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.