INSIGNIFICANCE

Spending time with my dear friend and rival David Schoffman is like slicing water with a bread knife. Implicit in the Schoffman enterprise is a divine choreography of  irredeemable futility.

That he is an artist of the highest caliber is beyond dispute, yet working as he does in the vacuum of southern California, his greatest achievements go largely unnoticed. Ironically, he is more highly regarded in Athens, Dusseldorf, and Doha than he is in Hollywood and Fairfax. 

His most recent show where he exhibited all 100 panels of his monumental polyptych The Body Is His Book, slipped beneath the radar of the city’s redoubtable cultural gatekeepers. Another artist made of more threadbare hubris would have folded into a compost heap of self-doubt and despair. Not so of our hero master Schoffman.

I flew to Los Angeles in late spring in order to see how this unpaid dreamer copes. I wondered what David would do after laying bare 25-years of thankless labor and receiving nary a whimper in return. Would he fold up shop and move to Ojai to cultivate heirloom tomatoes and cannabis? Would he descend into madness like most of his heroes? Would he retire and return to his pet project of writing a graphic novel about the history of Denmark? Or would he start sleeping late and take his morning coffee and bear claw at his local Yum Yum Donuts trading gossip with the local recycling scavengers and street preachers?

What I found both astonished me and reassured me.

The fact was, nothing changed. David conducts a daily set of rituals that are as boring as they are fruitful. I decided to follow him and to make a visual document of his uneventful life. I call this series Insignificance, because that is what it represents. 

Ironically, I have already scheduled an exhibition of these drawings at Gallerie Humaine in Paris. As is typical with my work, it will undoubtedly become a major cultural event.

A SERIOUS MAN!!???

 My adorably extroverted colleague David Schoffman lives in Los Angeles. 

In other words, he's just like everyone else you meet in that ridiculously fecund State. What makes David stand out is that he might actually be sincere.

I wouldn't have said this last week but he just released this video and I have to admit, it wasn't what I was expecting. 

A LIFE OF THE MIND

By any measure, my dear comrade David Schoffman lives in an ordinary - some would say ugly - part of Los Angeles. Unlike many parts of the city, his immediate neighborhood is relatively hospitable to pedestrian traffic. He can do most of his limited errands on foot. 

In order to quiet his anxieties and pretend that his immediate surroundings carry a tinge of romanticism, he pretends he is in a classic Hollywood film noir.

The Case Against Mirrors

 

My good friend David Schoffman seems to think highly of himself but I can assure you it's only a pose. Though spared from the afflictions of self-hate, he remains an agnostic narcissist indifferent to the character that shares his name .

And yet he serves as a constant subject of his oeuvre.

This is a mystery unsolved by his latest video.

David Schoffman's The Body Is His Book

This is the definition of renunciation.

My dear colleague David Schoffman doesn't fish, he doesn't ski, and he doesn't belong to a gym or a secret society. He doesn't invite people over to his studio, nor does he accept invitations for brunch. He doesn't sleep in nor does he stay out late. He hasn't bought a pair of trousers or a shirt since the Carter Administration. He's never participated in a pick-up basketball game or joined a pub crawling clique looking for a spirited Karaoke venue. He doesn't attend meetings or initiate phone calls. His 3-speed Schwinn has rusted from disuse and the last time he watched TV, Johnny Carson was hosting the Tonight Show and Soupy Sales was a household name.

..... and for what ... ?

Painting?

 .... what a waste ....   

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH DRAWING

My dear friend David Schoffman has done the unthinkable.

He has performed the terrifying ritual of naked introspection and has translated the results into an indelible artifact.

From his callow beginnings to his current state of sagacious semi-bitterness, David has compiled a series of drawings and notes that lucidly distill his inconsequential life. 

That such a book is now for sale is only further evidence that his vanity has tragically conspired with his indiscretion.

I read the book - twice - and felt the acute embarrassment of the jealous husband peering into the window of his wife's lover.

All the same, the illustrations are superb!

 

The David Schoffman Memoir/Manifesto

My good friend David Schoffman is so boring, his life so uneventful, and his professional achievements so scarce that he was able to condense his memoir into a 100 page artists' book. (Half of those pages are drawings).