Saturday, June 21, 2014

CONFUCIANISM CONFUSED


When my good friend David Schoffman told me he was retiring his paintbrushes and moving to Silicon Valley I thought he was kidding. When he explained why, I knew he had lost his mind.


"The alleged ugliness of office parks is a 20th century bias rooted in the discredited aspirations of Romanticism."

That's how he explained it to me. He describes the architecture and the landscaping as "man's ultimate repudiation of the anarchy of nature." He insists that Silicon Valley is the perfect environment to put the final kabash on the European tradition.

"Painting and all other forms of static representation are now the derelict remains of a failed utopian vision. Beauty and the sublime are frivolous self-indulgent luxuries of a bygone era and an artist must respond with vigor and alacrity."

The Body Is His Book #67, David Schoffman, oil on panel

This from the man who has spent the past fifteen years working on The Body Is His Book, the 0ne-hundred paneled polyptych.

It was only through a third-party that I found out that the real reason David moved was that he sold some sort of food/mapping/chat app to Zorintech for an undisclosed and presumably obscene pile of cold cash.


I hear he's going to China soon.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

LE FEUILLETONIST


When he's not beating his head against the tarmac or coiling himself into an embryonic crouch my good friend David Schoffman enjoys a minor side-career as a freelance investigative journalist.

He skulks around Los Angeles like a gumshoe, burrowing about for something that might be juicy enough for publication. Too cowardly to write about crime and too dim to diagnosticate corruption he keeps his radius within the provincial ambit of the art scene.

Few remember that it was David who uncovered the ignominious double dealing of Bamber Turkic, the former chief critic of Orange County's Studio Gazette and host of the popular reality program What Next, America? In a business where conflict of interest is seen as a necessity, the fact that Turkic was privately selling the work of artists whom he had favorably reviewed barely raised a pimple. The scandal was that it turned out Turkic was actually producing the work himself under a score of carefully organized aliases! 

Wine's Moisture, Lacquer on copper,  Reggie Reynolds ( aka Bamber Turkic ), 2009


Another notorious story uncovered by Schoffman was that of the underground black market for diplomas and degrees. Though not completely eradicated, at one time it was both easy and quite common to be able to purchase a bachelors or a masters degree without doing any course work. The going rate for an undergraduate degree was just shy of $75,000, which made it considerably cheaper than attending a four-year program. Masters were a bit more pricey so they never really caught on.

The problem was especially acute in art schools. It was so widespread that to this day when scrutizing a résumé at an art gallery one can never be completely certain if the artist is legitimately credentialed! 

This kind of journalism is extremely important and I hope David continues to act as the conscience of the creative class. Politics, such as it is, has poisoned Schoffman's reputation as a painter. For now he occupies his time sitting for hours in neighborhood bistros with his ear to the ground and eyes agape and attentive.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

AGE IS WASTED ON THE OLD


The stiff brackets of professional ruin barricade my friend David Schoffman behind an impermeable wall of waste. What began in gladness may not have ended in madness the way Wordsworth might have predicted but potential was left to decay and talent, once so bright, was ravaged by vanity and missed opportunity.
Urim and Thummim, oil on wood, 1987


The early work was mired by good intentions. Though far from tasteful, David's paintings from the 1980's were rife with compliant hesitation. With their rough handling and cheap materials they pretended toward mutiny but with little commitment. They were paintings that "worked" and nothing more.

By mid-career he had slid into a cesspool of intellectual quiescence.

 Like a broken promise, rows of paintings and reams of drawings bore savage witness to forgetfulness and compromise. With each passing year his tepid exhibitions dazzled the innocent while disappointing the astute.

And now we are told to wait.

David insists on our patience. He vows to return and to surprise. He pleads for our indulgence as he prepares what he claims will be his ultimate tour-de-force - the 100-paneled polyptych putatively titled The Body Is His Book.

 
The Body Is His Book #67, oil on panel (in progress)

What has already been seen of this grand project does not bode well for the future. Trickles and fragments have surfaced over the years and nothing to my eye merits either optimism nor even curiosity.

The Body Is His Book #33, oil on panel (in progress)

If we give David the benefit of the doubt and he gives us nothing in return he'll deserve more than our contempt. He'll deserve our mockery.

With competence comes the worst kind of decadence. The mildewed decadence of regression and blight. David Schoffman has one last chance at redemption.

I'm not holding my breath, 


Monday, May 26, 2014

WHAT IS HIP?


Glamorous, articulate and almost always controversial, my dear friend David Schoffman has always given great interviews.


Starting in the 1970's with his notorious tête-à-tête with Le Monde's Sascha Izit all the way to last year's ridiculously candid entretien with Dahlia Danton of The Harps of Heaven, Schoffman is reliably prepared to stir the broth with his unique blend of amiable quips and contentiously divisive insights.

Few followers of the art world's inside game will forget David's appearance on the Mick Teagling Show where in a bright orange shirt and burgendy scrubs he jumped on the studio couch and started chanting wildly "Je suis Ubu Roi, Je suis Ubu Roi."

Equally memorable (or lamentably indelible) was his interview with the late Canadian poet Guido  Cezzho. Published in the Sunday Supplement of Montréal Philologique David apparently answered every single question (according to Cezzho they spoke for nearly four hours) in a falsetto voice using a sock puppet.  


Now, if Schoffman is to be believed, all those antics are over. As a result of his recently becoming a paid spokesperson for Noitanbreh, a Los Angeles urban clothing line featuring bright, colorful t-shirts, rugged basketball jerseys and sensible yet savage looking bucket hatshe is contractually obligated to tame his public persona.

Now that's a scary prospect ...





Thursday, May 22, 2014

CHANGING LANES


Long before the painting, decades before his first exhibition, ages before that faint, frisky glimmer of genius began to manifest itself and spoil any chance for a serene and contented life, my good friend David Schoffman had dreams of becoming a professional athlete. As an urban New Yorker of the Mosaic tradition, exotic activities like soccer and baseball were almost completely unavailable - the largest expanse of green in his neighborhood in Brooklyn was the astroturfed litterbox of his aunt Shoshana's Balinese - so like all good Israelites he chose basketball.

And bowling.


Bowling, as anyone who has tried it can tell you, is the closest thing the Americans have to Zen Buddhism. Once one becomes adequately proficient, all that is further required is the achievement of complete and total detachment. Theoretically, if you can roll one strike you can roll a dozen more since the variables remain numbingly consistent. 

All that stands in the way of perfect mastery are the bustling synapses of the modern mind. 

David's passion for pins was so vehement and his aspiration toward perfect esho funi (the Dharma of disciplined disengagement) so extreme that he moved to Shiraoi in northern Japan to study zazen or what we call in French, méditation assise. 

After three years he still couldn't properly position his ankles for a decent Burmese lotus-squat so he threw in his toga, turned over his bowl and returned with his stubborn 148 average to Sid's Seventeen Lanes on Whitestone Expressway in Flushing.


A couple of sprained wrists and a herniated lumbar convinced my friend David to hang up his slippers and give the low physical impact of painting and drawing a try.

The rest, of course, is contemporary art history and though he probably couldn't manage a 5-7-10 split anymore he can still deliver a decent Theravada Metta Sutta.



As long as he doesn't have to sit on the floor.


Wednesday, May 14, 2014

MANUFACTURING CONSENT


Long before the name David Schoffman became common currency among the hep downtown intelligentsia, before owning a Schoffman was the necessary credential for cosmopolites aspiring toward high-gloss urbanity,  before 'understanding' Schoffman was a prerequisite for admission to the boutique graduate programs east of the Mississsppi there was the painter David Schoffman who labored quietly in his studio producing solidly hermetic abstract paintings snugly situated within the delectus of late-20th century formalism.

Riding a Pig he Tilts Toward the Sun, oil on wood, David Schoffman 1986
Those fortunate few who purchased these rugged, muscular oils bought them not for a song but for a jingle. David was waiting tables and living hand-to-mouth and the works he sold were priced to move.
 
Now, of course, the pendulum swings to a more favorable tempo - at least for Schoffman. While the paint is still oily and wet his pictures are rushed out the door by his private army of impish assistants. Pre-printed packing labels addressed to every compass-point are conspicuously piled in stacks leaving his visitors no doubt as to the folly of any dithering indecision.


He's a huckster now, brokering his reputation with an adroit instinct for calculated risk. He periodically shifts styles, withholds works, claims scarcities and orchestrates scandals typically involving much younger women.
 
Miraculously the cards still fall in his favor despite the indolent and perfunctory nature of his newest work. He can do no wrong in this changed world where quality and value have severed their connection like bickering siblings.
 
I miss the old David.
 
 
 
 Though I can do without the Noam Chomsky haircut.
 
 
 
 


Tuesday, May 06, 2014

GMO-OMG


Lovable and witty, my good friend David Schoffman is a world-class neurotic. Spend any amount of time with him and you'll hear a cross-current of competing theories on how to avoid illness.

 His latest scourge is the cell-phone which he insists is the cause of the recent rise in autism and childhood diabetes.

Next on his list is gluten, though I don't think we have any of that here in France.

He won't vaccinate his kids because he thinks it will hurt their reading scores and he never lets them near a computer for fear the EMF emissions will radiate their eyeballs.

He still paints in oils but won't use cadmiums, which is good news because he was always a better colorist than me and instead of turpentine he uses resins derived naturally from the roots of Japanese ginko trees which he grows himself in his hydroponic garden.

His nuttiest nemesis is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. According to David, the ubiquity of power lines cross-hatching the sprawling city like slackened rope, pose the imminent threat of excess exposure to dangerous Radio Frequency fallout. This in turn can result in Alzhiemer's, miscarrisges and irritable bowel disorder and Schoffman is not about to take any chances.



He's thinking of moving to the desert to a place called Twentynine Palms. 

I'm not sure if he knows yet about the Leo Durocher Nuclear Waste Repository that's 25 miles away.

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.