DIPLOMACY

The Gujerati mural, David Schoffman’s immense 1989 fresco painted on the vaulted ceiling of Qatar’s luxurious Abbasid Hotel remains one of the most popular cultural attractions of the Middle East. Brightly hued fabric airlessly held aloft in whispers of subtle brushwork fill the hotel’s lobby with honeyed luminescence. The work is a veritable alphabet of painterly effects and viewers are consistently stunned by the enormous work’s improbable intimacy.

Schoffman was awarded the commission by default after the original artist, Alexei Rouaud was tragically killed in a freak accident involving a sled and a coping saw.

Unaccustomed to working on such a large scale, David developed a unique process by which he could intermittently view the painting from a suitable distance by swinging from the scaffolding on hemp cable riggings. This apparently amused his hosts to no end and they took to calling him Numa, the name of Tarzan’s pet lion.

The hotel bar, Les Eyzie, is a favorite watering hole for Al Jazeera journalists and David’s work has become much beloved among them. Sensing an opportunity, the State Department has asked David to spearhead Operation Desert Draftsman, a soft-power ploy involving a series of life drawing workshops to take place in high schools across the Arab world.

This summer he will be studying Jebli at the Pollard Language Institute in Langley Virginia.

VENTRILOQUIST AT LARGE

The Ethics of Desire

David Schoffman’s work is seen by many as a lambent explication of post-stucturalist theory. The Ethics of Desire, was seen as Schoffman’s visual tone poem, a fingered dance of painterly destabilization which ruptured the notion of self, replacing it with new, non-objective signifiers.

A paper by Gramsci Professor Newton Suzuki of Bryn Mawr referred to The Ethics of Desire as the seminal “object lesson of value-laden, binary opposition”.
He went on to describe Schoffman’s “cunning appropriation of Western ‘moments’, misaligned with the vernacular of the East, creating fictive Euclidian spaces few contemporary artists seem intellectually capable of.”

Cloistered as I am in my Rue Gabriel Lamé studio, a place cluttered with books and periodicals, I read these descriptions of my good friend’s work and only one word comes to mind:

"Connerie!"

BLACKENED IN OBSCURITY

Unkempt, with parched wrinkled skin the color of rust, David Schoffman shows the wear of long nights in the studio. It has been his habit for many years to work as others rest, and sleep, only briefly, and only in the light of day.

He owns neither telephone nor computer, and those with whom he is in contact understand that he reluctantly welcomes visitors on Sundays only.

He prefers the company of writers and is particularly close to Janco Rasa, author of Sesso the Fool and Shapeshifters.

Once, after a long period of fallow inactivity, David tried to reverse his circadian meter, but failed miserably. The California sun’s brilliant luminescence and the unabating urban din confused him. It was the closest David ever came to madness.

Few have seen his new work, but countless rumors are circulating. Some have openly speculated that there is no work to be seen, that David hasn’t lifted a paintbrush in years and that his eccentric schedule is but a rueful dodge. Others think he is writing a memoir or drawing detailed maps of his native Canada.

In an interview last year in Hmm, David spoke elliptically about plans for an illuminated edition of Paradise Lost.

I think he is just flat out of ideas.

TROUPE DE CINQ

The predominant theme behind the School of Pestilence’s flurry of manifestoes in the 1980’s was the general rebuttal of post-structuralist meta-linguistics or what Stanwyre simply called “Gebisse.” At the time, Paris was a lexical Valhalla, a hotbed of hypotheses, a theorist’s shanga-la. Together with David Schoffman, Micah Carpentier, Darius Frommel and Yvette Chabanais we antically argued that the only enduring value worth fighting for was sensuality.

In our shabby, tin-roofed Théâtre du Risible on rue Joseph Liouville, we staged weekly roundtables consisting primarily of drinking cheap Alsatian wine and arguing loudly, deep into the night, until the concierge next door called the police.

We weren’t taken very seriously until the Sans Voix Immobile exhibition where Schoffman first showed his now famous Rattling Traffic paintings. The critics were generally lukewarm but Nannette Fabriquant, at the time the doyenne of French art journalism, raved in a two-page review in Centaur Gaullist, calling Schoffman “le prochaine sauvage de notre epoch.”

Fabriquant was soon appointed French ambassador to Burkina Fasso, Schoffman moved to Tel Aviv, the Théâtre du Risible was condemned as a “threat to public hygiene” and the School of Pestilence disbanded in typical, artistic acrimony.

LINOLEUM

Kimberly Roberts of the New York Critical Review called David Schoffman’s new sculptures “playful assaults on Cartesian uncertainties.” Shabu Caldéron, writing in Splatt described the work as “artifacts from the rosy smoke physics of practical chaos.” Dobrynyn used just one word: “combustible!”

Few knew that Schoffman worked in three dimensions, but for many years, he has been secretly laboring on the series of pieces now on view at Teresa Odena Modern.

The work most discussed and debated in the salons and saloons of New York has the cumbersome title: “The Dagger of Abraham Refuses To Think.” It is a life-size facsimile of a badly bruised Toyota Camry, constructed entirely from wood flour, burlap and linseed oil. Dangling from the crippled rearview mirror is a miniature Mount Moriah that inexplicably sways as if from a breeze. The license plate reads Soren 1843 and on the backseat, scattered like confetti are Ike Turner album covers. A Post-it on the pretzeled steering wheel has the phrase “the child strikes in combat” written four times.

Some called the work unnecessarily obscure. Others insist that it is clumsily overdetermind. The vast consensus however is that the exhibition is one of the most challenging of the season.

It is rumored that the reclusive Russian collector, Vlad Dracolya purchased almost every piece in the show.

CALYPSO

The lamentable year teaching life drawing at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków was a year David Schoffman would prefer to forget. The rivalries among the singularly ungifted faculty were mind numbing in their petty insignificance. The students were incorrigibly lazy, preferring to spend their afternoons drinking Wisniak and eating bigos. The models were torpid and fat.

Like all the decisions in his life, both bad and good, this one was motivated by a woman. Malgorzata Tuwim was by all accounts, an enchantress without peer. She was like a Celtic queen with her green-hazel eyes and bright copper hair. David referred to her as his Thracian Nereid.

She was also as toxic as bromine.

I think David did something like two thousand drawings of her. Before moving back to New York, he buried them in a shallow ditch on the outskirts of Opatów behind the now defunct saddle factory.

These drawings have recently come to light and after six months of restoration, fifty-five of them are being exhibited at Knoblauchgalerie in Berlin.

Malgo was at the opening and she remains as beautiful as ever.

THE AROMA OF MERCY

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Peder Bayer, Norway’s most pessimistic poet (a designation coveted by many talented competitors). He goes on to write in his famous essay “On Second Thought” that “intimacy leads to betrayal more reliably than remedy leads to cure. Like the vibratory night call of the wood thrush whose song beckons as it laments, we sigh through life’s tenuous filaments, craving fixity within the groves of impermanence.”

Bayer’s words come to mind as I meditate upon the growing enmity between David Schoffman and myself. The mounting distaste for Schoffman’s fickle conceits has affected my wellbeing, making me vulnerable to odd agonies of both of body and mind. Sadly, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him, even as an adversary would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

If I think about this dispassionately, which of course I cannot, I am resolved to Hobbes’ observation that "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe." Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” identified certain hostile impulses as stemming from “the narcissism of minor differences” and if anything, Currado and I are cousins of the same stained cloth.

I am guilty.

THE WILTING OF THE GREY WOLF

David Schoffman insists that the two or three unsold drawings from Live Draw are emblems of virtue. He maintains that had his work lost its edge, he would have sold every last scrap. The fact that he failed to delight everyone equally refutes my contention that he has migrated from the avant-garde to a populist, decorative mode of expressive denial.

He deludes himself.

I was told by a friend who was in attendance at Saturday night’s bacchanal that Schoffman’s work flew off his pad like ravens and that collectors vied for position with ham-fisted greed and ungainly enthusiasm. This friend, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told me that David concealed several drawings, looking toward DCA Fine Art’s follow-up exhibition, “Live Draw Detritus” where “unsold” works from Live Draw would be displayed.

How cunning my friend has become! This former lion of perilous artistic experimentation has calcified into a leathery reminiscence of hard-earned achievement. He is now content to be the pharisaical apologist for tinsel and frippery.

Oh David …. What lovely drawings … and so inexpensive!

Les Ficelles Silencieuses de Dessins

Something is most assuredly amiss.

For twenty-two years I have greeted each new day with a pain au chocolate, hot milk and the early edition of Le Vers L’Avant, the Midi’s finest newspaper. I rely on its inky pages for a mature, dispassionate rendering of the world’s events. Free of idle speculation, puerile gossip, tendentiousness and hype, L’Avant is an artful relic of a non-existent past.

I was therefore irritably confounded when today’s Art and Culture section led with the following headline: “The Sorcery Of Chalk: David Schoffman Stuns California Crowd With The Silent Strings Of Drawing.”

What a half-lunged, nimble-tongued burlesque! Empty of analysis, vacant of scrutiny, Schoffman could not have received better press had he paid for it! Sending a journalist to DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica to cover the farcical “Live Draw” was bad enough. The toadying servility of the reporting, comparing Schoffman to the likes of Dominique Pécuchet and Veronique Bouvard, two of the Republic’s finest living artists, was a rancid exercise in American style public relations.

I have cancelled my subscription.

LIVE DRAW
EIGHT ARTISTS - THREE MODELS - LOTS OF PAPER

I detect a weakening in David Schoffman’s convictions. His normally strident tones have turned dulcet and accommodating. He seems battle weary and tentative. There is neither thrill nor frenzy in his carriage and those of us who have grown accustomed to his ardent theatricality are now left with only the gaunt niceties of respectable politesse.

Could this signal the curfew of his creativity or merely the solemnity that comes with age. His former self was a shapeless ecstasy, an intellect inflamed, a noisy chorus of urgent enthusiasms. Now he is a vacant precinct of predictability and habit. Where he once sought provocation, he now strives toward effortless geniality.

Perhaps this explains his flirtation with “public drawing”. Maybe Live Draw signals the tug of an inevitable decay, a muffled retreat into the featherbed of pleasing picture making. It could be that the false calm of insouciant color and nimble line are precisely the ideals toward which Schoffman currently leans.

The public will have a chance to evaluate all this on Saturday night, May 24th at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica.

I’m grateful that I can’t attend.

LIVE DRAW

What shapeless buffoonery! What ill-timed chicanery! Has age yielded no wisdom? Has profit fouled all perspicacity? Has throbbing Mammon thrusted the former vicar of the avant-garde into the cozy innocence of FIGURE DRAWING!!!

David Schoffman is about to break artistic wind, betraying the finely crafted monuments of his illustrious career, by participating in what is mockingly called “Live Draw.” When I read about this carnival of paltry exhibitionism in the otherwise respectable periodical Art Ltd, I was stunned into a state of pagan speechlessness. The former valor of my dear friend David has now been crushed by the common cause of gain.

In our early days together, David and I forswore the antiquated exercise of life drawing as a relic. For thirty years we honored our vow to pursue the new and relinquish the grizzled clichés of the Academy.

And now this!!

If only for their rarity, I would love to purchase one of his drawings. Though the camel-dunged products of his perfidious treachery will undoubtedly be lovely, (David was always a gifted draftsperson), their real value will be as documents of decay and artistic discourtesy.

THE KISS OF THE MARKETPLACE

David Schoffman‘s career reflects the immense disorder of his peculiarly peripatetic ambitions. He tries to find merit in everything equally. He wanders like a tramp from exhibit to exhibit, packing his résumé with a trail of incompatibles.

In 2008 alone he has shown his lucid watercolors at Camillo Galeani’s Galleria Cavallo Puzzolente, his Gunwale lithographs at Kunstsheide Berlin and his unfinished series of encaustic medallions at the Nijmegen Art Fair.

I admit that commercially his kettle continues to boil but he is reaching boat-bottom in ideas and execution.

And now, in Santa Monica, California, he is about to participate in the madman’s mission of drawing in front of a gallery full of spectators. On Saturday evening, May 24, David will be featured in DCA Fine Art’s rekindling of its popular Live Draw exhibition. Three fabulously naked models will apparently gambol about the gallery while a group of eager artists attempt to render them without distraction. Schoffman’s impromptu works typically sell (at absurdly low prices) while he’s in the midst of making them.

It’s all terrifically crass, though I would advise coming early.

CLANKING TOWARD IMMORTALITY

Humble as brine and bashful to a fault, David Schoffman dodges the sinless bouquets of acclaim with dignity and grace. The turbulent spank of celebrity is something he eschews. Disarmingly chaste in matters of self-promotion, he prefers to remain unseen and have the radiance of his work speak for itself.

I was therefore stupefied to find my good friend David splayed shirtless on the cover Doucement magazine, the mint of Parisian middlebrow journalism. Sandwiched between an incurious puff piece about Jacques Dutronc and an over-exposed photo essay on Palestinian medical students in Havana was a five-page interview with Schoffman. In it I learned that he climbs a rope ladder for exercise, that he hates cabbage and that as a child he tried to teach himself Greek by memorizing the folk songs of Vasilis Karras.

Perhaps in an effort to burnish his image, David has decided to venture into the cloudy realm of bourgeois respectability. Maybe he is trying to correct the prevailing image people have of him as the fastidious roué, charmed equally by invidious caprice and naked intelligence. Maybe he feels the need to dispel the rumors of his encroaching madness. Maybe he is dissatisfied that the central hymn of his legacy is a cadaverous fable of unrequited appetites.

Or maybe he is in a waking dream, rattling the cage out of boredom.

DAVID SCHOFFMAN: THE MAN, THE ARTIST

People often ask me what it’s like to be an intimate friend of such an exotic character as David Schoffman. They see his work, hear his lectures and read his essays and they imagine an artist of uncommon decency, rapacious erudition, solemn dignity and incorruptible determination. They envision a glamorous bon vivant whose good fortune is the well-deserved recompense of genius. They picture him in his studio, where choruses of angels guide the splendored strokes of his brilliant intuition. I think to most people, David is the stuff of legend, a mythological archetype of their idea of the artist.

I recently chanced upon of a short film of David Schoffman in situ, depicting a typical day as he tries to wrestle the savage paroxysms of inspiration.

LITERATURE

St. Mark’s Helium Table, David Schoffman’s first and only book of poetry, was published amid a cloudbank of controversy. Written in the early 80’s, a period in which David was involved with an unholy host of deviants and crackpots, the book is replete with gorgeous renderings of what he called “life’s unsavories.”

The contentiousness surrounding this slim volume of verse centered around the depiction of Girat Verhoeven, known to most people as the founder and former CEO of Seattle’s Nijintech Industries. It seems that in 1979, Schoffman and Verhoeven temporarily shared the modest accommodations of eastern Turkey’s notorious Elazig Prison. In the poem “Was It Henna,” David described their cell as a “rotting, clammy cavity/ perfumed with piss camphor/ lenient with disinfectant.”

Verhoeven sued for defamation of character when in an interview published in The Acephaly Review, Schoffman identified him by name as the inspiration for book’s eponymous poem. What nettled the litigant most was the tercet, “his chived, discomforted countenance/whittled by opiates/degraded and dimmed.”

The highly publicized trial helped Schoffman sell over 10,000 copies of his book, an enormous figure for a book of poetry. Three rancorous weeks of testimony yielded nothing for Verhoeven but rendered the severe judgment of hackneyed incompetence for Schoffman’s lyric abilities.

No new volumes are forthcoming.

AIUS LOCUTIUS

I am an embalmer of a crumbling friendship. I have endured the fetid slime of gratuitous vilification, yet I rise above the Race of Reptiles and overlook the affront. The trilling of the thrush’s throat could not have been more explicit. The rank indecency of David Schoffman’s recent attack on me is a grim reminder of his covetous misery. Yet, as I sit here in my luxurious garden, swilled by the perfume of Peruvian daffodils and sweet alyssums, I can only offer my forgiveness and compassion.

In a recent interview, broadcast on Canal Plus, David Schoffman offered some unjustifiable and calumnious characterizations that betray the covenant of our friendship. I include an excerpt below:

UCCELLI



It’s been well documented that David Schoffman has an avid fascination for birds. In a 1995 profile in Prague’s Nový Prostor, Schoffman spoke at length about the maniacal mewl of the Silesian Eagle Owl, a bird whose enveloping wingspan and conspicuously ornate facial disc are legendary throughout Central Europe. In the same interview David described the six months he spent in Sri Lanka studying the Spotted Dove and the Ashy-Headed Laughing Thrush. “I drew constantly,” he said, “trying to depict the rapture of flight and the showers of light as they played off of the brilliant infinitude of brown and gray. It was a painter’s paradise and “Chanticleers and Columbiformes,” my series of hand-colored monotypes would have been inconceivable without this seminal experience.”

What David failed to mention in the article was the string of damp beds, the pangs of unembroidered poverty, the galling feuds and oppressive doubts that characterized that six-month sojourn. I remember receiving letters full of odd hallucinations, paranoiac fantasies and erotic misadventures. Names like Mosby the Sailor, Silas The Street-Prophet, Mufti Sam and Lalima filled his rambling missives that read more like novels and irate manifestoes. To this day I am unsure how much of what he wrote was true and how much was fantasy.

That was many years ago, and David has been leading a productively sedate, even boring existence for some time. I am happy that Prolix Press has recently re-issued “Chanticleers and Columbiformes” in limited edition. It is a sobering reminder that the wages of disquiet, traded by the gifted hand, can yield precious monuments to our more noble selves.

THE GUESTS OF ABRAHAM


Like many immigrants to the United States, David Schoffman experienced fully both the exuberance of opportunity and the diligence of pain. His early struggles with idiomatic English were often comic. Overhearing how an acquaintance had “quit cold turkey,” he wondered for years about the hazards of the nation’s ubiquitous deli counters. When an embattled critic described his first one-man show as “the trifling bathos of a party-hearty paper-pusher,” he was completely flummoxed, and remains so to this day.

Like Unamuno’s Quixote, David found his true fatherland in exile. Though never comfortable with America’s Levitic distrust of the senses, he is fully at ease in the country’s ritual embrace of pragmatic, can-do independence. He realized early that the culture was a thriving polyphony of personal re-invention. Together with lawyers and clergymen, schemers, rouges, recluses and visionaries stoked the hot flame of liberty’s torch. It’s a nation of cardsharps and Schoffman fell in love with it as only one not native to it can.

His rise to the upper echelons of artistic Elysium was an unparalleled act of creative deception. Claiming to be the illegitimate son of the eccentric Marchesa Luisa Casati, he inveigled an audience with Jefferson MacNeice, the former curator of painting and drawing at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge. Passing off some drab watercolors of his “mother” that he hastily painted on the train from New York, he arranged an exhibition devoted to the beddabled Casati legacy. For a fifty percent split on the proceeds I agreed to write the catalog essay and filled it with mad claims, cross-referenced footnotes and a phony blurb from a feeble Andre Derain.

The rest is (recent art) history.

SHIFTING MUSES


David Schoffman is losing his eyesight. Like Degas, Borges and The Green Lantern, David’s macular disinterphicus is slowly shepherding him into the gloomy pitch. “The Body Is His Book,” his ongoing series of dizzyingly transcendent paintings may well be his last. As he descends into the black-tar of blindness, he continues to work with the unforfeited optimism of a dreamer. As the starless shroud begins to muffle his wildness, the urgency of his vision becomes more pressing. His newest works show no signs of despair and as he lifts the flag upon the mast of his artistic mission, he pulses forward with ambition and ever increasing complexity.

“The invention of painting belongs to the gods,” he wrote to me last week, quoting Philostratus, “and the gods are reclaiming their gift.” I am ashamed to say that a part of me rejoiced, as the only artist worthy of exciting my nasty competitive impulses will soon be receding into inactivity. This ugly urge is further testament to the titanic nature of David’s genius.

Eyes maimed by blindness may only husband other talents, greater gifts, for an intellect as supple as Schoffman’s will not be scuttled by mere infirmity.

He has already shown signs of a tectonic shift. An accomplished amateur musician, David has begun composing a song-cycle based on Hesiod’s Works and Days. The first piece, “What’s All the Fuss About the Slayer of Argus” is a catchy, somewhat sentimental ditty that may very well catch fire in today’s extremely eclectic music scene.

AUTHENTICITY

It’s time to acknowledge the debt, owed by David Schoffman, to two illustrious though unsung artists of the recent past. Schoffman’s evasions are understandable. His fears that a nod toward his predecessors may taint his eminence are well grounded. Accolades accrued through misconception will ultimately sully a well-earned legacy so I have taken it upon myself to illuminate upon David’s artistic antecedents.

Medussa Moratti knew no pangs of constraint nor did he harbor the fitful discontent of his peers. He was a man comfortable in his own skin and at home in his own studio. Though virtually unknown, Moratti’s work was extremely influential among the Parisian avant-garde of the 1970’s. His perplexing treatise, “Toward The Unsung,” unlocked a convulsive wave of ribald experimentation. That his reputation was eclipsed by his acolytes is one of the many injustices he suffered as a visionary. Below is “Fervid Geysers Rise,” a piece that proved instrumental in Schoffman’s development.


The Canadian Bedouin Noah Clrec was slightly better known. His gauzy paintings depicting wreaths of vapor, buoyantly gladdened by gravitational ambivalence were well received at the time though largely unrecognized today. Schoffman was among a small circle of frothy young artists who attended his regular lectures at The Free School on Boulevard Arago. Clerc often referred to his theory of “bolted withdrawal,” a form of sensual self-denial that ultimately leads to original invention. He argued that through willed isolation, artists could free themselves of what he called “the commanding hiss of history” and create un-mined categories and modes of expression. An early untitled Clerc is reproduced below.


Schoffman will undoubtedly deny the shadow this casts upon his reputation. He prefers the naked myth that defines him as the stony hedge of ingenuity.

The naked feet of an appropriator are rarely kissed.