Wednesday, April 30, 2014

ROOTS


Austerity and pleasure deferred have been the twin pillars of David Schoffman's tantric behavior. My good friend has spent the better part of his life in a state of perpetual abjurement. As our existence is one of inevitable suffering only in renunciation can one reconcile the lure of our fleeting appetites.

Or so David explained to me many years ago under the awning of Le Crazy Horse de Paris, just a few doors down from my old studio on Avenue George V.

To David the world of the senses was the egoless world of aesthetics and unlike most artists - or most people for that matter - he deferred personal pleasure for some distant, chimerical future. Free time as an idea was useless in that time was seen as an adversary and anything that was free could not possibly be of any value.

And so it went for many years. Schoffman, moored by ambition and tethered to the studio, did nothing but read, write, draw and paint. He embodied little of the common American identity and was excluded from even the most basic conversation that referenced shared popular experience. 

He never knew who won the World Series, who shot J.R. or who unraveled the trousers of the leader of the free world. To him a Soprano was a coloratura, Seinfeld was the name of his accountant and The Boss was something he thankfully never had to endure.


All this changed of course once David started dating a woman thirty years his junior. Suddenly names like Jay-Z and The Arctic Monkeys rolled off his tongue like shaved ice. He now breaks bad under a house of cards and gleefully dances with the stars while keeping up with the Kardashians.

Schoffman is now officially unbuttoned and the former abstemious courtier of refinement plays the hammy hipster in search of that very lost time.
 
I hear he's even thinking of moving back to Brooklyn.


Saturday, April 19, 2014

DOWN IN THE DOGMAS


Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria

Scratch the prickly pelt of any individual of consequence and you will find a damaged soul disfigured  by an unrequited romance. My good friend, the Los Angeles conceptual artist David Schoffman, is no exception.


Behind the bluster and beneath the ebullient energy is the rotting marrow of bile and regret. To call it heartache would be like describing a vicious gale as a benign drizzle. A listless unforgiving melancholy is the basso continuo, the leitmotif, the je ne sais plus of his outwardly charmed life. 

The cause of his despair can be summed up in two mellifluous yet vinegary words:


For years Schoffman chased the beautiful Danton like a rabid rattled terrier. He sent her flowers accompanied by long lyrical notes full of the kind of slushy sincerity only a simpering adolescent would deem effective. Their epistolary romance was a turbulent literary tour-de-force of one-way wishful thinking. Danton teased while my good friend David sniveled in the syrup of his unanswered affection.

Danton and Schoffman, date unknown.
  
Danton took great joy in tightening the leash that led my friend David into the funk of spiritual infirmity. She rejoiced in his suffering and celebrated in his presumed celibacy. While Schoffman diminished into a walking dirge Danton jived and jitterbugged into an amphitheater of ecstatic cruelty.

Of course, a situation as untenable as this could not go on forever. Schoffman plunged into a series of lubricious romances in a futile attempt to exorcize the Danton demon. He capered from couch to couch and ricocheted into countless fruitless affairs until finally resigning into impotent exhaustion.

He remains bitter to this day and it could be argued that his abandonment of painting in favor of the more strident forms of theoretical expression is due to his utter failure at love.

In the end we are all rewarded by the deeply vague aesthetic speculations of this very gifted artist plagued with a profound distrust of the senses.

Friday, April 11, 2014

AN AUTHENTIC OUTFLOW OF EFFLUVIAM


For as long as I've known him, my dear, dear friend David Schoffman has tried desperately to lay waste the claim that he is a sleazy, lying, unscrupulous knave. His (envious and resentful) colleagues regard him as something of a joke. On any given day one can reliably find mon cher David sipping a steamed milk mocha (known elsewhere as a latté, elsewhere still a cappuccino, in other places it's called café au lait and in certain Mediterranean countries known for their direct and frank powers of description, a 'reverse coffee') at his favorite minor, mini-mall chain franchise bistro which shall remain for now nameless due to the reliable spasms of nausea its elicits in someone more accustomed to nursing cassis infused white wine cocktails on balconies of Beaux Arts architectural masterpieces such as myself.

You see the problem with David is that after years of reading all manner of self-help manifestos and so-called 'books', he is still not at peace with the startling reality that wherever you go you take yourself with you.

On the wall of Schoffman's cell at the Kosala Zen Retreat, 2006
He once spent two weeks in silent meditation at the Kosala Zen Retreat in Malibu in order to find what the glossy brochure described as his "authentic being." What he learned instead from the wise and enlightened sensai after fifteen days of eating brown rice and root vegetables and parting with a little over $1700 was that wherever you go you take yourself with you.

Another time, at the relentless prodding of an ex-girlfriend who insisted that if they remain together as a couple David would have to go through the hard process of becoming 'complete', he attended a Labor Day Weekend intensive seminar called "Placing The Past In The Past; Sealing The Future With A Suture." Much tough love and holding the sweaty palms of total strangers yielded not so much completion as dire constipation since one of the more draconian rules of the event was the parceling of bathroom breaks to an unhealthy one per day. 

"Once a dick always a dick," (un queue est toujours un queue) was how my world weary Oncle Maurice used to put it and I think that pretty much sums it up. It is no doubt due to distance that I remain loyal to my flawed and feckless friend.

He no longer paints, barely reads, hardly ever goes outside and lives on a meager diet of steamed milk and espresso.

But the funny thing is, I think that after all his futile searching and in spite of all his pathetic groping after significance, my good friend David has finally found his real and true self. 

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

TOUS LES VINS COULAIENT


There's a house on a hill somewhere in west L.A. where all hearts are deceptively open and all the cheap wines incessantly flow. It's a community like no other or at least there is none like it in France or to my knowledge, anywhere else in Europe.


Behind a travertine wall baked in the lead white glare of the Californian sun is the home of the Celestial Masters, a loose federation of miserable poet/sorcerers who, in their words, are "armed with sand and blood against Justice" and who are dedicated to the bizarre ideal that women were treasures to be entrusted only them. It's a strange secret society whose members' nostalgia for Prussian chivalry and the Rat Pack have turned their Los Angeles life into a poisoned feast. To them Beauty is bitter and reviled and they have created an anachronistic, remedial valhalla full of misogyny and malice.


The Executioner's Summons, oil on silk, David Schoffman, 2013
Next door to the Masters was the studio my good friend David Schoffman rented last August in order to complete his monumental series of paintings dedicated to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. His many interactions with his eccentric neighbors could fill the hideous pages of a fabulist's notebook and David describes last summer's odessey as his own personal season in Hell. 

He told me about waking up in the middle of the night to the dreadful and terrifying cackles of an idiot. His life was strangled of its every joy and each day his intractable predicament played ever finer tricks on his impending madness and palpable misfortune. 

There were days when he would find stretched out in the mud alongside his fragile ginko trees a Celestial Master literally gnawing on a gun-butt like some wild enraged beast. 

Then, when he found himself on the point of uttering what he describes as his 'last croak,' David strangely discovered a renewed appetite for Charity. It was an inspiration that turned his entire misadventure into a dream.

And though Satan still lived next door he was a little less inflamed. Schoffman was ultimately able to ignore their deadly sins and cowardly deeds and lacking the descriptive skill to adequately render their egoism into words, charcoal or paint, returned to his Luxemburg project with a renewed and profound respect for women and the crucibles of their daily struggle to be assertive, powerful and strong.

Could he still be dreaming?




Monday, March 24, 2014

La belle et la bête



Dogs lead a charmed life here in Paris. Notre chiens are among our most exalted citoyens. They are treated with greater respect and trusted far more than our politicians and our priests. We welcome them into our restaurants, our taxi cabs,all our parks and even some of our museums. They are not appendages to our lives but an integral part of our national identity.



Not so with my good friend David Schoffman and his Boston Terrier in Los Angeles. In California it's children who are treated like pets. They raise them like poodles preparing them for the ultimate dog show which they call the SAT's (pronounced ess-ay-Tees. Unlike our Baccalaureate, these SAT's are a gâteau wrapped in a ribbon with a fresh appetizing truffle on top.

That is to say they are extremely easy and reflect nothing of a child's intelligence other than their talent in taking a silly test.


Dogs on the other hand are treated like adorable lepers, restricted from intimate contact with humans and all other life forms. Leash laws are strictly enforced and if you don't pick up your dog's caca within 3 seconds of its descent you will enjoy the severe approbation of your neighbors and perhaps a visitation from the local constabulary.

Such is life in the laid-back anything goes West Coast of Les États-Unis. 
There are other anomalies within this alleged shangra-la. I'm told that among the artists in Los Angeles the most valued (and potentially monetizable) quality is silent obedience. A top down critical structure is in place where collectors curate shows and build museums and the creative community ignores whatever conflict of interest that relationship may imply.

This doesn't seem to bother my well-heeled colleague David. Ever since he began to wager consistently at le piste de course he has managed to remain independent of the creative/industrial complex. He's a capable gambler, neither charmed nor cursed but he has developed a reliable system by which he can be assured a steady and substantial income.

Compared to Paris, the L.A. art scene is a place where the tail wags the dog. The inevitable question therefore arises:

If Schoffman can stand aloof as he tracks to the track to earn his daily tonic, why does his work still look so damn predictable?



Monday, March 17, 2014

FORMER BEAR TURNS YOGI


When my good friend David Schoffman started wearing Guayabera shirts and appointing his studio studio with fresh cut peonies I knew he was losing his edge. Middle age has taken its toll on this former pugilist of paint. Known never to shy away from a fight, David has abandoned his quarrelsome ways and now contents himself in a catholic tolerance for what he calls 'diversity.'

In French the word diversité means something entirely different. It is void of any social and political connotations. It simply suggests the idea of variety and one can easily maintain the ability to be violently opposed to whatever form that variety may take. It is about choice rather than about coercive kindness, a uniquely American social fiction that seems rather impossible to enforce.

This is especially true in the artistic and intellectual worlds. I have no problem confessing to the fact that I cannot abide the revisionist realism school of painting that has acquired great currency of late. I find politically tendentious video and installation art both childish and boring. Gender issues are only slightly more interesting than transgender issues and third generation minimalism is as inviting as gum disease. 

The way of the Buddha doesn't come naturally to my contentious friend. It must take an unbendable will to hold one's tongue while the heathens and barbarians inundate our cultural institutions with the silty refuse of third-rate ideas. While here in Paris the intellectual gauntlet is thrown at the least provocation, in California where anything goes, convictions are as durable and as defensible as a Malibu mudslide.


And so my good friend sits, bathed beneath the Five Pure Lights with his Lung ta Wind Horse flags decorating his studio as if for a child's birthday party. He has willingly exchanged the cerebral for Sādhanā, bellicosity for an ego-defeating bliss and anxiety for the wretched stillness of Abhyasa.

To tell you the truth, I'm rather relieved by this recent turn of events.

Now I can check one more competitor off my list of rival geniuses!

 

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

UNDER THE VOLCANO


Vivre en bourgeois et penser en demi-dieu.
 
No less of an authority than Gustave Flaubert licensed us, the artists, to live a life of predictable and rational stability. So long as in our minds and in our work we remain the savage demigods we are exempt from the onerous demands of bohemianism. 

My dear friend David Schoffman has taken the first half of Flaubert's injunction to the absolute extreme. Under the lush splendor of southern Californian skies David suffers daily the grievous monotony of great weather. Like most of his colleagues he has adopted the climate as something of a birthright and spends as much time as he can sitting outdoors drinking coffee.

In Paris by contrast, the harsh, grey winters turn us inward, forcing upon us a kind of domestic exile and in turn producing the optimum conditions for thought and creativity. 

Los Angeles is more of an unfortunate paradise where great minds wither under the incandescent urges toward pleasure and repose.

The formally ferocious Schoffman is no exception. In the past twenty years I have seen him evolve from the feral insurrectionist to a genteel handicrafter, content in dabbling in his garden with his watercolor and brush.

It's a sad spectacle seeing this former gladiator of the avant-garde relaxing under a canopy, sipping a beer and admiring nature. 

Perhaps my dear Flaubert was right when he wrote "Nous danson non pas sur un volcan, mais sur la planche d'une latrine qui m'a l'air passablement pourrie." David reeks from the fetid fragrance of contentment. He has returned unharmed from the wilderness and remembers nothing but the trees.
 
 
 
 



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 ?