ULTIMATUM

My dear friend David Schoffman is considered by some to be an artist of only collateral significance. He is generally perceived to be a man capable of dazzling facility only to be hopelessly encumbered by the damp bog of third-rate, secondhand, stillborn ideas.

This assessment may be corrosive but it is well-deserved. His ecumenical approach to art and culture is simply unhygienic.

 He seems determined to alienate his peers and further anger his enemies. He is the anti-networker, the lonely gadfly, the elevator flatulator and the clamorous self-rightious contrarian. Unsurprisingly, his recently published Syllabus of Errors will earn him few new friends.  

A manifesto containing no less than 80 artistic offenses, this odd document appears to be rather catholic in its condemnations.

Take for example Error no. 56: 

Any reference, allusion, quotation or tangential association with popular culture damns a work to the purgatory of the fugitive, the temporal and the temporary. It is therefore unsustainable for serious works of art to engage in any dialectic which relies on faddish extra-artistic references. 

  If I'm reading this correctly this puts the full kabosh on the likes of artists like Giotto whose frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel were essentially the Tin Tin of the Trecento.

To be perfectly candid I've had it with Schoffman's bookish, brainy, highbrow hijinks. If he succeeds in alienating me he'll have nobody left and that would be error number 81. 

LIES, LIES AND MORE LIES

Artists are a sectarian bunch. They defend their fictions with an unguarded vehemence. They cling to the conceit of their own election. Their alleged agency is like a prized heirloom of conveniently forgotten provenance. Oh, how they gasp at their imagined stature among the Titans!

That they do so is only evidence of an existential terror for as Leopardi famously noted, "Man is stupefied to see in his own case that the general rule is shown to be true."

In the case of my dear deluded and paranoid friend David Schoffman the general rule is that artists, or for that matter people in general, can and do learn to draw adequately well. Somehow, he has convinced himself that he alone is the last honest draftsman, the lonely standard bearer of line, the Cronus of color, the Cerberus of form.

Seeing the World at a Slant, watercolor and ink.

His sketches can indeed be interesting, but just that and no more. They bare his stamp the way bedsheets carry the imprint of a sleeper - unique, yes, but not terribly so. Swift quirky scrawls, a few quick splashes of muted color, a clever arrangement of solids and voids and voilà a Schoffman! 

Unfortunately he feeds on the fermented honey of highly inflated critical acclaim. The recent Figura y Forma exhibition at El Palacio de los Tres Encantos in the newly renovated downtown of Logroño featured no less than fifteen of David's inkwash hors d'oeuvres. One critic gushed about the "damp, lacerating reservoir of feverish lubricity in every stroke of the pen" ("húmedo, lacerante depósito de lubricante con fiebre en cada trazo de la pluma"). Another described the drawings as "curt, clever cadenzas of chiaroscuro and a pageant of plangent depictions of hot flesh" ("cadencias inteligentes rápidos de claroscuros y un desfile de representaciones plañidera de carne caliente ").

Danton and Schoffman in Los Angeles, 2013

Schoffman has now persuaded himself that the jewel of genius is his and his alone. The delusion is so complete that he has accused his fellow Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton of the larcenous lifting of his linear ideas. He thinks he owns these shallow contraptions whose only virtues lie in their playful competence and quaint conventionality.  

Danton, to her credit, does not bother to attach any blathering hyperbole to her copious cache of sketches. When asked about the work by Vernissage editor Dolphy Cane, she confessed to "dashing them off at bus stops, in taxis and whenever I have a few idle moments where I need to pass the time."

Brueghel's Meat-Mill, pen and ink, 8 x 6 inches, Dahlia Danton, 2013

Bus stops and taxi!?

In Los Angeles???  

DIAZEPAM OR MARZIPAN

For some the ravelled sleeve of care fades like a dying animal as soon as the heads hits the pillow. Others toss in spasms of discomfort until the balm of black night lulls their consciousness into bewildered oblivion. For my good friend David Schoffman there is no tepid torpor that dims his active mind. For David sleep is just another form of work.

The clouds don't open nor do exquisite visions appear before him like necessary angels. He hears neither voices nor is he visited by the dead. What happens to David while he sleeps is the product of a disciplined meditation, a specific diet (beets and lentils in olive oil consumed slowly no less than three hours before retiring) and tight pajamas, especially around the armpits and groin. 

What he hopes to induce with this unusual regimen are dreams frozen in pictorial frames that he can adapt in the studio upon awakening. This admittedly eccentric practice is one derived from the Hualapai Indians of northern Arizona where elders typically rely on sleep and peyote buttons the way we might depend on psychoanalysis to tap the chords of buried motivation. (Beets and lentils may not be as effective as peyote but David finds them safer and easier to digest).

On any given night, a few faded recollections lodge themselves like flinty bayonets into the stream of Schoffman's thoughts forcing him out of the bed to make a few quick sketches.  

Dream Drawing #1877, watercolor and ink on paper, David Schoffman 1998

"I haven't slept a full night in thirty years," he told me the other day, concentric rings the color of bathroom mildew girdle his eyes as evidence. 

 
I'm not sure if all this is worth the effort, after all, David isn't the first artist hoping to open the doors of perception in unconventional ways.

I suggested, years ago, that he dispense with his silly rituals and enjoy a couple of pieces of candy before going to bed. Both Orwell and Sainte-Beuve did this and they swore it helped their writing. 

Another approach might be a nightly snifter of brandy and a couple of valium.

A HOLLOW CORE OF COMPULSION

There's more than a touch of madness in the character and in the work of my dear friend David Schoffman. That he labors for many many years on the same small paintings is evidence enough of a slight imbalance. That these very same paintings show absolutely no sign of progress despite his slow, methodical tinkering only strengthens my impression. 

 Traditionally, we think of our great artists as slightly unhinged though in fairness, Schoffman's debility is neither slight nor is his artistic vision particularly great. He is essentially of average competence, of limited ingenuity and is rather mannered and predictable in his eccentricities. 

What he does have is a fancy German magnifying glass. This contraption is so powerful you can see the dandruff fly off the scalp of a tick. He also has an army of small kolinsky horse-hair brushes. They're fashioned with only a handful of bristles but when their tips come to a point you can use them to hijack a plane.

Untitled unfinished oil on canvas, David Schoffman 2006 - present

But what my friend has most of all, the one reliable quality that he leans on like a bus shelter is what we call in French la contrainte d'un assassin or the patient constancy of a killer. David shrewdly lies in wait and with calculated perseverance and a lenient sense of his own mortality he hovers over tiny details, luring his pictures into a state of menial, minute, fetishistic obsession.

What a miserable, futile and embarrassing waste of time!

NO ATTONMENT FOR APPROPRIATION

For some reason, my good friend David Schoffman operates under the convenient illusion that if he trots out his undeniably impressive credentials the art-loving public will overlook the flimsiness of his work. The fact that his paintings are included within the collections of countless august institutions is only a sad reflection on the credulity of the curatorial class. He thinks that the splendid tally of fellowships and grants, long enough to fill a Qumran scroll, obscures the shamelessly derivative approach he takes to picture making.

For a glaring example, let's take Schoffman's portentously titled oil on canvas  The Plague Full Swift.

The Plague Full Swift, oil on canvas, David Schoffman, 2009 (Courtesy of the Musée de la Calomnie, Dunkerque)

This harmless little bauble, gaudily pigmented with lapidary azure blues, tropical greens and sanguinary reds lustily rusted to a dissonant crisp is nothing but an over-worked refry of the 1964 grisaille masterpiece of Micah Carpentier.

Cuánta Sombra en mi Alma, oil on plywood, Micah Carpentier, 1964 (courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Madrid)

That Schoffman shows no remorse in his piracy, no anguish in his flagrantly unattributed looting of the great Cuban master's imagery and legacy is but one more signal of the utter demise of artistic decency and virtue. 

Hiding behind the tattered veil of post-modernism, Schoffman's poverty of imagination, tethered as it is to his professional success, is justified and even lauded by the critics as a conceptual triumph.  

May my dear friend be inscribed in the Book of Grifters & Frauds, Charlatans & Double-Dealers .... Amen

2.025: IT IS FORM AND CONTENT (L.W. Like!)

By now it's a tired cliché to talk about the waning of our collective attention span. To state that electronic gadgets and devices have infantilized us into driveling philistines is not a particularly original observation. 

 My beloved France is currently awash in mindless high tech applications promoting greater efficiency and wiser time management. The fact that they produce the exact opposite result has escaped no one. But if France is crazy about technology then the U.S. is a raving psychopath at a dopamine festival.  I'm no de Tocqueville but on my last trip to the U.S. I found the change in the American character quite breathtaking, especially among its many gifted visual artists.

Which brings me to my distracted colleague David Schoffman. He is a profoundly changed man. 

This former serious and high-minded artist has become an indentured servant to the tiny screens and chirping ear buds that have come to dominate our imaginative landscape.

It's not his over-saturated Instagram close-ups of hummingbirds and azaleas that bother me so much nor is it his obsessive consultation of the Twitter feed of someone who goes by the name "shelonglegs." I know plenty of well-meaning, reasonable and intelligent people who do the same sort of thing. Even his unflappable devotion to Facebook with all its panegyric flatteries and trivial encomiums doesn't bother me all that much.  

I suppose what I find most galling and exasperating is the slow gradual dissolution of the vital character of David's once formidable intellect. 

Right before I left Los Angeles I caught my dear friend giddy and transfixed as he watched a short video of zoo lions masturbating to Mozart.

I suppose anything is better than adorable kittens.

 

JACOB AND ESAU

It would foolish to pretend that a life spent staring at unfinished canvases coldly confronting one's glaring inadequacies on a daily basis would be a life void of anxiety or stress. 

For well over a decade my dear friend David Schoffman has been laboring like a serf on a series of works whose ultimate resolution has been as elusive as a sperm whale. Every attempt, every botched opportunity, every missed metaphor has etched a line deep into David's dented temple. Every failure of form, every misdirected shape has sewn another wrinkle around my good friend's milky blue eyes.

He is not broken but he is aged, his hair, white as laundry soap, has thinned into fine meek meadows of downy dander.

Schoffman in front of the still unfinished painting The Covenant of Otto (left: 1999, right: 2013)

Some say he has gone slightly mad. As evidence they cite his forgetfulness, his sudden flights of dreamy inattention and his sloppy, frivolous and amateurish drawings.

Gone is his stridency, his vinegary wit and his eloquent, dinner party disquisitions delivered extempore under the spell of excessive spirits. David is now diminished, even dull, slowed by the solvent vapors of his studio, a toxic cocktail of turpentine, cadmium and lead. His former effulgence has been replaced by a mild composure and a disinterested complacency.

And so The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings remains unfinished and David's draining energy is absorbed more and more by crossword puzzles, the dog park and his silly little watercolors.

The competitive side of me rejoices in David's inactivity. Of all my contemporaries it has always been Schoffman who represented the only palpable threat to my dominance. Together with me and a couple of other hardened art world veterans we have occupied the thin, brittle peak of critical preeminence reducing our colleagues to virtual insignificance. And now that Schoffman has been laid low by fatigue and infirmity I'd be lying if I claimed to be sorry.

But David Schoffman is a cunning little bastard.

 Could all this be nothing but a diabolical ploy?  

MIRROR IMAGES

Under the veil  that buries my dear friend David Schoffman within his weighty, dyspeptic gloom, there is, if one examines closely enough, a faint glimmer of guarded hope or maybe even a blur of qualified joy.

There just might be some muted merriment or even maybe a bit of foolish optimism burrowed beneath his mystic disquiet. His cautious tranquility comes and goes and one must be patient and loving in order to sense exactly when his hard crust will soften enough to allow some light into his wounded heart.

For this reason, his recent collaboration with the poet Nassif Değirmenci is an event worth watching.

Nassif Değirmenci with his favorite chair,  2013

Highly esteemed for his beautiful Turkish translations of traditional Laz poetry,  Değirmenci is less well-known for his original work in Shivrani (Daghestani) Arabic. Working principally in the Kesideh or 'purpose-poem' motif, Değirmenci's work covers large narrative themes with sweeping digressions and lush, descriptive imagery. In the Muweshih of the Virgin, probably his most ambitious work, the story of Nweh and her seven year betrothal to the vizier Tamim goes on for nearly 900 pages.

Schoffman first became interested in Değirmenci's work after seeing the TED Talk of Mosul-based film critic, Eugene Alfaq. The twenty minute lecture was ostensibly about "that which gets lost in cross-cultural translation" but ironically what it touched on more poignantly was the stuff that actually survives. He used Değirmenci's as a case study, citing him as someone who is comfortable writing in several semitic languages and who uses them all with great discretionary skill.  

The following examples should be emblematic:

Değirmenci's 1997 sonnet Nartik was deliberately written in Hebrew in order to more freely express his ideas about lust and longing. Chavib, by contrast, was originally composed in Sayhadic precisely for the opposite reason. And to avail himself of its rhyme-rich vocabulary, History Lesson 2 was written in classical Akkadian (and translated by the author into Italian terza rima).

The list goes on and on. 

But what ultimately drew Schoffman toward Değirmenci was their mutual and abiding passion for American jazz.  They decided to work together on a series of classic improvisations, coupling David's colorful, geometric paintings with Nassif's discursively baroque verse.

David and Nassif in Değirmenci's Beirut apartment, June 2013

The results so far are rather stunning. The painting below was a spontaneous response to one of Nassif's first attempts at writing poetry in English - a sestina entitled Grapeskin.

Playing the Dozens, oil on canvas, David Schoffman 2013

  
And so the effluvium of despair has temporarily lifted from the tortured shoulders of my dear friend David. Now if he could only find a durable remedy for his chronic hemorrhoids.

LEANING IN AVANT LA LETTRE

David Schoffman and Dahlia Danton

My good friend David Schoffman is an easy going chap who typically keeps his strident opinions to himself. His very public row with the glamorous Los Angeles artist Dahlia Danton has been a conspicuous and undignified exception.

They recently appeared on a panel together at the voguish Galerie des Choses discussing the legacy of Tamara Trentpole, the reclusive New Mexican  artist who died last December. Known for her imaginary landscapes, Trentpole worked in complete obscurity until the Brooklyn-based curator, Spark Boon, chanced upon her paintings at a rummage sale while visiting his parents at their retirement community in Tucumcari. 

Fake Lake, Tamara Trentpole, oil on board, 1953

 A hastily assembled exhibition traveled the country and was greeted by a wide range of critical responses. Trentpole's inoffensive paintings somehow became a litmus test for one's relationship to modernism, feminism, capitalism and the role of social media in determining taste. 

Dahlia Danton delivering her paper "Trentpolarization" at the Scranton Center for Contemporary Art, July 2013

 According to Schoffman, Danton's presentation was an "encyclopedic laundry list of politically correct platitudes woven into a fictional narrative, marinated in a toxic cocktail, laced with childish fantasy and wishful thinking."

Danton counters that Schoffman's obduracy is symptomatic of "the entrenched interests of tenured academia and east coast elitists who still  designate Cézanne as the original (male) Modernist at the expense of other, equally important female and transgender figures." Danton cites the pioneering research of Orestia Shestov and her tireless attempts at the rehabilitation of American expatriate artist, Faun Roberts.

(from left to right) Oh Jardin!, Faun Roberts, 1919 and Still Life with Bottle, Cézanne, 1895

To Schoffman, this is merely a futile attempt at revising the canon of art history for the puposes of naked self-promotion. David believes that by disengenuously comparing apples to melons Danton is turning her special pleading into a political crusade.

Seeing this as a golden opportunity, the ever entrepreneurial Boon has organized a series of Danton/Schoffman debates, culminating this fall in a two-person show at New York's Spinzter and Reyes' uptown gallery.

It seems that the art world finally has it's own Ali/Frazier extravaganza. Painterly pugilists going toe to toe should be an entertaining highlight of the upcoming art season!

PERFUMED EXEGESIS AND GUILTY BLISS

Within the wide and divisive range of language-based, post-modern hybridized and allegorical works are the metonymical masterpieces of my good friend David Schoffman. Linguistically baroque with ornamental twists and cross-referenced rebus-like projections whose decentered subjectivity are but a sly and ironic ruse, David's work rewards only after extremely close reading.

In fact, his complicated and hermetic practice requires such close analysis and deep intellectual scrutiny few ever bother endeavoring at the task to begin with.

It's perhaps ironic that this skilled stylist of academic English prose is neglected in his own native country yet revered like a saint here in France. It is to the credit of his translator, Chanelle-Clanddi Bara that David's highly nuanced texts with their ingenious puns and double entendres are rendered so fluidly in a foreign tongue.

Nonetheless, my dear friend is embittered. He wants nothing less than the full appreciation of his American peers. He is frustrated at what seems to him as a debilitating opacity and an unhealthy distrust of what he adorably calls "Nietzschean perspectivism." In a recent exhibition at the Palais Fongus de Mer in Limeuil David presented a piece entitled Regressive Desublimation which seemed specifically aimed at his American detractors. Though it dealt primarily with generative schemes of perception and hyperbolic ideological consecrations, the allusions to the sub-sets of unambiguously American interpellates were as clear as they were damning.

And so to make ends meet and to amuse his restless and highly animated visual appetites, David, with chalk, ink, graphite and every other primitive tool of human handiwork, fills countless sketchbooks with lovely lyrical drawings.

He sells these under an assumed name and is rewarded for his efforts quite handsomely. Discretion and tact prevent me from betraying his secret in full but come this October, New York's Meier-Graefe and Meade will devote all of their 2000 square foot gallery to these charming, well-crafted baubles.

ARTIST FOR A NEW AGE

At one point, after reaching the infancy of his impending old age, my good friend David Schoffman decided to collect a compendium of his earlier indiscretions, examine the sum of his comic misadventures (of which there were quite a few), and turn them all, (some might say redeem them) toward some good (dare I say, commercial) use. He felt the need to create some sort of spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk, an extravagant porridge of verse, painting, prose, music, monumental kinetic sculpture and massive, high definition video projection in order to capture the wide range of his experiences and the profound depth his feelings.

Instead he started a blog.

At first it was quite successful, even viral, if I may play upon the theme of pestilence. His short vignettes were full of charming aperçus, self-deprecating ironic observations and tentative conclusions that resembled earlier great essayists like Shestov, Van Yost, Hazlitt and Montaigne.

Then suddenly David went dark. 

His essays, or to use the argot of current currency, his posts, became scurrilous streams of capricious vitriol, score-settling screeds of venomous, calumnous, even libelous invective and at times reached the depraved, rarefied point of menacing, thunderous intimidation. 

Of course, that was the point when they started to become really entertaining.

But alas, it was all so short-lived. After several lifestyle adjustments such as intermittent acupunture, the banishment of lactose, gluten and lard, an aqua-cycling/yoga class and a strict eschewal of Russian literature, David went back to painting his puny, insignificant pictures with their lovely colors and their cheaply thrilling plays of light and illusion.  

THE MYSTERIES OF ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

Los Angeles artist David Schoffman nurses a desperate need for reassurance. His Delphic exterior is merely a mask for his timorous, almost mousy disposition. 

I met my dear friend in Rotterdam a few weeks ago as he was preparing for his most recent exhibition. Even the title of the show betrayed his deep-seated insecurities.

Made up mostly of notebooks, post-its and clumsy sketches drawn on the backs of napkins, fax paper and ATM receipts the show is a case study in reticence.

Replete with elaborate graphic outlines of unconsummated projects, the show is like a dirge to the deferred, the delayed and the under-funded. What emerges is a sad portrait of a fragmented imagination that is more comfortable with failure than with hope.

Sketch for Immorality, 2009 (courtesy of the artist and Te Veel Swerts Gallery)

Dining out on a questionable reputation for clairvoyant genius, David is able to pass off these puny meanderings as nascent seedlings of potential revelation. (It should be noted that though much admired in Europe, Schoffman remains a marginal presence in his native Los Angeles). 

The credulous Dutch critics were duly cowed.

These past few years have seen a flurry of exhibitions both large and small from my over-productive pal David. While the pundits and academics parse through his every nuance, Schoffman consults with his over-taxed accountant, trying to catch up on his child support payments.

MIDDLEBROW IS THE NEW HIGHBROW

Editions Boyaux has recently released
La densité de mensonges, a riveting though often exasperating memoir by my dear friend David Schoffman.

David Schoffman vacationing in Cyprus, 2013

Why he chose to write this loosely chronological picaresque autobiography in French is an interesting question. (He is currently laboring over its English translation).

A private, guarded and openly misanthropic individual, David probably found it easier to be frank in a foreign language. His French is of the plodding and academic variety, more suited for a Citroën owner's manual than for a work of literary non-fiction. Luckily the Belgian screenwriter Brigitte Chimay Straffe (The Fourth Policewoman, Tchaikovsky's Armoire, Devils) worked tirelessly as his editor and walking Larousse. 

 

As the title suggests, much of the text should be taken with more than a grain of kosher salt.  
The frequently cited anecdote concerning the menagerie of pets seems dubious at best. Likewise the story about David's awkward "romance" with Louise Bourgeois. 

All in all the book is an entertaining read, especially for those unfamiliar with the foibles of artistic dissipation. Several European production companies are vying for the rights but David is wisely waiting for the English translation and the book's reception in Hollywood.

A WOMAN SCORNED

After decades of unambiguous unanimity, a fissure, a fracture and an irreconcilable set of bitterly contentious differences has destabilized the academic and critical communities beyond recognition. A new generation of scholars and specialists seem hell bent on reversing years and years of rock-ribbed canonical orthodoxy. Heading the charge is none other than Dahlia Danton whose recent reinvention as an independent critic and curator has left more than a few of her colleagues deeply skeptical if not outright suspicious.

Dahlia Danton in David Schoffman's Culver City studio. 2013

Like many a bolshevik before her, the first privileged targets of her merciless and wrathful revisions have been her closest friends. With hyphenated hyperbole she has called Ximena Lukacs an "anti-philosophical floosie," Moïse St. Pierre a "flat-footed, ham-fisted aesthetic technocrat" and her former protégé Spark Boon an "out-dated and out-numbered dabbler in antique bric-a-brac."

She saved her most venomous and malignant prose for my dear compagnon de route, David Schoffman. Comparing him to Ingres (whom she glibly described as "tight-assed), Danton contends that David dwells in an hermetic bubble where making art masquerades as a noble and ethical enterprise. She challenges what she calls "the metaphysical ballast that constrains his work within an artificial architecture of tact and reason."

She sites his grand project The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings as evidence for what she describes as "the loathsome onanistic artisanship where quality and depth act as embarrassing exercises in pitiable nostalgia." 

from The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings, no.76, 2013, David Schoffman

Danton famously wrote in a 2011 essay in the online journal Art(test) that "errors of regression under the shroud of formal significance are detached but never exempt from modernity." She seems to believe that by separating herself from her former colleagues she can successfully allude, in her own ouevre, the "shroud" of obsolescence.

I just think she's still mad at Schoffman because of his indiscreet dalliance with Orestia Shestov.

´Echec Déchet

My good friend David Schoffman is a wonderful raconteur. In fact, his story telling talents far exceed his limited gifts as an illustrator. This is both fortunate and tragic as evidenced by his latest literary venture, J'accuzzi, a lushly illuminated travelogue of south-central France.

The premise -admittedly, quite novel - is a lush, annotated tour across the vast network of thermal spa resorts of the Massif Central.

from J'accuzzi, by David Schoffman (Librairie Nouveau Déchets), 2013

From the hedge-row valleys of the Bourbonnais to the narrow gorges of Ardèche and Cévennes, Schoffman takes us on a cyclonic junket through the great furrow of the Rhône. From the mesa of Aubrac to the volcanoes of Auvergne, David describes in excruciating detail every resort and every amenity.

In a prose as luxurious as the casinos of Vichy, David captures everything from the optimistic Belle-Époque architecture of Néris to the austere Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul. All along the way, he regales us with small portraits and illuminating vignettes of the eccentric people who frequent these oases of remedy and leisure.

While his watercolored images are in welcome contrast to the typically high definition digital imagery we've grown accustomed to in these types of coffee table publications their obvious aesthetic shortcomings hinder the work's overall effect.
 

from J'accuzzi, by David Schoffman (Librairie Nouveau Déchets), 2013

 Though I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is for this type of "book" it's interesting to note that the publisher, Librairie Nouveau Déchets, has already deleted it from its catalog.

BAMBOOZLED

On a recent trip to St. Petersburg, my good friend David Schoffman had the great good fortune to witness a milestone in modern art history. He was having tea at the Lagoda Rossi Café with the miniaturist Grod Bloch when Daphne Vhrozhinska of the State Russian Museum waltzed through the door. She was arm and arm with Los Angeles painter Dahlia Danton and both, in Schoffman's colorful retelling, looked stunning.

Dahlia Danton, St Petersburg, 2013

It should be remembered that Russian collectors seem to have an insatiable appetite for Danton's kitchy California confections and  her presence in St. Petersburg can hardly seem like an unlikely coincidence. As for her intimacy with the State Russian Museum's senior conservator - that is a different story. It seems that her expert eye and her fluency in Spanish made her a critical collaborator in Vhrozhinska's latest project.

The recently discovered Nido de la Víbora, Micah Carpentier's putative final work was undergoing a thorough cleaning by the nimble Russian restorer and Danton was called upon to verify the great Cuban's signature. My dear friend David asked to see the work - Carpentier and Schoffman had a warm and productive relationship in the late 1970's - though he was skeptical of the works authenticity.

Before you could say русский супрематизм, David was inspecting the 9 foot wide drawing, looking for hints of duplicity and fraud.

David Schoffman inspecting Nido de la Víbora, 2013

He didn't have to look very hard. 

As any art student will tell you Sakura Sensei Manga Markers come in an assortment of vivid, lightfast luminous colors. When they came on the market in 1989, they were an instant favorite among doodlers, Pokémon geeks and professional illustrators. Nido de la Víbora contains whole passages using these versatile markers.

My readers don't need to be reminded that Micah Carpentier was murdered in Havana in 1978.

 

ERROR IS BORN OF SEEMING

You don't have to be John Maynard Keynes to see that the People's Republic Inc. has traded the quaint quotations of Mao's Little Red Book for Gordan Gekkos Reaganite call to arms. And as my readers know all too well, there is no greater gauge of freshly coined arrivisme than an avidly superficial obsession with contemporary art.

Combine these two facts with my good friend's occult sense of opportunity and you get (pace John Adams)

Schoffman In China!

David Schoffman in a recent edition of the New Xinjiang Review

  He recently returned from a three week trip which took him from the far reaches of Shihezi in the northwest to the capital Beijing and finally to the pearl of the Pearl River, Guangzhou.

Officially he was there as an ambassador of sorts. appointed by Veronique Airys, the President's special liaison for international museum and library studies, to represent America at the annual Conference of Sense-Based Intelligence and Rhetoric in Hong Kong. (I kid you not, such a conference exists). In reality he was there pimping his declining career. 

He delivered a paper harmlessly entitled "The Self-Cartographies of Performative and Spatial Praxis," and though in substance it was a boilerplate of starched, salvaged and reconditioned aperçus, it was met with heated, sectarian controversy. Apparently, David's Chinese hosts were none too thrilled by his tiring use of the phrase "post-Marxist" as a lazy euphemism for anything that occurred anywhere in the world after 1989.

Though they basically left him alone during the rest of his trip they did attach to him a small, discreet surveillance team. 

[Note the arrows. The arrow on the upper left of the photograph points to a tiny camera fixed to the sign above a small souvenir shop. The other two arrows point to, what the Chinese lovingly call "undercover spotters."]

Tentative plans for an exhibition of David's work at Beijing's Bee Museum were summarily scraped. 

Pity.

He had already begun work on some pretty decent paintings.

Sleeping Buddha Sleeping, David Schoffman. Oil on Canvas, 2013