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 ...