hear Guido Tocca’s resplendent redefinitions of polymodal chromatism. This cat can play.

I am bitterly envious that the cover art on Tocca’s last CD’s is a painting by my friend and rival David Schoffman. Schoffman has a tin ear and such primitive tastes that his idea of good music are bands like the Sonora Seven and Darba.

I recommend to any serious listener any and all of Tocca’s discography. My personal favorite is the 2007 recording “Dazzled by Dawn: Live in Antibes.”

what once I was, and what am now

With John Milton turning 400 and with the popular noise of the deadly swarm having far from abated, David Schoffman has returned to Samson Agoniste for guidance and inspiration. As a Nazarite is separate to God so too is David to his art. His childish optimism still pictures his work as the seal of silence that corrects the world. As a bondslave to painting, he spends his light in his cramped atelier, far from what Milton called the “daily fraud.”

What a fool to think the sun is speechless beyond his studio walls. What arrogance to assume that upon drawing his tools he has made himself exempt from our collective culpability. His adamantean nobility is ill-fitting and ridiculous. His work is simply not that good.

What! You think I should dull my spear just because his wife just delivered a son?

THE SONGS OF THE HEART

David Schoffman's beautiful bride, a magnanimous and sublime woman whose many virtues highlight her husband's dim pessimism is on the verge of birthing a child. I find few things more sensual than the naked body of a woman in full fecundity. I flew in from Paris for two reasons.

One, to initiate litigation against my former dealer Byron George of the now defunct New York gallery Sardanapalus Modern and two, to draw David's darling mate in her lovely morning dress.

Tempests come and go but the hushed air that precedes birth is a cherished field of bliss.

TWENTY-FIVE FOOLISH DOLLARS

In Auvers-sur-Oise, 35 kilometers northwest of Paris, there is a quirky little shop called Prix Bas et Maladroit which seems to sell just about anything. On one trip I bought a stuffed dove, a bottle opener in the shape of a sperm whale, an American style toaster and a cassette tape of Jean Gabin reading La Chanson de Roland. The whole assorted hash cost me less than 50 euros.

David Schoffman’s 400 Drawings is an untamed orchard of exquisite invention. It’s a drowsy mix of refinement and anarchy where no two drawings are alike. And like my favorite shop in Auvers, everything is ridiculously under-valued.

I’m afraid that this new venture represents the first full sobs of David’s madness. He is numb both to reason and to sound business practice. Twenty-five American dollars is what a family spends at Starbucks for a coffee and few croissants. It’s what parking used to be at the Bibliothèque Nationale before they raised the price. I spend more each month on late fees at Visuelle, my local movie rental place.

But as we say in the Midi, "ce n’est pas mon pâté!"

FROM AN OCEAN TO A FETID PUDDLE

I hate to see my friend David Schoffman treating his radient drawings like dust. How can he offer up the fruits of his atrocious labors for such a pittance? Like a mute canary I hold my tongue and watch as he suffers the indignity of playing the herring merchant. Is it need that skewed the compass of his staunch character or maybe it's just another episode of his antic imagination.

If I had $10,000 I would gladly give it to him. The hucksters hook is an awkward cudgel in his hands. This project has turned him from a verb to a noun, from a visionary to a scavenger, from a blazing torch to a mousey messenger.

But alas, I'm no fool. I just purchased six pieces!

A HARBINGER OF PROGRESS??

Summoned by sudden, unanticipated expenses, unimagined sums of tyrannical proportion that threaten the flames of his zealotry, David Schoffman has abandoned the hypnosis of his obsessions and has entered the world of commerce.

The art world grieves as the banking crisis has made collectors more circumspect. Schoffman’s own Maecenas, the disgraced Bakunin Brothers CFO, Sebastian Faure, who personally owns four hundred of David’s pieces, is now under indictment and is living in Umm al-Quwain awaiting extradition.

The well is dry but David won’t be doomed.

In an unusual venture that critics are already speculating will irredeemably redefine the art trade, Schoffman is offering to sell his drawings for the pitiable sum of $25 apiece!

He has set aside 400 of some of his best works and is currently consulting with the marketing firm of Fabbri & Fabbri in order to launch this unorthodox endeavor.

I can only wish him luck in this new, mournful misadventure.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.