Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A FINGER IN THE EYE OF THE ACADEMY


As he tells it, when my good friend David Schoffman was a small child, his father would reward him with a silver dollar each time he completed reading a book forever creating the defective connection between intellectual achievement and financial well-being.

This would prove to be a critical misunderstanding later in life when he sought a tenured position at one of the many highly bureaucratized universities that dot the American pedagogical landscape. 

An exhibition record as long as a whale's back was of little use as were two highly acclaimed University Press studies on Hölderlin's influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Equally ineffectual was David's short stint at the State Department as cultural liaison with Islamabad in the late 1980's. Ironically, even his fluency in French and Hebrew was held against him as it was seen as skills associated with privilege and class. 

So after nearly ten years as an adjunct and associate professor David was summarily let go into the academic wilderness as an unemployed and unemployable over-educated elitist. 

But there is a happy ending.

At the urging of some of his tech savvy former students Schoffman has embarked on a new and potentially more stable career as a podcaster, a profession, he wryly points out, that is omitted from the official American Association of University Career Counselors Internship and Jobs Handbook. 

He currently has a following of over 600,000 regular listeners and a Twitter account equally bloated with devoted fans.  

Though he has yet to fully monetize this incredible turn of events, for the time being he is fully enjoying his new found fame. As he said in a recent podcast, "to think I used to feel gratified when my graduate seminar Structuralism, Surrealism and the Hollywood Blockbuster was fully enrolled."

Sunday, February 16, 2014

MY VAGUE SURMISE


The Bar-Yishai Codex, leaf XXVI (courtesy of the Fleishmann Institute, Vienna)


The Bar-Yishai Codex discovered in 1922 in the Great Geniza of Fez is a mystifying document. The incoherent text encased within a chaotic mise en page and jacketed in a rugged lambskin binding has puzzled specialists on four continents. Theories abound but no conclusive thesis has yet to receive a consensus.

Even the date of its composition is a matter of fierce debate.

Some are convinced that it's a late 17th century Central European work containing a hybrid of alchemical recipes and Lurianic invocations of messianic longing. Others believe that it's just the meandering musings of a devout North African mystic lunatic that found its way to the geniza by the meager virtue of its sacramental orthography. There is even some speculation that it's actually a Christian document from southern Spain and it refers to the odd ascetic practices of the 14th century Augustinian cult of Sacellum Rebellem.

What we do know for certain is that my good friend David Schoffman, after many tired years of dabbling, groping and hopeless magical thinking, believes he has finally stumbled upon his "large and meaningful" grand subject matter.

To David the Bar-Yishai Codex with its obscure mesmeric ornamentation and uncertain provenance provide the perfect appeal to an uncritical public addicted to riddles and mysteries. It gives his work a new imprimatur of sphinx-like seriousness and wishful erudition. 

Bar-Yishai Codex no. 4, oil on linen, David Schoffman, 2014
Absent the flimsy underpinnings, David's new paintings would hardly stand on their own. Their conventional formatting and almost careless execution would be inexcusable without the stanchion of so-called scholarly speculation.

And yet the critics were conned and bullied into believing that here at last are the grave and resolute works befitting our times.

Bar-Yishai Codex no. 6, oil on linen, David Schoffman, 2014
David is quick to remind his unskeptical public that years have gone into his research and that he has digested volumes of learned texts in order to bring to light these allegedly important works.

His timing, of course, is impeccable.

The current backlash against technology and social media has resulted in a romantic craving for the old and the hand-made. Here at last is an artist who uses neither irony nor kitsch to get his points across. That it is insufficient for an artist to be defined merely by what he is not is a point that for the moment remains rather elusive.

Put simply, David's getting a free pass because nobody want to risk seeming stupid. That most critics and curators fear the perception of appearing anti-semitic doesn't hurt either. 

The very tangible possibility that the Codex is a forgery seems only to have occurred to me.

So far ...

 

Thursday, February 06, 2014

THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY


The fruitless folly of sustained effort and unrequited longing .

That was how my good friend David Schoffman summed up his early attempts at attracting the attention of art dealers, curators and critics. "The knaves would have nothing of it. They gnawed at my heels with contempt. They toyed with my desperate insecurities and maliciously heaped an acrid stench of stern rebuke with the corrupt impunity of tyrants. Like dogs they nibbled on my soul, their blunted fangs burrowing deep into the marrow of hurt and rejection. They took me for a fool until of course they couldn't any longer, but I refuse to forget and I will never forgive."

Gunther Broadstreet
He reserved his harshest comments for Gunther Broadstreet, the former editor and chief of Art Abandon who dined regularly on David's liver during those long, lean years. He was the last to finally champion Schoffman's work but in a shameless amnestic way. In a naked attempt to expiate his former disregard, Broadstreet has become the loudest and most hyperbolic of David's admirers.

"That blustering old goat gives windbags a bad name," is David's take on the matter, "I'd make him eat cadmium before I'd give him the time of day."

And he was only getting started
What has occasioned this retrospective summery of snubs, slights and discourtesies is the filming of a new documentary about contemporary artists by the prize winning filmmaker Abrahamine Artaud. Self-consciously fashioned in the manner of the 1973 classic Painters Painting the movie features interviews of all the usual suspects revealing few surprises and fewer insights. Unlike its more candid predecessor, this current project, tentatively titled Equivocating Artists, is nothing but a fanfare of sophistry, politesse and unprincipled self-promotion. 

Still from Equivocating Artists, 2014. (Courtesy of Tainted Pictures and Abrahamine Artaud)

 The notable exception being the seven minute forty-two second verbal hemorrhage by my angry friend Schoffman.

Gunther Broadstreet
 Broadstreet, who refused to be photographed, was courtly, insincere and conspicuously contrite. 

Friday, January 24, 2014

THE DEFINITION OF MEN


Every winter my fortunate friend David Schoffman ties a tray of cheap watercolors to a rickety French fold-up easel and acts the gentleman amateur. While some seek summer respite under the blesséd skies of the South, my contrarian colleague chooses January to move his steaming, over-cooked kettle from the California flame. Like Bowles and Burroughs before him, David has found a small slice of paradise in the northern Moroccan port town of Tangier.

Schoffman in Tangier, 2014
He rises each day at dawn when the grey peaks of Andalusia are barely visible over the Strait. After a strong cup of Turkish coffee and a warm fresh sfenj from the local makhbaz he begins his trek through town looking for the perfect painterly motif.

Some say it's a sign of waning ambition, others are less charitable, seeing it as an augury of imminent instability. I see it as merely a tepid tribute to a middling talent whose promise was betrayed by the misfortune of unearned and premature professional preeminence .

How else does one explain the reams of unresolved doodles that are perennially tacked to the walls of his Los Angeles studio? Why is it that when quizzed, as he was recently by the Guardian critic Shoshana Temehu about the small scale of his recent work his stock reply was "even Ezra Pound had trouble with the long form?"

When one makes the simple calculation it becomes glaringly evident that save for a few eager years early in his career, David has been most comfortable making pretty little pictures whose commercial accessibility can only be matched by their conceptual irrelevance.  

Don't get me wrong. I love the guy and I deeply respect his work ethic and admire his formidable intellect. It's just that it is simply undignified for a grown man to devote so much effort to painting lovely little watercolors and then attempt to dress them up with some fancy theoretical shroud of academic dissimulation. 

When I hear him describe his work as "disruptive analogs of taste," or "flagrant assaults upon visual intersubjectivity," I feel a throbbing, woozy jolt gnawing within the viscera that can only be described as sea-sickness . 

 When he tries to pass off a darkened view of the Gibraltar port, as he recently did in a CBC interview, as "a cautious gaze at the unanalogous," my throat tightens and my breathing becomes labored and dangerously uneven. 

Why, you may ask, do I let him get to me in this way?

Simple.

Naked, unabashed, chest-thumping, ball-scratching rivalry.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

A GREAT MIND SPEAKS OUT


Tomer Tamar is one of the great names of modern letters. Accomplished poet, esteemed though greatly feared critic, playwright, aphorist, polemicist, political speechwriter and professor, Dr. Tamar has spent a lifetime illuminating and elucidating the world of ideas.

Dr. Tomer Tamar, watercolor on paper, Serge Mahfouz
After years of championing the work of my good friend David Schoffman, it appears that Tamar has finally gone rogue.

Thirty years ago while serving as editor and chief of the now defunct periodical Eruditio Humanitas, the professor was a tireless advocate not only of Schoffman but also of the entire band of expatriate miscreants who flooded the bars and bistros of la Rue de Rennes in the early 80's.  No superlative was too hyperbolic for the dazzled don. It seemed that every other week some essay would surface extolling the visionary genius of this American insurgent. Needless to say a noisy claque of malcontents from l'École nationale supérieure simmered with both a vehement and a jingoistic vintage of bitter resentment.

I too was among them.



We cried foul but to no avail. Dr. Tamar remained unmoved. It was as if he had a gambling debt or was the subject of blackmail. One day Schoffman was the heir apparent to Derain the next he was the visual equivalent to Lacan or the visionary twin of Lévi-Strauss. It was obviously all just flagrant unabashed connerie but the professor was so powerful at the time that nobody had the nerve to challenge him.

Now that the esteemed scholar has retired from public life and is living in quiet retirement in Samois sur Seine his ardor has cooled and his influence has waned into near irrelevance. I would love to report that his memoirs have been eagerly awaited but that would be a gross exaggeration. The fact is, after all these years he had trouble finding a publisher.

As a courtesy I received an advanced copy and I confess that the first thing I did was scour the index for references to me. I was slightly wounded to have merited a mere two paragraphs but was content to find that our long-standing grudge was airbrushed into a vague form of "intellectual friction" (divergence d'opinion). Schoffman on the other hand did not fare as well.

In a chapter with the ominous heading "Charlatans, Knaves, Fools and Frauds," (Bouffons, faussaires, imbéciles et les fraudes), my dear friend David is described as "a blowhard whose fractured French was as agreeable as a day-old brioche." He goes on to depict an atmosphere of debauched dilettantism where "the rightful heirs of Ingres were supplanted by a coterie of cowboys who left New York to try their meager luck in the small, parochial pond of Paris."

It gets much better and ultimately leaves Schoffman battered and bleeding in a raw, turbulent soliloquy of scorn, slander and ridicule.

I'm not entirely sure how Tamar's book will be received by the public. For a variety of reasons his ideas are not taken very seriously any longer.





Friday, January 03, 2014

AN OVERREACTION

Le buste/Survit à la cité




Or so my good friend thought. Like Gautier, pauvre David Schoffman believes in art. After all these years he still desperately clings to the Romantic idea of Transcendence. 

But really David, if art actually held the path toward redemption, don't you think we'd all be redeemed by now?  Are there not somewhere between 50 and 100 thousand Bachelors of Fine Arts degrees awarded each year in North America alone?

Yes, perhaps the hard stone monuments may endure but probably not much else. Here in Paris the current exhibition season has been replete with video installations and performance art. I think our cities can outrun these flinty fads of post-modernism.

But you David, il ne faut pas exagérer, your reactions are way too extreme.  

Are you seriously devoting all your time and effort making small sketches of zoo animals!?

Untitled watercolor on paper, David Schoffman, 2013
 

Thursday, December 19, 2013

THE CONSOLATIONS OF CALIFORNIA


Some things are best said in my native French.

Gustave Flaubert, to whom I owe my entire artistic existence put it this way:

"Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres."

Alas, this ideal of living like a bourgeois has eluded me my whole life and yet I like to think that in spite of my shortcomings I have been able to evoke some sort of wicked originality in my work.

My good friend David Schoffman does not suffer the same defect. He is fully invested in the world of hidebound, conservative conventionality.


But pace Gustave, his poor work lacks all sense of passionate duress. Comfortably situated in a small home on a quiet street he putters away in his studio making little innocuous baubles that flatter his collector's collective sense of unearned refinement. 


His putative subject matter is some vague exegesis on the commodification of eroticism but what he's really after is a tasteful, illustrative, aphoristic rendering of sex at its most sentimental. People love it the way they love magazines, as a gloss of mild glamour under the cover Art. They are drawn to his work the way one is drawn to a puppy or to a tow-headed child with a gap tooth. 

Living in Los Angeles has a way of soothing the artistic appetite. The urban tensions are spread so far apart and one is even denied the requisite cosmopolitan drama of weather.

So poor David lives like a bourgeois, draws like a bourgeois, paints like a bourgeois and even smells like a bourgeois.

At least he has a nice car.  
 

Saturday, December 14, 2013

À LA MODE


Somebody should have told my good friend David Schoffman that it wasn't for the Arts section. His first portentous statement in the interview was a curt dismissal of an entire generation - the very generation that skips the Opinion page and goes straight to Styles.



"It is impossible for a young artist to do any work of significance,' he began, "because there is one and only one subject in Art and that is the subject of Death."

 "Words like mortality are meaningless to this brood of optimists just barely out of adolescence. To them the void and the abyss might be names of nightclubs and tapas bars not critical ideas and ultimate paradoxes." (Maybe the Styles section was in fact an inspired choice).

How my dear colleague David found his way into the paper of record is a story in and of itself. It seems that fashion's final frontier is the long neglected vestiary habits of bald middle-aged artists. Well past the prime of pink hair and nipple rings this crucial demographic (The Times readership skews radically toward the 55 and over crowd) is known to combine comfort with the casually mismatched. Add a few paint stains on a pant cuff and voilà , a look

It seems that the Italian designer Ettore Macchia has already come out with a line of pre-washed smudged distressed linen trousers and over-sized plaid hoodies he calls stracci artista. A typical pair of slacks sell for about 300 euro.

Here in France, a place notorious for its sartorial intolerance, there's been a gradual softening toward the disheveled. It is no longer unusual to see grizzled retirees waiting in line at the boucherie wearing brightly colored Converse high tops with a pair of black baggy cords.

I'm not entirely convinced, however, if our personnes du troisième âge are quite ready for hats.



 

Thursday, December 12, 2013

THE DARKER SIDE OF THE ART MARKET: THE UNTOLD TRUTH


When artists sell their work to other artists the transaction is always fraught with unanticipated consequences. While it could be read as the supreme compliment, especially if the work in question is rare and costly, it also could be rendered as an act of subterfuge or even of outright aggression.

It's to the later condition that the sale of my good friend David Schoffman's large 2002 oil on linen Rattling Traffic No. 5 belongs. The profligate buyer (the painting at the time was valued at around $10,000) was none other than the Los Angeles artist Dahlia Danton.

Dahlia Danton in front of Rattling Traffic No. 5  (date unknown)
The Rattling Traffic Suite was last exhibited in it's full completed sequence in 2007 at Delia Cabral's legendary Santa Monica Gallery. I remember it well for I too was included in the exhibition together with the late Cuban maestro Micah Carpentier.

Art dealer Delia Cabral

Not included in the exhibition, a fact that was duly noted in the press at the time, was the comely Ms. Danton.

Bitter murmurings about some alleged 'boys club' rippled through the various sancta sanctorum of Los Angeles' feminist art community and there was even talk of a boycott, though it never really got off the ground.

The show nearly sold out and David's work was dispersed among a few well-known collectors and, if I remember correctly, a small, regional museum of contemporary art in the Mexican State of Sinaloa.

Now, as Schoffman's mid-career retrospective is in preparation, the highly anticipated reassembling of the complete Rattling Traffic will be a terrific opportunity for scholars, students and critics to accurately trace the unusual arc of David's development.

Unfortunately, Danton refuses to let go of number 5.
Citing issues of safety, conservation, liability and even the threat of terrorism, Danton adamantly declines to cooperate. She won't even allow the publishers of the catalog to visit the picture in order to document it.   

Shifting Ship #2, oil on canvas, Dahlia Danton 2013
What is she hoping to prove! Why would she deprive us of the comprehensive overview of Schoffman's work that the public so ardently craves and desperately deserves?

Is she fearful that her own work will dim by comparison? Is she alarmed at the prospect of being seen as hopelessly derivative, a mere callow disciple pathetically laboring under the awful shadow of genuine genius.

Or are the terrible rumors actually true and she took the painting to Burning Man, stripped down to her underwear and while her boyfriend stood on six foot stilts juggling billiard balls she incinerated it in a huge bonfire together with an effigy of Francis Picabia and 150 back issues of Art in America ?   

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN


When generations to come look back on the early 21st century they will have documentary filmmaker Herb Small to thank for leaving behind such an important cultural monument. 
 
Filmmaker Herb Small, 2013
Beginning in the fall of 2002 Small on a tiny budget supplied in part by his father-in-law's Atlanta based upholstery business, took it upon himself to document some of the most important artists of the day. I was one of the first such artists and the very first European painter to be included. Now, over ten years later he has gotten around to interviewing my good friend David Schoffman.
 
Small has an uncanny knack for capturing his subjects at their most natural and unguarded moments. He is truly amazing in the way he so effortlessly elicits confessions, recollections and poignant aperçus in people not generally known for their candor and honesty.
 
Schoffman was, by all accounts, a tough customer. It apparently took Small about half-a-dozen visits and nearly twenty hours of filming to come up with this admittedly unsatisfying vignette.
 
That said, it is certainly better than nothing. 


Monday, December 09, 2013

LACK OF CONFIDENCE GAME


To the one-hundred and fifty million Americans who suffer from insomnia:

I have a solution for you!

Anyone who has ever had the great misfortune to sit through one of David Schoffman's powerfully tedious lectures can tell you that there is no better remedy for addressing a sleep disorder.

Like Samuel Johnson's description of Paradise Lost "none ever wished it longer than it is."

Often, while traveling through the States, my good friend David invites me to attend one of his talks. With all his faults, Schoffman remains a practical man and to supplement his income, avails himself of the podium whenever the opportunity presents itself. My general formula is that for every five demurrals I'm obliged to say yes once.

The problem lies, I believe, in David's squeaky insistence on the viability of painting to communicate meaning. He pretends that the formal language with which he was educated remains coherent despite all the evidence to the contrary. He speaks of "space" and "mass" as if these terms had an objective, unambiguous definition. He refers to Cézanne as if the arcane logic of pictorial geometry was accessible to an audience of graduate students. He honestly believes that the term "figure/ground" means anything at all to an audience of upper middle class museum members.

Luckily for David his tenuous status as a minor art star remains bankable enough and he can rely on several speaking engagements a month. In effect, it doesn't really matter what he talks about, his audiences remain faithful having gained the right to report that they bore witness to 'intelligence.' In fact, the more technically incomprehensible his lectures are the more rarified they appear and in turn render his audiences (in their own eyes, at least) into smug self-assertive cultural cognoscenti. David picks up a few bucks and like a night at the opera, his public gets to brag how smart they are.

As they say in America, it's a win-win.

  

Thursday, November 28, 2013

WITHIN THE SHADOWS OF DESIRE


Each morning upon waking my good friend David Schoffman sadly (but with great nobility) resists the overwhelming temptation to go back to sleep. He struggles daily with what he calls "the blinding ineffectuality of effort."

He stays in bed as long as possible and it is only the grating sound of his grey Brazilian shorthair Minou that spurs him into something resembling action. 

He lives on a nondescript street on the outskirts of Los Angeles where the highlight of each week is the collection of the neighborhood's recycling. 

People wonder why the cosmopolitan Schoffman chooses to live in an area that has about as much charm as a Parisian parking lot. Why, people wonder, does the militant aesthete whose strident manifesto The Senses: A Polemic, an essay that single-handedly sparked both the slow food and the dilatory foreplay movements, voluntarily reside in an area so void of charm?

Schoffman has a curious, some might say superstitious approach to his work.  He likes to quote T. S. Eliot's famous prescription that "art is an escape from emotion" and he prides himself on his ability to peel away even the faintest joy from his life. Like the bride who guards the jewel of her womanhood for her betrothed David suppresses his rage for beauty, ransoming his instincts for the benefit of his work. He feels that in order to reach the highest level of artistic refinement he must surround himself with what he calls 'the barren vacancy of the monotonous.' 

And so to Schoffman, every day is long and each morning a renewed struggle against the scourge of pessimism and lassitude.


I think he needs a vacation.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

POST POST POST MODERNISM (A POST)


"As the earth's temperature rises my faith in young people diminishes to the point of bitter cynicism."

Such was the terse pearl offered up by my good friend Currado Malaspina on his first tweet. To say that my colleague doesn't take too enthusiastically to the new technology is sort of like saying that the Pope isn't terribly keen on family planning. It isn't just one opinion among many, a passing and harmless prejudice that simply places him neatly among the baby-boom codgers of '68 - no - it is nothing less than the sin qua non of his artistic and intellectual identity.
 
 
So it was quite striking that he has developed such an unlikely alliance with Brooklyn's hip high priest of social media Spark Boon. On a recent trip to Paris to report on the Lefebvre art forgery scandal for Dolphy Cane's new art journal Vernissage, Boon met up with Malaspina for a pastis at Cafe Tonton in the 8th. Though dense with the din of tourist babel, it is one of Currado's guilty pleasures to frequent déclassé bistros that are loud and overpriced.

It was actually I who midwifed the meeting, hoping to rouse the aging Currado out of his creative somnolence. Boon it should be noted is the creator of viral genre-bending art videos that have force fed French Structuralism down the philistine throats of countless Instgrammers world wide.


In other words, it is a perfect match.

So in addition to his solitary tweet, Currado has doubled his stable of Facebook associates,  opened Entourage and Spotify accounts, started regularly posting on the French version of iFunny (JeRegole) and purchased a bright green I-Phone.

He's now working with some brainy North-African developers on a app that enables one to make prank Skype calls.


Thursday, November 14, 2013

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent


Though my command of the English language is not perfect I am fluent enough to understand the wrath of my good friend David Schoffman.


His latest grievance is the impact of "posting" and texting on what he calls "the slightly educated class." He sees the developing American vernacular as a grim whirligig of empty idioms, arbitrary diminutives and indiscriminate military-type abbreviations. 

As he bloviated to me the other day in an email, oblivious to the ironies implicit in this method of transmission: "The argot of the Internet is an effeminate linguistic afterthought that would have Shakespeare, or for that matter Walter Winchell, hermetically arc-welding their own crypts shut."

:(

Cranky reactionary that he is, David has come up with a suitable, personal antidote to this fretful cultural decline.


Every few months Schoffman rearranges his considerable library and lugs a stack of randomly selected books clear across town planting them in his studio in small precarious ziggurats. He then proceeds, as per Nabakov, to reread these often dog-eared dust heaps and mildewed spider traps. The brittle piss-yellow pages of second-hand paperbacks practically crumble to the touch. And yet, on any given day, David might revisit The Birth of Tragedy, Huis Clos or Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.

The idea is to suffocate any possibility of low-brow philological philandering.  



So for example if he finds himself listening to National Public Radio for any significant length of time he'll need to gargle, so to speak, with To The Lighthouse or
Swann's Way. If a telephone solicitor succeeds in penetrating his gauntlet of filters and screens and catches him unawares he'll feel the desperate need to cold shower under a reproachful downpour of Dickinson and Pound. And if, on the odd chance he happens upon the lapidary platitudes of the Huffington Post, nothing short of Wittgenstein's Tractatus will chase the bitter aftertaste of that oily AOL .


And of course, one never needs an excuse to revisit good old Walter Benjamin...







Sunday, November 03, 2013

La recherche du temps enterré


There is something rather chilling about being the subject of a book. The implication is that you have somehow crept from the present tense into the terminal past. At first I thought my good friend David Schoffman was acting like a spoiled ungrateful child but now I understand why his decision to allow the distinguished scholar Loretta Pansesna into his life has become a source of great regret.

Loretta at Work, David Schoffman '13
Pansesna. the author of two critically acclaimed biographies (The Crease is in the Middle: Godfrey Schwartzbard the Duke of Savile Row and The Unlicked Cub: Tiebé Shirat, Picasso's Forgotten Mistress) has embarked on the first, full-scale authorized biography of Schoffman and it is exciting David's already overly hypochondriac imagination.

He sees this enterprise not as a mid-career assesment but rather as a valedictory summation, a sort of closing argument, though he's not entirely sure if it is from the standpoint of the prosecution or the defense. Whatever it is, Schoffman has never felt the cold damp sigh of mortality as vividly as he does now. He sees Max von Sydow everywhere. The devil's scythe is constantly licking the scruff of his grey tufted neck while relieving him of one pawn after the next. He can't sleep nor can he paint. After all, why bother? It is all already written. It is all for naught.

To make matters worse,  Pansesna and her research staff of three annoying graduate students are dredging up an almanac of long forgotten sins. David sees absolutely no value in ventilating such a tawdry trivial concordance of not-so-youthful indiscretion. The buried past should remain safely heaped in a mulch of palliative denial where it can neatly decay with grace and without rebuttal. Now, what little future he has left will probably be consumed with matters of paternity, libal, larceny and even murder. That Schoffman will now have to answer for the slurring allegations surrounding the long forgotten Affaire de l'étouffement sur brioche will be, at the very least, a lacerating embarrassment. 

Pansensa argues that the "accidental" death in 1979 of Adèle, the nineteen year-old daughter of Almont-sur-Gironde's chef adjoint de la Cour supérieure was a tragedy that likely holds the key to the entire Schoffman oeuvre . To ignore it would be an excerise in scholarly dereliction. Maybe this biography is precisely what David needs to finally heal this open wound.

However, I think David's chief concern is that his kids will find out that while still in graduate school their dad briefly worked as a stripper in an Austin, Texas fetish bar under the pseudonym The Rope. 

 
 

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

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. 




Tuesday, October 08, 2013

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???  

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

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.