THE CONSOLATIONS OF PAINTING (POORLY)

My somber and serious friend David Schoffman sits in his studio and reflects upon the history of hardship. Not hardship in the abstract nor hardship as a universal condition. No, Schoffman's reflections are restricted to the local, the proximal and the personal. The history of hardship to my dear friend David is the history of his own undoing and the unraveling hardships he himself has "endured."

A recent book by Lee Cuypt, a distinguished fellow at the McTeague Institute in Cambridge argues that like many creative people, David Schoffman has faced many private and professional crucibles. In his view,what makes Schoffman unusual is his unique and stubborn inflexibility and his "hubristic opacity toward introspection and growth".  Cuypt patiently takes the reader through a chronology of David's  lengthy exhibition record, from the first one-man show at Verdurin/Bloch in 1978 to his most recent at Alt/Space LA. He finds a disturbing pattern in that when faced with an aesthetic choice, David invariably opts for the least accommodating, the least accessible and as a consequence, the most hermetic. He has alienated his allies and armed his detractors with an encyclopedia of justifiable jibes and jeremiads.

David has skillfully constructed his own isolation and operates in a figurative jail cell awaiting his execution. He lives a fantasy where his contemporaries are cast as charlatans and knaves and he alone righteously upholds and maintains the Western Tradition. Professor Cuypt cleverly calls this the  "Boethius Complex" and has written an elegantly argued polemic that will remain the standard text in Schoffman studies for a long time to come.

SIMULACRUM

"I HAVE BECOME A PROBLEM TO MYSELF."
MY DEAR FRIEND AND MENTOR, THE LATE MICAH CARPENTIER WAS FOND OF CITING THE CONFESSIONS OF AUGUSTINE.

Our Lady of Charity, Santiago de Cuba

David Schoffman's studio, Culver City, California

Beside his great works, Carpentier left little behind. It was as if he had envisioned his tragic, premature death and in preparation, denuded himself of the superfluous. Among the many relics in El Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, the historic basilica nestled in the foothills of Cuba's Sierra Maestra, is a small box containing the few things Micah did not consider impedimenta. Each object is doused with significance and sentimentality, or so claims my colleague David Schoffman.

I saw an exact facsimile in Schoffman's Los Angeles studio and I suspect that David might be running a neat cottage industry in Carpentier curio of questionable provenance.

COITUS INTERRUPTUS

Hokusai had his One-Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hiroshige had his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, Yahweh had his Decalogue and now, my prolific friend David Schoffman  has his Twenty-Eight Rungs of Lust Deferred, a stunning graphic tour de force.

Chaste self-abnegation is a theme that has preoccupied David for many years. His 1998 lecture "Late Renaissance Religious Imagery and the Interrupted Urges of Michelangelo," delivered at l'Università di Eboli's Istituto di Ricerca Arcane and later published in the anthology Abstemious Art & Artists (Sheleg Books, 2001), posits the theory that immaculate self-discipline between 1490 and 1600 was a common and conscious aesthetic posture. Poets and painters, in direct opposition to Aretino's rakish, libertine excesses, proposed a more temperate trope and devoted their art toward an almost Tantric pre-climactic form of fulfillment. Michelangelo's Creation being the prime example of this type of erotic adjournment. 

Schoffman's theories are what we call in France, connerie pur and I'm sure, at heart, he knows this. He apparently was up for tenure and felt the need to gild the scholarly lily.

La Pensée Sauvage

My hapless friend David Schoffman's early attempts at systematic ethnographic research were costly though radiant failures.

Kaitabhuto Figurine - Java

As a young man, Schoffman spent months at a time trekking through unforgiving terrain in far flung countries looking for uncooked, untamed artifacts. Unlike a professionally trained researcher, David left the terra firma with a series of ideés fixes hoping to find confirmation in situ.

Chief among his biases was the assertion that any societal/cultural phenomena encoded in artisanal production has, at root, an instinctive urge for chaos and disruption. This hairbrained theory came from a dyslexic-driven misreading of Marcel Mauss' Essai Sur Le Don.

After fourteen years of sporadic dysentery, vague inflammations, assorted bug-bites and several near-death experiences, David returned to the comforts of cable tv and indoor plumbing without a single original thought but with a trove of wonderful drawings.

I'm told that in the United States, graduate school is an essential step for all ambitious artists. Though this idea is mocked here in France, perhaps David would have been better served by this more conventional rite-of-passage.

ALOOF AND FRAIL

THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS HAVE BEEN SENT OUT AND I AM PLEASED THAT THE IMAGE CHOSEN TO REPRESENT THE THREE OF US IS ONE OF MY DRAWINGS.

Carpentier of course, has no dog in this dispute but my good friend, collaborator and rival, David Schoffman, baring his irascible teeth  has decided to refight the long forgotten Guerre de Clichy. 

It was perhaps twenty five years ago in a small gallery on rue Truffaut, not far from l'Église Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles that I first noticed the stain of Schoffman's pestiferous predilection for competition. Making art for David is not a vocation but rather a furious and unrelenting blood sport. Unlike me and I dare say, Micah as well, he doesn't see his work as a sublime calling but more as an untamed cris-d'armes. Jousting with sheep and tilting at windmills David sees adversaries where others see colleagues and fellow-travelers.

We were involved in a group exhibition, similar to the one coming up next month in Los Angeles, and David insisted that the invitation list his name first and include a reproduction of one of his pieces at the exclusion of everyone else. The predictable outrage ensued and the festering scent of acrimonious discord followed the show throughout its duration and well beyond.

I understand that no small degree of excitement and anticipation surround the ALT/SPACE LA show. The pre-publicity has been generous and flattering. The public seems genuinely interested. Only David Schoffman is choked with suspicion and apprehension. Only David drowns in an absinthian dread.

Only David is capable of snatching collapse from within the jaws of luxury and triumph.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

   

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.