READING MATTERS

North American art magazines aren't what they used to be. When I was an art student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early seventies, in addition to reading Art-das Kunstmagazin, Domus, Cahiers d'Art and Flash I was an assiduous devotée of Arts Magazine, Artforum and Art in America.

Arts no longer exists, Art in America is essentially an infomercial and Artforum is like Andy Warhol's Interview but with bigger words.

A few ambitious critics and intellectuals have been rushing of late to fill the void. One relatively new journal called bvcx  is published in Brooklyn New York by Malmoth Ltd and is edited by Sami Sukah and Françoise Kipur.

The only reason that it caught my eye is because my dear friend David Schoffman sent me a copy.

Ever since we were young, David has always made it a point to passively yet aggressively keep score with me. Every time he had an exhibition, no matter how trivial and insignificant, he would rush to send me an announcement. If he were mentioned in the press or featured on television, I would be promptly notified. (It would be useful to point out that whenever David receives one of his not infrequent, highly critical, negative reviews I am conspicuously left out of the loop).

And such is the case with bvcx. The current issue has a lengthy (and largely incoherent) article about Schoffman and his relationship to the flamboyant and beautiful Los Angeles artist cum diva Dahlia Danton.

I'm not sure if David actually read the article or was merely flattered by the attention. He comes off as vain, grasping and competitive. Anton Mier-Bahn, who wrote the article, is an old friend of mine and is not one who settles for scoring petty rhetorical points. Though the prose is dense with a lot of academic jargon the gist is unmistakable.

The rest of the magazine was rather interesting, especially the article about André Derain's relationship with the Nazis. The layout is very striking as well, though I'm afraid it may diminish from its seriousness.

Table Scraps

Drawing, like prayer, is an implement of hope. My good friend David Schoffman wavers between supplication and dreams as he soldiers hopefully through an abyss of unsubstantiated surmise. He draws constantly with a romantic's infinite longing for completion.

Completion? Does he really expect to complete his one-hundred paneled polyptych in this lifetime?

The Body Is His Book: 100 Paintings Installation, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 2005

Though he rarely allows anyone to see the actual work in progress in his studio, the working drawings for his monumental The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings have been widely disseminated. A small group of studies were recently reproduced in the Italian periodical Verme Vecchio. In a seven-thousand word essay by Professor Enzo Giovanemoglie of Università di Bologna, the drawings were described as "arterial spokes of secular prophecy," ("raggi arteriosi del secolare profezia").  Giovanemoglie goes on to argue that "the glaze of death" ("lo smalto di morte") is never absent from the "processional, melismatic valves of complicated patternings ... [that are the] ... architectural underpinnings of practically all of Schoffman's graphic renderings."

Perhaps

I just think that David has a very nice team of competent assistants.

The Body Is His Book #62, (Unfinished), Oil on panel, 2003 - 2012

BALTIC BABES

When my perennially ambitious friend David Schoffman announced that he planned to paint the portraits of the entire Estonian Men's Olympic Swim Team, I have to admit I thought that he had lost his already truant mind. Now that the results are in (Gallerie Ziodorno T, San Francisco, Aug. 14 - Sept 19), I am certain that all his considerable critical faculties have taken hasty flight.

Portrait of Mats Lepik, Oil on canvas, David Schoffman 2012

In the Bay Area, the obvious appeal of sprightly tinted images of strapping, square-jawed young men is a given. Equally predictable was the eviscerating critical response.

That Schoffman seems utterly indifferent to the judgement of his peers betrays an acute late career decadence as expressed by the likes of Picasso, Derain, DeKooning and Daudet. With his reputation secure and his market value equally robust, David seems to be making a mockery of the entire enterprise of art-making.

Is this the same David Schoffman responsible for the genre defying tour-de-force "The Body Is His Book?"

PLEIN AIR POLITICS

The Neo-Dada Los Angeles artist collective Ars Magna Sciendi is an eccentric offshoot of the much larger and much better known European group Pinakothek. The Los Angeles 'organization' (I use that word reservedly and with no small degree of irony) was founded in 2009 by René Besmorg, Ospizio Priuli and my good friend David Schoffman. Together they have published and produced a wide variety of projects, pamphlets, direct actions, exhibitions, demonstrations, provocations, short films, short manifestos, short-lived offshoots and several actual very real living breathing babies.

Their latest exploit is a curious blend of civics, summer and the enduring appeal of French Impressionism. Together with a small group of (unpaid) interns, Schoffman & co. set out to follow the presidential race. From California to New Hampshire the Ars Magna Sciendi group have been shadowing the candidates and their armies of volunteers. 

Going door to door with satchels of art materials, these crazy Dadaists are literally canvasing prospective voters. Their procedure is simple: In exchange for the supplies (six tubes of acrylic paint, an 18 x 24 inch pre-stretched cotton duck canvas and two #12 synthetic hair brushes) participants are asked to paint a landscape in the style of their favorite impressionist imagined as either a Democrat or a Republican

Emma James, Driggs, Idaho. Fifth Street Park through the eyes of Gustave Caillebotte as a Tea Party Republican, 2012

The results are rather astonishing. Schoffman and his collaborators will be continuing the project until the November election. The paintings will be exhibited in the spring of 2013 at the Museé de l'Art Brut in Neuchatel, Switzerland.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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!!!

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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 Relief,  Installation, 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 .

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.

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."

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.

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