Saturday, July 28, 2012

CALL FOR ARTISTS


These days, everybody is an "independent curator." Dubious qualifications, suspicious sources of motivation and conflicts of interest seem to be the only unifying quality possessed by this cadre of cultural hangers-on. Even my ordinarily sober minded friend David Schoffman has contracted the curatorial virus.

Eius Rationatione is a recent exhibition at Gallerie Guanxi on Rue Denis Poisson in the 17eme arrondissement and it has created quite a sensation. Though the work is unremarkable David has been tireless in its promotion. Throughout the entire month of June you couldn't pick up a French art magazine without reading some prattling puff piece planted by Schoffman and his mindless minions.

Vers eudaimonia, Lucien Magnotta, distemper and glass on enamel, 2011

The putative theme was the "deliberate dissembling of tradition-based craftsmanship," (dissimulation délibéré de l'artisanat basé sur la tradition) though not all the critics were so easily persuaded. I've included an image from Lucien Magnotta and one from Annette Accro just to give you an idea of the kind of work he included.

Défection de gamins, Annette Accro, collage, 2012
And yet, for some inexplicable reason, David has received at least four new invitations to curate shows. He is going to Berlin in August to supervise the installation of ätherisch Objektat at the Weißaugenmöwen Kunsthalle. Then he returns to Los Angeles to work on something he refuses to talk about. (I can't be sure but I suspect it has something to do with an opportunity that suddenly presented itself- a consequence of the small insurrection at their Museum of Contemporary Art.) Then he comes back here to put together a survey of recent French/Algerian works-on-paper.

I don't begrudge his success I just wish he would include me from time to time.
Il m'a planté!

Friday, July 13, 2012

Soft Power


The Tuda Mengu Mosque in Ulan Bator is a modest affair. Though Mongolia's Muslim population has dwindled to just under 150,000, the capitol still maintains a few remnants of a more illustrious past. The local imam, Migjid Abdulmajid carries on valiantly while his community steadily emigrates to places like Dubai, Kuwait, Toronto and Teaneck, New Jersey. My well connected friend David Schoffman has recently visited the region as part of a State Department delegation seeking closer cultural ties to the international Islamic world and returned with a curious and rather beautiful souvenir.

Postcard of the Tuda Mengu Mosque, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
 As is well known, during the late 18th century certain draconian measures were introduced throughout the Bayan Olgii countryside in order to test the obedience of the rural population. Among the severe and arbitrary prohibitions were smoking, singing, chess playing, archery and usury. To circumvent these laws a group of insurgent peasants called the Minyins invented an intricate and visually stunning game called Khatya. The game shares a few common themes with the 6th century Indian game of Parcheesi but is vastly more complicated. The precise rules are the subject of bitter controversy, - the last proficient player died in 1963 - but people continue to own and cherish their Khatya sets.

18th century Khatya board, Bayantooroi, Mongolia
As a gift giving culture, the Mongolian Muslims practice a wonderfully creative form of generosity. David returned to Los Angeles with yak skin slippers, dried gojiberries, a Mongolian violin called a khuurchir and a gorgeous, hand-painted, birch Khatya board.


I think David gave his hosts official United States State Department tennis balls and blocks of surplus cheese.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Guarda com'entri e di cui tu ti fide"


It is well known that my highly principled and ethically misguided friend David Schoffman rarely welcomes visitors to his studio. He guards his privacy with meticulous brutality. Even Lord Myron Noccimick, the esteemed éminence grise of the British Royal Collection was shunned by Schoffman a few years back.  David claimed at the time that he had a debilitating toothache,  a perverse tribute since he never deems it necessary to offer any pretexts for his antisocial behavior.


The rare guest must be vetted, groomed, briefed and forewarned before setting foot anywhere near Schoffman's works-in-progress.
 
So it was with no small measure of bewilderment that I learned that David recently hosted Silicon Valley entrepreneur Stanley Sansal and his partner Ulrich Powell.

Daphna Ahf-Zahav, Ulrich Powell, Stanley Sansal and Schoffman, Culver City, 2012

Credit Daphna Ahf-Zahav, associate curator for contemporary art at Dubai's Kunsthalle Sachererahp for facilitating this rare event. I'm told that the typically laconic David was unusually forthcoming. He expressed great interest in Sansal's latest venture, MetiTechtm, a start-up devoted to identifying common, cross-continental genetic blueprints in order to scientifically challenge the orthodoxies of race.


Both Powell and Sansal were reciprocally conversant as well in the intricacies of the international avant-garde (they are both sitting members on the Sachererahp board) and were particularly knowledgeable regarding Schoffman's entire oeuvre.




Things got a bit frothy when Daphna innocently asked about the Guillermoprêtre affair. (I'm of course referring to the unsolved 1999 murder of former Schoffman studio assistant and heiress to the Algerian caliphite, Angélique Guillermoprêtre). It's one of about two dozen subjects that one best avoid around David - I'm surprised Ahf-Zahav was unaware of that. Attempts to diffuse the discomfort were of no avail and in the end Powell and Sansal were not permitted to purchase the fifteen paintings they had set their hearts on.  

It's just as well. Sansal is going to need that extra $250,000. His company is now embroiled in a nasty bit of litigation. It seems that MetiTechtm software has established a strong genetic link between Nicolae Ceauşescu and Buddy Hackett. The heirs of both clans are none too pleased.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

DESTINO


Calle Empedrada was a sad, sorry place for a romantic misadventure. Despite its charming name, this narrow decrepit artery running east to west along the Canal de Cadáveres Flotantes is a veritable slum. The famed colonial cobblestones from which it derives its name have long since been paved over, leaving only a few scattered remnants beneath its ubiquitous potholes.

Calle Empedrada, Quito. David Schoffman 1982

In 1982 my good friend David Schoffman and I were involved in an unmanageable ménage à trois with benzedrine and aguardiente. We asked to be consumed in the heat and fog of aimless dissipation and we were. We were young and we were immortal. We were Kerouac and Cassidy or as the locals referred to us, Auxilio and Epifiano, the legendary inebriates from Ulises José Malatesta's novel Hacia Abajo.

If it were not for the sudden appearance of Javiera Popova I'm afraid this story would have had a much different ending.

Javiera Popova
 Popova was the granddaughter of Ratmir Makarichev,  Abakan's former chief of police under Nicholas II. Makarichev was known as a particularly sadistic official who took great pleasure in personally participating in even the most trivial interrogations. Many wondered openly how such a cruel beast could have grandfathered such a glamorous beauty.

In any event, Popova was a twenty-year old art student when the cross-eyed besotted Schoffman asked her in his broken Berlitz Spanish to dance. It was Samba night at Democraticus, one of two bars on Calle Empedrada that had live music. The way Javiera remembers it, David hobbled over, handed her a canelazo on ice and tentatively mumbled something like "agustaría profundizar conmigo"? which doesn't exactly mean "would you like to dance" but was close enough.

She took him home that night and did not leave his side until he was completely straight and sober. They stayed together, on and off, for the next year and a half, Javiera even moved to New York but that ended badly. Popova went on to become one of South America's most popular actresses appearing regularly in El Corazón Roto, Venezuela's longest running soap opera.

As you know, my good friend and compagnon d'ivresse went on to become David Schoffman.



Wednesday, June 20, 2012

POSITIVELY 4TH STREET


It's almost laughable. 

Despite the mercurial whims of callow critics whose compass needle is presently fixed on southern California and in the face of fickle but friendly collectors whose over-eager appetites clamor for product of Pacific provenance, my good friend David Schoffman continues to withhold his paintings from view. Precisely at the moment when the Art Fair class is smoldering in a delirium of feral desire and the demand for Schoffman's work is at it's most formidable, David chooses to disappear.  

Cloistered like a leper, he remains quarantined in his studio absorbed in his work. Prompted by an absurd and antiquated ethic, he insists on refining and reworking pictures that, to put it crassly, are good enough.


I think there is anger behind this posture of nobility. Treating his work with such high seriousness is a musty relic of Romanticism. Behaving as if the last thirty years of contemporary art never happened betrays an arrogance that has rightly alienated Schoffman from his peers. Stoically laboring over minute brushstrokes and meticulously mixing paints - (oil, of course) - on expansive and orderly palettes are abject, self-indulgent vices masquerading as polished virtues.


Meanwhile his paintings pile up like clover mites. If he's not careful, his loyal cadre of incredulous collectors will discard him like last week's losing lottery ticket. 

On top of all this he doesn't return my calls.  He sends cryptic messages by way of his over-worked (and under-paid) studio assistants. He is beginning to cultivate a reputation for being "a perfectionist," read: "difficult." He is aloof.


This is all to say that David Schoffman is an antique, a remnant, a wasted rind of an irrelevant past. He's a reactionary who still thinks that painting "matters." His sincerity makes the rest of us look bad. 


I hope his mildewed canvases rot. I hope his reputation twists in the fetid winds of score settling innuendo. I hope his stock nosedives into a cesspool of inconsequence. I hope his beautiful paintings are rendered incoherent by the erudite misreadings of influential academics. I hope he runs out of ideas.



Monday, May 21, 2012

Open Sesame


Many important Jewish traditions have permeated the fabric of American culture, or so claims a controversial new book on the subject by my dear old friend David Schoffman. From the Ten Commandments to the love of Zion, Jewish law and lore have penetrated the American mainstream. But Schoffman goes further claiming that "no Jewish tradition has impacted the country more indelibly than the 'thirteenth bagel'." The book is called Between Knish and Nosh: How a small minority retaught us how to spell (Amphigouri Press 2012) and it has caused a minor literary tempest among specialists and academics.

For those of you unfamiliar with this allegedly ubiquitous tradition, next time you buy a dozen bagels count the contents of your bag.

When I recently pointed out to David that what is referred to as a "baker's dozen" dates back to Victorian England he became  agitated and defensive. I stressed that whatever skills he lacked as an historian he more than made up for in his genius as a painter.

from The Body is His Book: 100 Paintings, David Schoffman

"Who cares about painting?" he replied indignantly. 

I suppose he's right ...

Sunday, May 06, 2012

INFLATION


When the Colorado tenth circuit court converted Valmont EEB2 from an individual Chapter 11 petition to a Chapter 7 the California art world experienced an unexpected ripple. The forced liquidation of business assets was a routine affair until a weathered Strathmore sketchbook was discovered under a mountain of black accounting binders.

Dated September 1969 and signed on the front in an adolescent cursive, the product of rote training in what used to be called penmanship, was the name David Schoffman.

Untitled drawing, David Schoffman, conté crayon, 1969

This remarkable discovery of Schoffman juvenilia - by my calculation David was 13 when this drawing was made - has forced the critical community into a radical reassessment of an entire oeuvre. Previously, the conventional wisdom has been that the early stirrings of Schoffman's imagination were deeply rooted in his complete and total lack of academic training. His early work, which was seen as a combination of rabid appropriation of affichiste pastiche and Franco-Belgian bandes-dessinées could very well have been a more organic outgrowth of Bargue's systematized canon of classicized forms.

I find this reappraisal rather fascinating for it sheds some light on this important period in my dear friend's development. Though it is not the precocity of the drawing above that amazes me - my own drawings from childhood are quite frankly much more accomplished - it is that a court appointed "specialist" appraised the entire 20 sheet sketchbook at $115,000!

Now there is a mad treasure hunt for more of these trifles.


Nom de Dieu!!!

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

BABYLONIA


My good friend David Schoffman is well known for his incorruptible indifference. He has a coarse quarrelsome nature and knows its best for him to avoid the necessary kinships and vital alliances of the art world. Upright in the portentous glare of his reputation, David never misses an opportunity to sabotage his considerable achievements.

It actually soothes his heart to alienate people of influence.


Every generation has its artistic Edens and David insists on banishment from each and every one. Back in the day he bickered with Greenberg, groused against Gogosian and tussled with Castelli. He clashed bitterly with Schjeldahl, fussed endlessly with Danto and had a knock down barroom dust-up with Peter Pyrenean, the former editor in chief of ArtNotes.

I even heard from a reliable witness that while David was still a student he picked a fight with Pierre Matisse just to see if he could carry on a credible altercation in fluent idiomatic French.

Much has changed in the intervening years. After a particularly ugly incident involving an art handler, a Scandinavian collector and a broken window, Schoffman left Manhattan and settled in  Gualala, California. He sees practically no one and has neither cell phone nor computer. To reach him one must send a letter to the post office on Highway 1 and hope it somehow finds him. 

View from Schoffman's studio window, Gualala, California

I heard from our mutual friend, Dahlia Danton that he is doing beautiful work and that he is still living off of residuals from a Korean sitcom he did in the early 80's. 

Friday, April 27, 2012

ART HISTORY


My dear friend David Schoffman has a problem. Unlike me and countless other artists our age, his paintings, (which are no more slight and insignificant than his peers') never really caught on commercially. After countless exhibitions in innumerable galleries he still hasn't found a reliable base of collectors.

Even our hapless mutual acquaintance, Dori Minquand makes a solid living selling his egg tempera portraits of house pets.

So David, to this day, by the sheer misfortune of having to earn a living, is reduced to the indignity of juggling day-jobs with snake-oil schemes in order to make ends meet.

But perhaps the end is near. The now infamous Art History: The Musical video which has been circulating on the internet for the past several years has gone viral! It remains to be seen how Schoffman can translate this into profit but for now, at least, he is a minor celebrity.



I hear he is even dating B-list starlets and anorexic runway models.

Saturday, April 07, 2012

A FORK IN THE ROAD


Here in Paris, we are always half a step behind the artworld of New York. I rely upon my good friend David Schoffman to keep me up to date. Usually what he thinks is important is merely some idle, petty gossip but occasionally he comes up with something interesting. The recent publication of "Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the assignment" by Paper Monument is a case in point.

Maria-Theresien-Platz, Adolf Hitler, watercolor on paper, 1906-07 (private collection)
The premise of this great little book is that the messy enterprise of educating future artists is something much more than the mere transmission of technical skills and conventional rubrics of design and form. There is an ineffable quality, a manner of thinking and interpreting the world that is unique to artists and the best way to transmit this is elliptically.  The editors collected from a wide range of art professors their favorite assignments. Included, for example, are art school staples like: "With ink and a twig between your toes draw oxygen" and "You're a callus on the big toe of a pachyderm - draw the view".

As enchanting and entertaining as the book is, nothing in it comes close to the assignment Micah Carpentier gave to David and I when we were art students at Beaux-arts in the early 70's.

As best as I can remember, it went something like this:

"Adolf Hitler was a failed artist. By an unlikely twist of fate, in 1923, instead of plotting the Hitler-Ludendorff Beer Hall Putsch he decided to apply for an M.F.A. Design his portfolio."

Unfortunately, some members of the faculty found the assignment somewhat offensive and Carpentier was summarily fired as a result. He moved back to Havana and shortly thereafter was killed under extremely suspicious circumstances. 


Saturday, March 24, 2012

MISGUIDED


Rarely mentioned, seldom cited, the iconoclastic Dutch art historian Simon Stuyn holds a pivotal place in the development post-modernism. As a lecturer at the Universiteit Beeldende Kunsten in Maastricht, his centrality within the discourse is belied by the arbitrary fortunes of geography and language. What little he has published has yet to be translated into English, (his most important work, Weerzinwekkend Bewijsgrond has been adequately translated into French under the inexact title Pensées Inhabituelles), and as a militant opponent of capital punishment he refuses to travel to the United States. 

His influence on the work and intellectual development of my eclectic friend David Schoffman has been profound.

Portrait of Simon Stuyn, charcoal on paper, Orestia Shestov, 1998 (private collection)
His most accessible (though least plausible) theory is that all products of the imagination begin with what he calls "spraak tijken" or language tics. These 'tics' are unconsciously yet deliberately misunderstood and ultimately filtered into what he strangely calls "reverie artifacts" or "mijmering artefacten." Literature, according to Stuyn is a "groot tijk" or a "big tic" whereas the visual arts are "minderjarige tijken" or "minor tics." The principle condition of post-modernism is what Stuyn calls "de verschrikkelijke synthese van grote en kleine tijken," or "a maudlin medley of major and minor tics" (translation mine).

When David and I were students, new theories of European pedigree had tremendous currency among young artists eager to break from the conventions of formalism. Schoffman was taken by Stuyn, Grissold, Lacan, Jabotinsky and the entire Rotterdam School. His work has been a distillation (although a gross misunderstanding) of these ideas ever since.

I personally think that Stuyn is what the Dutch call a "heide hoofd" (loosely translated, a "bog brain') and that David's entire career has been a misguided attempt to render visual the incoherent blatherings of a third-rate theoretician.

Sadly, this explains a lot.

Monday, March 12, 2012

SCALAWAGGERY


Few remember Donna Deliquasse. Those who do, widely differ in their reckoning of this odd and mysterious woman. Some saw her as a vulnerable eccentric. Others claimed she was the Joan of Arc of the East Village, a tragic hipster who sacrificed her sanity and ultimately her life for the sake of her art.

I remember her as David Schoffman's kleptomaniacal roommate when he lived in a one bedroom fifth floor walk-up at 454 Avenue A.

Donna Deliquasse in Schoffman's downtown New York apartment in 1979
Donna was from the Midwest, though no one seems to recall from exactly where. Her accent was vaguely Canadian with long rounded vowels and clipped S's and T's. Without her coke bottle glasses she was legally blind and with her glasses she was just dangerously near-sighted. 

I remember a New Year's Eve party on Long Island somewhere - I think it was Syosset or Jericho but I can't be entirely sure - where Donna was the only sober person left standing. She insisted on driving us back to the city. We all piled into the car - David, me and my girlfriend at the time, Bebé Rongley (who had just been crowned "Miss Astoria Queens", a dubious distinction of which, as a foreigner, I recall being mightily impressed).  I swear, a raging drunk could have better navigated David's 1965 Chevrolet Bel air. I vividly remember promising the Virgin Mary that if we survived the trip in one piece (we did) I would give up alcohol (I didn't) and Ecstasy (I did) for the rest of my life.

But for all her strangeness, Donna was undeniably a promising young artist. She worked as a waitress at Max's Kansas City and it was there while quietly observing the likes of Donald Judd, Robert Smithson,  Jennifer Wazzerstein and William Burroughs that Donna developed her unique artistic sensibility. Pieces like "Four-Square Under-Over" and "Pleasure and Relief" are directly related to the Minimalist/Earthwork stream of consciousness aesthetic that simmered at the time on the east coast of the United States.

Pleasure and ReliefInstallation, Per Por Gallery, New York. 1979. Donna Deliquasse
Despite his vehement denials most of us who were around at the time saw an intimate connection between Donna's early installations and David's first published manifestos. The stridency was his but the vision was clearly Donna's. Few doubt as well, despite his assertions to the contrary, that he is the biological father of Donna's daughter, the Italian choreographer, Cathi Deliquasse-Carter.

Donna Deliquasse may have been the shoplifter but David Schoffman remains the shape-shifting swindler, peddler of embezzled ideas and dissembler of the first order .

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

SOLAR FLARE


By a boundless, unbridgeable margin, the most aberrantly unusual artwork I have ever seen is a recent performance piece called "Tanning" by my strange friend David Schoffman.  Staged at the Mastdarmkunst ArtFair in Blumenthal, the work drew a constant crush of collectors, spectators, curators and critics all trying in their own way to make sense of this genre-defying piece.

Tanning, day 2, David Schoffman, Mastdarmkunst ArtFair, Blumenthal, Austria, 2012. (photo courtesy of Blecker Strauss)

The work was accompanied by a book length series of essays which only slightly helped in decoding Schoffman's intricate labyrinth of references and allusions. Molecular biologist Gunther Drava wrote a marvelous piece about epithelial cell patterning in relation to Wittgenstein's enigmatic Remarks on Colour. Columbia's Sheila Stephanie Martin-Roth contributed an equally compelling chapter that traces the three-thousand year history of auto-mutilation. Beginning with the common practice of tongue splicing in 9th century BC Bithynia and ending with a colorful portrait of a Sing Sing tattoo artist, Martin-Roth places Schoffman squarely within the "body-as-book" tradition.

The basic structure of David's piece is fairly straightforward. For eighteen days, nine hours a day, he sat and stood in the outdoor courtyard of Blumenthal's 300 year old Institut für WarmesBier. Exposing himself to direct sunlight for nearly three weeks, Schoffman's bald head slowly became a parched, rust-colored dome while his unprotected eyes became frozen in a ludicrously shuddersome squint.

Videotaped by renowned fashion photographer Dominique Schlaghhosen, an edited version of the event will have an extended screening next Fall at the Ballybride Museum of Contemporary Art.

David's blisters are all nearly healed and his ability to see is improving daily. When I asked him if he felt the whole ordeal was worth the pain, not the mention the risk he shrugged and said that he felt he really had no choice. "The art world is a competitive place," he confided, "one has to stay relevant, sexy and controversial."


I suppose two out of three isn't bad.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

художник


For one Georgian lari you can send a first class letter from Ipkhi to Tbilisi. Since it declared its independence shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has been issuing its own unique postage stamps. After an unlikely series of coincidences, my newly minted philatelist friend David Schoffman found himself working for the Gori post office.



There's a drinking game, extremely popular around the port cities and fishing villages on the Black Sea. Called Bhkhnic - after the fennel soup traditionally served at Luzhkanic baptisms and weddings - the game can get pretty rowdy and even violent. It starts by people tossing old utility bills into an over-sized milking bucket. Players then reach in, grab an envelope and try to identify the figure depicted on the stamp. For example, the 4 lari express stamp has an engraving of the writer Shio Aragvispireli, the 10 lari air mail stamp depicts the opera singer Golikova Osetrina and the 50 GEL next-day-express stamp has a glowing, embossed dreamy rendering of Vakhtang Gorgasali, the sixth century king of Iberia and founder of Tbilisi.

As part of a movement directed at the reformation of the Georgian character, the Ministry of Culture has decided to discontinue all commemorative stamps, hoping to curb public drunkenness. Boris Azasatryan, under-secretary of rural agriculture and a collector of contemporary art is related by marriage to my lucky friend David.

David and Boris Azasatryan in Sukhumi, 2009
It was Boris who "arranged" for the commissioning of the Schoffman 1 lari stamp. For every stamp purchased, Boris, in a 70 - 30 split, shares 30% of the proceeds with David.


They call it a "Black Sea Back Room Bargain."

Sunday, February 12, 2012

EVERY PATH HAS ITS PUDDLE

Nara Era ritual head. Hand-carved kaya wood 



Like Peter Paul Rubens, in addition to being and accomplished painter, my good friend David Schoffman is an avid collector as well. Whereas Rubens had a weakness for antiquities, cameos and coins, David leans toward the mysterious cult objects of Asia and Africa.


Much of his collection was gathered while traveling. Instead of purchasing his objets d'art from conventional sources he typically finds some disreputable black marketeer and smuggles his trophies past unsuspecting customs agents and easily compromised border guards.

Lacquered Sengoku Head, Japan, 1674

He has an ungovernable passion for fine-cut Natabori single block sculptures of grotesque heads with priapic noses. Five years ago on an ill-fated trip to Japan with the obstreperous orientalist Sir Galwain Thomlinson and his wife, Dahlia Danton, Schoffman brought back no less than five-hundred such heads. Their uneven quality, dubious provenances and questionable authenticities has not deterred Collective 54 from including David in their prominent and highly regarded exhibition series, "Artists Collect."


I've previewed the show (it opens on March 1st) and the installation is truly stunning. The United States Department of the Treasury is currently investigating the collection piece by painstaking piece. If it is determined that any of the works were acquired illicitly or have entered the country improperly, Schoffman may very well be indicted.

All this makes great publicity for Collective 54, (membership has doubled just within the past two weeks), but bodes poorly for my reckless friend David. 

Quelle honte.


Sunday, February 05, 2012

WE SEE ALL THINGS IN GOD


I hate traveling with David Schoffman.

If repose and tranquility are the purpose of a trip, David will only contribute a taut imbalance, a restive agitation and an ornery, fractious element of unpredictability.

The problem is that at this point in his contemptible career he can't go anywhere without being recognized.

Occluded Corridors Installation 2009, London


Ever since his 2009 Occluded Corridors exhibition at Froomie/Mooktza's London gallery - the show that Vivianne Sürtük of The Mail famously described as"a weightless, visionary leap into the unforeseeable gone awry" - David has become, after languishing anonymously as an august, artistic éminence grise, a ridiculously acclaimed public figure.

Everywhere he goes he is flocked, fringed, beleaguered and beset by a crush of adoring admirers. This pestering rabble with their odd sense of entitlement aren't the least bit inhibited in their asphyxiating expressions of untoward intimacy. Perfect strangers think nothing of talking to him, joking with him, touching him, pinching him, caressing him and kissing him as if he were an old friend.

He claims to hate it - and on some level I suppose he does - but I've seen David play the crowd like a panpipe. Enjoy it David, while it lasts! Your great good fortune is as chimerical as a warm winter wind on rue Malebranche.

David with an adoring fan in Parc de la Villette, 2011

Monday, January 02, 2012

BERBER BACCHANAL


Rummaging through some old files the other day (Parisian winters are notorious for inspiring such mindless domesticity), I happened upon a crumpled sketch by my good friend David Schoffman.


 My hardened heart was momentarily stilled at this magical aide-mémoire. It quickly brought me back to that distant quarter of my misspent, dissipated youth.

It was 1980 and David and I were retracing Delacroix's 1832 sojourn through North Africa (or something equally noble and ridiculous). We were staying at the now derelict Hotel-De-Saint Longinus whose long lost luster had something to do with Jimi Hendrix and was always a favorite among drug addled exiles. It was winter in Essaouira and the Atlantic coast was beautiful. 

A quick search on the internet - keywords: Morocco, noir, sheesha, Gnawas - yielded the spectral snapshot below:

Quartier El Fath, Essaouira, Morocco

As far as the inscription on Schoffman's drawing -  semel in ano licet insanire*  - it was, after all New Years so I suppose it speaks for itself.

*Once a year you're allowed to go crazy

Saturday, December 24, 2011

PIOUS MISBELIEF

My dear, articulate friend David Schoffman has started something of a cottage industry, traveling around Latin America and the United States delivering lectures on Micah Carpentier. I find it somewhat disconcerting that not only has he converted the memory of our beloved comrade into a piddling revenue stream but he has also decided to apply a bit of revisionist art history into the mix.

from The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier 1992
 I don't recall ever hearing David criticize Micah's work when Carpentier was alive. Quite the contrary. He was more of an apple polishing groupie, a fawning bootlicker, a groveling flunky, maybe even a bit of a doting yes-man. 

Never critical.

The clip below strikes me as being a bit odd. Recorded recently at Gerstein Hall in downtown Seattle, Schoffman begins his talk with a bit of gentle belligerence. I'm told by a few colleagues who were in attendance that what followed was 55 minutes of uninterrupted bile.

  Micah Carpentier Lecture, Gerstein Hall, Seattle, 2011 (fragment) by dschoffman 

Micah Carpentier

Micah Carpentier Retrospective, Musée  d'Art Contemporain, Côte-Nord

Micah Carpentier



Wednesday, December 21, 2011

LOWBROW MEETS LOWBROW

 
The capacious intellect of my dear friend David Schoffman is only matched by his infinite insecurities. How little he has developed both emotionally and stylistically is in full evidence with the recent publication of Behind The Grey Tail, a heavily redacted collection of David's private journals.


"Diaries," wrote the Slavic poet Rada Mladen, "are the last refuge of the ignored," and I can think of no better description of these 756 monotonous pages of self-absorbed reflection. Schoffman's "insights" give new meaning to the word ordinary. His flat, tedious prose present a near insurmountable obstacle to even the most assiduous reader. 

The only thing that kept me plowing through this turbid text were the many (I believe there are over 500) references to me.

Here are a few examples:

November 11, 1986. Paris
A low wind whispers near ... Currado and I have just returned from a short sojourn in Istanbul. I crumble under his shadow ... the littering leaves of autumn turn the sounds of Paris into a fanfare of snare drum and cymbal. Currado speaks eloquently of Gide ... I scarcely understand.

March 21, 1990. New York
Malaspina's triumph is my collapse. I am annihilated, ruined, silenced by his swaggering domination of the New York artworld. Danto, Smith, Kimmelman, Perl, Kramer, Hickey - they are all falling over themselves singing panegyric homilies, tossing perfumed bouquets at an already bumptious braggart. I can't stand it!!!!

June 1, 1992. Rome
It seems the Malaspina name still has some currency here. It got us a terrific table at La Pergola where the seared tuna with friggitelli is absolutely amazing! 

Only the most devoted Schoffman fans (are there any left?) need explore this book. Save your shekel and wait till the movie comes out. No kidding! The rights were just sold to Crepuscular Pictures for a whopping six figures with serious talk of Dee Martenelli playing the lead.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

THAT'S SHOW BIZ


The Gasp of Love in Terza Rima, a tawdry exhibition I agreed to participate in with my vain and sensitive friend David Schoffman was a bit of a succès de scandale.

I'm afraid David felt a bit slighted by the critical community because ... I suppose ... 

I upstaged him.

Tant pis!