Monday, February 21, 2011

JOYCE AND NORA IT'S NOT


Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, high profile, high octane creative couples are rare and powerful phenomena. Rarer still is the durable conjugation that triumphs over egoism and sustains the participant pair into greater and greater artistic achievement.


If this blog were a work of fiction I would continue by describing the truly inspiring partnership of my good friend David Schoffman and the gifted and charming Dahlia Danton. Unfortunately the truth is rather tawdry. Friction and discord wrapped their torrid romance in a shroud of unnecessary misery. Alarming salvos of hysteria and turmoil were their preferred vernacular. Their verbal violence was legendary as was their concomitant concupiscence and perfidious disloyalty.
The imminent Los Angeles exhibition, The Gasp of Love in Terza Rima promises to be a contentious affair. I'm told that Danton will be in town for the opening and has made it plain that she fully intends on asserting a deliberately provocative presence. This may prove to be awkward. As has been amply documented, Danton and I,  like Paolo and Francesca, have been bested by the appetites and my friendship with Schoffman has scarcely recovered. The work I intend to exhibit at ALT/SPACE LA happens to be a lurid, graphic chronicling of our miscellaneous adventures. The delicate and faint-hearted would be well-advised to avoid the April 2nd vernissage.                                          
Schoffman, Danton. 2007

Monday, February 14, 2011

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT


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


In a word ... NO.

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

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

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

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

David ... you are forgiven.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

IN SEARCH OF FASCIA HEINE


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


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

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

Sunday, January 30, 2011

SECRETS AND LINES


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


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


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

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

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

I wonder why David never mentioned any of this before.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Danikåa Blest



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

Danikåa Blest, Currado Malaspina 1998
From the spring of 1992 to the fateful fall of 2001 Schoffman lived in seven cities within four countries on three continents. While working in Barcelona he had a show in Geneva. While painting in Prague he exhibited in Paris and while living in Paris he showed in New York.

You get the idea.

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

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

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

The critics soon took notice.

Friday, January 14, 2011

ART HISTORY: THE MUSICAL


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

You decide

Saturday, January 08, 2011

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH


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


This coming spring, at the venerable gallery ALT/SPACE LA,
home to some of Southern California's most idiosyncratic artists and performers, David will stage what will undoubtedly be seen as his most unusual spectacle to date.


Thursday, January 06, 2011

BELIEF AND THE WHIMS OF EXISTENCE


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


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

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

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

See what happens indeed!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

CALLING ALL CARS!!


A STUNNING AND FLAGRANT CRIME, WHAT LARCENOUS GRANDEUR! 
A FUTURE FOLK TALE, AN EPIC POEM. GALERIE ENDROIT DOUX, IN THE NAKEDNESS OF MIDDAY, AMID THE TUSSLE OF L'HEURE DE POINTE  IN THE 19TH ARRONDISSEMENT, SWINDLED AND DECEIVED BY THE LEGENDARY ART THIEVES BÉGUCHET & POUPARD.

"The Body is His Book #36"

My luckless friend David Schoffman was the subject of a small scale retrospective appropriately titled "Plus du Soleil S'Approchent." On the third day of the exhibition the wily Béguchet dressed as a common bricoleur entered the gallery and abruptly turned off the electricity. Within seconds David Schoffman's "The Body is His Book #36" had vanished.

The following day Tito Poupard entered the gallery and placed a hand-written note into the palm of the receptionist's hand that read: "excusez-moi, we had over estimated the worth of Schoffman's painting. It is hardly worth our time. ... close the gallery tomorrow one hour early, meet us in back of the hippodrome in the Bois du Boulogne and we will return the work to you with our regrets."

Murry Scève, who until recently was David's principle Parisian dealer, arrived at the Hippodrome de Longchamp at exactly 16:00. He was met by a beautiful young woman who gave him a wrapped parcel tucked into a Printemps shopping bag.


Exactly forty minutes latter Scève returned to his completely empty gallery.





 

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

DOOR OF DECEPTION


The Sefdala N'Dmowiaw claim the ancient Hebrews as their ancestors. While I am skeptical my dear credulous friend David Schoffman takes them at their word.


The batwing door of the Fifth House of Worship or the Ikktambaqi of the Sefdala is an ornate, colorful contraption that swings with a mild croaking sound. Located in the southern Gambian village of Jali, this beautiful artifact caught our eye when David and I traveled there as students some thirty five years ago. We returned to Jali a few months ago during the Kiapa Festival and the door had been beautifully restored.

The Alkaloo, or village chief, explained to us that the inlaid door was sent to Eaton, Pennsylvania where, what he called a "mazugaka" or what we might call an art conservator, performed acts of extraordinary magic to radically change the appearance of the door. He seemed to be rather pleased.

He called the star in the center of the door the "twall dwa dawide" and is certain that it signifies his people's origin in the old testament tribe of Reuvan. It is for that reason that every male member of the village carries the name Reuvan. His name was Abla Enkomo Reuvan Dok. His son was Koki Reuvan Dok Daldal. Our driver's name was Reuvan Botu Reuvan Daikono. And so on and so forth. 

When the door mysteriously fell off its hinges during our stay a minor uproar ensued. The Sefdala are deeply superstitious and read the mishap as an augury of some vague catastrophe. David made himself a small hero when he "selflessly" offered to take the fallen portal back to Pennsylvania for some further remedial treatment.


The Swinging Door of the Fifth House of Worship of Jali now hangs above David's dining room table in Los Angeles.


It really is quite beautiful.


Sunday, December 12, 2010

IN ADVANCE OF AN ADVERSARY


MY FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN RARELY LEAVES HIS STUDIO FOR FEAR OF DISAPPOINTMENT. "LES CHOSES NE SONT PAS COMME ILS ETAIENT UNE FOIS," HE CONSTANTLY LAMENTS AND INDEED, EVEN HERE IN PARIS THINGS DON'T ALWAYS STAY THE SAME. "TOUS SONT LAIDS," "EVERYTHING IS UGLY" AND INDEED, WHERE HE LIVES IN LOS ANGELES, THAT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE.


I once asked him why he was so devoted to rendering the intricacies of West African fabric design. "It's busywork," he quickly replied without thinking, "it keeps me cloistered, insulated and hopefully inoculated from the terrors of boredom."


Visionary or self-satisfied subverter of forgotten conventions?

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

TOWARD FIERY PHLEGETHON


After "La Grand'Inondazione" the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Alghero commissioned a trio of international artists to create new works to replace those lost in the famous disaster. Together with Albertina Pechorin and Melchior Stavrogin, my over-worked colleague, David Schoffman devoted two full years to this obscure project. 



Toward Fiery Phlegethon, studio view

The sum of his unprofitable efforts can be seen in the church's north transept. The minutely painted panels betray the torments of solitary time spent in fruitless endeavor, tucked, like a lame kitten, in a bleak, underlit studio.

Renovating this impoverished house of worship was a wanton, ruinous enterprise. How appropriate to have hired someone so accustomed to dishoner.

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.