THE ARTIST AS DRIVER

My good friend David Schoffman drives a beat-up old car.

This has major significance in Los Angeles, a place where cars are seen as a reflection of a person's station in life. The fact that his car is a 1993 two-door Jeep Cherokee where one of the doors has been rendered inoperable due to a faulty hinge, speaks volumes

It gets about 16 miles-per-gallon of gas. It is therefore impractical. The interior upholstery is falling apart. Spiders leave webs overnight that extend from the rearview mirror to the glove box. There's a faint smell, not unpleasant but vaguely rancid nonetheless. The radio reception is spotty as if it had a mind of its own. The engine is sluggish and accelerates slowly.

Like I said, in L.A. one's car is one's mobile metaphor. 

 

 

WHERE IS DAVID SCHOFFMAN

My good friend David Schoffman loves the rails.

There's something about the single perspective, the abiding point where all things vanish, that appeals to Schoffman's metaphysical appetites. 

Having reached that point in his career where achievement is measured exclusively by endurance, David's indifference to his own legacy is more an expression of hauteur than a manifesto on detachment.

He's secretive. 

The last time he was interviewed for publication was in 2021, an incredibly long silence for someone known for garrulous self-aggrandizement. I'm not even sure if he still lives in the U.S. 

I heard a rumor that he boarded a train in Halifax intending to cross Canada with a sketchbook and a 35mm camera, but it hasn't been verified by anyone trustworthy enough.

Regardless, wherever he is, I'm sure it's not the destination that motivates him.

It's the evasion.

 

Dahlia Danton & David Schoffman

 

I've known the Los Angeles painter Dahlia Danton for many years. We've grown apart but have remained in intermittent contact. 

Recently we appeared together with my good friend David Schoffman on Timmy Black's ridiculous podcast "The Lives of Contemporary Artists." It was a wonderful reunion.

It occurred to me that Schoffman and Danton are very similar and it was no surprise to me that they hit it off so well. Both live in L.A., both dislike animals, and both have an inflated sense of their own artistic merit.

All the same, they are charming and I wish them well.

BAD BUSINESS MOVE

I rarely collaborate. I am too narcissistic, too jealous, too competitive, and way too petulant to collaborate with other artists. This egregious defect has served me well. The name Currado Malaspina is untainted by associations with lesser minds and inferior talents.

But I recently made an exception.

The project was simply too tempting.

Micah Carpentier's Song of Songs is a vital contribution to the contemporary art discourse. 

Los Angeles painter Dahlia Danton has reproduced this 1972 masterwork from one of Latin America's greatest artists. Micah Carpentier, considered the "Cuban Duchamp," illustrated the biblical poem The Song of Songs and kept the manuscript in a drawer. In 2002, Carpentier's nephew Ezra, discovered the work and donated it to Havana's famed Micah Carpentier Archive. Through the intervention of the State Department and the University of Turin, Danton was granted the sole right to reproduce Carpentier's drawings and enjoyed unlimited access to the archive.

The book, published in August 2022 includes Danton's annotations, a short essay by me and a preface by my good friend David Schoffman.

This will probably be the last time I collaborate with anyone.

The potential residuals are minuscule and the work I put in by way of reputational capital is too costly.

 

The Failure

By every measure, my dear friend David Schoffman is a failure. Though this judgement seems harsh (isn't judgement harsh by nature?), is there really much to gain by equivocation?

Prolific and even talented, Schoffman remains, in his seventh decade, as obscure as a locksmith. I wonder sometimes how he does it.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year he works in his studio producing one work of art after another. The sheer variety is staggering but what is truly impressive is the consistency with which each new project is greeted by the public with indifference.

A lesser failure would have quit long ago.

To list his failures would be cruel but a short inventory of some recent exercises in futility would suffice to make my point. Let's begin with his 100-panel polyptych The Body Is His Book. He worked on this piece for over fifteen years and though he has exhibited fragments of it throughout the years, the pictures are gathering dust in his dusty studio.

Or how about his podcast, Timmy Black Presents: The Lives of Contemporary Artists? After four years and 125 episodes, he's never exceeded more than a few loyal (and indulgent) listeners.

His YouTube channels are equally desolate.  Hundreds of short, clever videos go unwatched and yet inexplicably, Schoffman goes on.

Even after he invented me, Currado Malaspina, his failure persisted like a bad smell. Together we created two handmade illuminated volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy and even that effort turned out to be a professional piss-in-the-wind.

His failure though is fluid. Even as a female abstract painter, Schoffman's charming and decorative abstractions (presented to the world as the work of Dahlia Danton) have fallen flat.

You'd think that he might have attracted a few conservative admirers as a landscape watercolorist, but failure adheres to Schoffman like tar.

I'm sure that Schoffman's failure is so complete, so indelible, so inscrutable, that you haven't even managed to read this to the end.

Behold The Book: The Rise of Attention Surplus

Of all the harebrained, self-aggrandizing schemes perpetrated by my dear comrade, David Schoffman, this one is the most flippant. Like all neurotics, David is a master of unscientific medical diagnoses. Inventing a brand new debility is another classic case of a solution in search of a problem.

This so-called "attention surplus" syndrome pretends to identify an ability some people may have, to evade the distractions of technology. As we all acknowledge by now, such a rare and remote aptitude is simply impossible.

Let's all be adult about this. It's time to definitively wave goodbye to prolonged patience.

MICAH CARPENTIER'S SONG OF SONGS

 

Together with my good friend, David Schoffman, I have found myself involved in all manner of dubious enterprises. I regret most of them. Linking my fate to the notoriously unreliable Los Angeles painter has caused irreparable damage to my credibility.

That said, there are some lingering advantages to our collaborations. For one, I have gained significant access to the highest echelons of Southern California's art politburo. To most North American arts professionals, Paris remains a provincial backwater, best relegated to Instagram-ready vacation photos. Thanks to Schoffman, I'm almost a household name among the L.A. artsy cognoscenti.

Another benefit has been my lasting affiliation with the Plausible Deniability Project™. Our latest project has been the publication of Micah Carpentier's Song of Songs, a beautiful facsimile of an original artist book by the legendary Cuban artist. Edited and annotated by Dahlia Danton, the book includes tributes by both David and I. 

In all modesty, my essay is much more interesting.