A BOUNTY OF NAMES

Last week I was in Paris, attending the Bourvil Institute’s annual Saussure Conference and catching up with my good friend Currado Malaspina. I had the occasion to borrow his cell-phone and was flattered to find on the dormant screen of the diminutive apparatus, an image of one of my drawings.

Taken by this unexpected high-tech homage I began to play with the tiny keys hoping to find a few more clues into Currado’s elusive temperament.

Shamelessly I scrolled down his capacious list of contacts and found that it was a veritable who’s who of global art and intellectual enterprise. Beccarie, Broad and Bourdon were followed by Cash, Deutsch and Desclos. The home phone numbers of Gogosian, Govan and Gallimard were casually listed next to the e-mail address of Currado’s grocer. Perl, Podhoretz and Prévost, each with a cutely appropriate icon were listed next to his dry cleaner Quentin Polak. It was astonishing to learn just how many illustrious people were in his orbit.

Before returning the phone, I discreetly copied down the number of Dahlia Danton with whom I lost contact several years ago after a rather acrimonious disagreement.

I tried the number when I retuned to L.A. I got her voice-mail but didn’t leave a message.

BOOK REVIEW

The more one knows about Currado Malaspina the more the creeping vines of mystery obscure any true understanding.

The French playwright, Stephanie Arnoux, whose Sapphisme recently earned the coveted Prix Cornette for best drama of 2007, struggles in her recent book, Malaspina and the Trembling Blaze to clarify our misconceptions and illuminate our understanding.

That she ultimately fails does not diminish her heroic effort but rather highlights her general thesis that Currado Malaspina is the most enigmatic and complex artist since Marcel Duchamp.

I highly recommend her book to anyone who is the least bit interested in the current trends of contemporary art.

THE SONG OF DEGREES

The lamp of bittersweet reminiscence burns dimly yet dependably. The 15th anniversary of Micah Carpentier’s wretchedly received exhibition of paper bag drawings in Havana’s Grand Theatre is upon us.

David Schoffman and I plan to mark the occasion by mocking our innocence in a runnel of tears.

I remember so well, Micah, with tortured anticipation, installing each of his seven-hundred bags as if it were a sacrament. I can still hear the scraping of is well-worn eraser making last minute addendums, luring his life’s work to a state of near perfection.

The unschooled and the ambivalent were lulled by the malicious into greeting the work with contempt. The gods were appeased only by his death.

THE MAN - THE LEGEND - THE LORE

Movie Trailer, MICAH CARPENTIER, Release date: October 2008

Eastern European television is a tone poem to attenuated life spans. Production values are as uncomplicated as a waiting room flower arrangement while the programming is an arbitrary collage of nacreous fluff. Everything is brief, colorful and blandly nubile.

It was fitting that while vacationing this past summer at the Szechenyi Spa in Budapest, I happened upon this commercial while channel surfing in my hotel room.

I’m now trying to get my hands on the actual Micah Carpentier film. The image of my dear departed friend working in his Havana studio tore at the scab of my grief. I miss that bandit terribly.

MERCURIAL MALASPINA

Micah Carpentier Films recently released a short film about Currado Malaspina that was recently screened at Cinémathèque Rouen to a hostile audience of Dante scholars. It was almost immediately pirated and grainy DVD's are already circulating around the flea markets of Paris.

I suppose that now that it's fair game and that its content is so vitally important to understanding this complex man, I thought it appropriate to post it on the blog.

Postscript: Contrary to the review in Le Nouvel Ops that listed David Schoffman as one of the producers of the film, I had nothing to do with any aspect of the work at all.

THE VERROCCHIO CODE

At the 23rd Annual Conference of Arts and Letters held last month in Bareggio, Currado Malaspina startled the assembled crowd when he presented his unsubstantiated theory that Verrocchio was a woman.

It has long been suspected that the third figure from the right in Santo Spirito’s Saint Monica is a self-portrait. The fact that her back is turned toward the viewer indicates strongly, according to Malaspina’s far-flunged hypothesis, that the artist had something to hide.

Furthermore, it is significant that the painting in question depicts the mother of Augustine, the saint who famously devoted himself to the pleasures of the senses prior to his convenient return to faith and reflection. Like the memoirists of today, Augustine realized that on the page, vice was more gripping than virtue, so long as the author finds redemption before book’s end.

Verrocchio, according to Currado, was deeply shamed by his shape-shifting gender-hopping and sought a similar, Augustinian absolution through his wonderfully innovative depiction of religious imagery and his all consuming devotion the Florentine clergy.

After delivering his paper, the conference recessed and over coffee and cake, enjoyed a screening of Barbara Streisand’s Yentl.

TEMPERED VEHEMENCE

The short-lived periodical ZUT was a joint venture that included literary lights, Sonia Bartov and Camille Zohnenstein, the bad girl of Cabaret, Tiquette Perdu and the painters, Fédeau Mombart, Molly Rosienne and Anne de Dornay. At the height of its popularity it had a monthly circulation of over 75,000 loyal subscribers.

Among its early contributors was Currado Malaspina. Although he was banished from its advisory board after the fourth issue, (his torrid affair with Bartov, a squalid tempest of depravity that ended in shame for the two of them was the cause of his eviction), he left his typically indelible mark on the magazine’s future.

The inaugural issue, simply titled ZUT, had its cover designed by Malaspina, and was printed in an edition of two hundred. A recent copy was recently auctioned on Ébai-France for
EUR 400,000. (I, unfortunately, sold all my back issues at the marchè au puce for a pittance before moving back to the States.)

What I do have are memories, which some would argue (unpersuasively) are more valuable than coin. The one I cherish most dearly revolves around the week Currado, Sonia, Camille and I worked on the Absinthe issue (ZUT I, no.3).

Our intensive research rendered an awareness of the beautiful fragility of the small hands of fate. We drank our poppied poison till its charms turned toxic and each of us in our own personal way saw the dreadful ecstasy of dissipation.

I have never felt my senses as profoundly again.

FESSES QUI VOLE

TailWinds, Currado Malaspina’s fabled rebuttal of the biblical creation myth is a forty by sixty foot mural, famously installed at the Lourmarin Aerodrome. Commissioned by the Fédération Laïque Luberonois, the giant picture has become an important sight of secular pilgrimage. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a hallowed venue for communist youth groups and militant Hungarian atheists.

Critics have noted that the imagery seems to be a cross between Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten By A Lizard, but Currado will have none of that. He sees the work simply as an anti-clerical, visual homiletic that splashes a few cheerful colors on the walls of baggage claim.

An oversized postcard of the image is available at most French airports though due to its volatile subject, most of the country's post offices refuse to let it circulate through the mail.

THOU SHALT NOT

In his treatise Il Cortegiano, Baldassare Castiglione outlined his conception of the complete personality - manners, taste, corporal vigor and a disposition that favors anonymity. Currado Malaspina famously quipped that The Courtier was the West’s first self-help manual.

Throughout the years, Currado has become increasingly obsessed with man’s preoccupation with advice. It struck him that regardless of the culture, the ideals propagated by elders, kings and philosophers never seemed to apply to him. He took no pointers from Plato, no direction from Demosthenes and between Oprah, Deepak and Dr. Ruth there were no recommendations worth considering, even as a temporary experiment in human conduct.

Several years ago, Currado the Jester decided to create a compendium of all worldly wisdom, compressed, distilled and fully illustrated on conveniently sized post-its, so that these behavioral reminders could easily be affixed to notebooks, laptops and refrigerators.

He started with the grossly over-rated Ten Commandments, zeroing in on the first two, which he found particularly inconvenient to the artist’s vocation.

WHIPLASH

Sharp flashes of lucid observation fill the brilliant pages of Beauty Fails, Currado Malspina’s 2002 anthology of notes, dreams and jeremiads. Originally published by Palmira Press, it is Malaspina’s first prose work in English.

His rough knuckled illustrations fan across each page creating the faint impression of an illuminated book of hours. In fact, one short essay in which he describes a restless longing for an estranged colleague’s alluring young wife is entitled O Intemerata.

It is endlessly rewarding, charting the dingy grottos of Currado’s tactless imagination. Connolly Rothschild famously described Beauty Fails as “a libertine primer on liberty” and assigned it each year to his creative writing students at Yale.

Rothschild’s sudden demission from the English department may have been the result of a rising tide of censorious priggishness but no one in New Haven is talking.

BARBAROUS GRUDGE

Weather has always played a big part in the mercurial behavior of Currado Malaspina. Curiously, his mood turns darker as the sun shines brighter – summer being his worst season. As Parisian women shed raiments like serpents shedding skins, the streets become what Currado likes to call “un carnaval de décolletage.” And yet, to a man whose world is illuminated by the lamp, climate has its own peculiar consequence.

As a child, Malaspina would spend the month of August with an invalided aunt in the tiny village of Agnac in Lot-et Garonne. The Aquitaine can be a magical place for a child with its lush plum orchards and mysterious chateaux. For young Currado it was an annual agony.

Small for his age, the local children would subject him to wildly imaginative torments and unspeakable abuse. Ever since, heat and pain have been linked in Currado’s mind.

Young Malaspina took solace in sketching and many examples of his juvenilia are still extant. The Dordogne Museum of Contemporary Art recently staged an exhibition in honor of Currado’s sixty-fifth birthday and in it were several of these very early drawings.

One of Currado’s erstwhile tormentors is the eminent art critic, Raoul Contout who, in reviewing the show in Paris Match recalled their early summers, quipping, “the short child grew into the large man of elephantine ego and slight achievement.”

Children can be so cruel.

UNRATIFIED BRILLIANCE

Although there were neither witnesses nor any known record or transcript, there is no shortage of speculation regarding the legendary four-hour walk Currado Malaspina took with the Italian psychoanalyst E. Barba Giovedi.

Malaspina puzzled for many years over the nature of his work and its putative relationship to his personal history. He struggled for years with his despairing pessimism and often wondered if his dark disposition was necessary for his creativity. As a lifelong serial philanderer, he wrestled with his conscience and his oppressive remorse. As a pasticheur of other people’s ideas he was pained by his unexceptionalism despite his early promise.

In short, he was a shell, a ruin, an empty vessel masquerading as a genius for the benefit of a credulous and adoring public.

I will not add to the unsubstantiated rumors but I will simply note that after that famed meeting, Currado produced the series of monotypes that have justly earned him a sacred place in the annals of contemporary French art history.

He has since replaced his old neuroses with new, more eccentric ones and has no intention of addressing them clinically.

CATALEPTIC CRAYONS

Of all the illustrated editions of the Divine Comedy that I have come across, the one closest to my heart is Currado Malaspina's Beatrice In Bed.

His clumsy, irreverent drawings of Dante's beloved are so raunchy, so unbecoming of their original intent, so flagrantly personal that I am drawn to them with embarrassment. They bear no balm of refinement, their fallible formlessness are in stark contrast to the relentless musicality of the poem’s terza rima. Vinegary pigment, inelegant brushstrokes and text scrawled as if by the beak of a marsh cock crowd his sheets in a panic of dissonant misbehavior.

But beneath the work’s gassy astringencies there is a ripe, affirming tenderness that parallels the poet’s own grueling transformation. Few artists have been able to capture so vividly the Commedia’s imperium of uncertainty and incomplete redemption.

It's a pity that the book is out of print.

CONSTRUCTION DUST

Currado Malaspina once told me that during the course of a lifetime, a man can expect his soul to bend four times: Once in doubt, once in anticipation, once in despair and once in agony.

The longest period is despair.

Life, he told me, is like the narrow bones of the fingers, incessantly in motion and perpetually at risk. To plan and to wager are one. Even our most subtle utterances are but the guttural hackings of a beast.

His favorite poem is Yuntas by César Vallejo.

Completamente. Además, mundo!
Completamente. Además, polvo!


Completely, Furthermore, world!
Completely, Furthermore, dust!

And yet, as I write this, construction proceeds with the methodical urgency only a narcissist could be capable of. In the Normandy village of St Germain sur Ay, a 5000 square foot, beachfront studio complex, complete with an intaglio workshop, two darkrooms, an editing facility and a skylit painting atelier is being built for the pessimistic Malaspina.

I suppose despair has been good for business.

NO LIQUOR STRONGER

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Tuhija Repo, Finland’s infamous poète maudit. He goes on to write in his famous essay “The New Magnetic Fields,” that, “intimacy is to betrayal as scotch is to bourbon. Like the belted kingfisher whose predatory rattle signals life and death in one loud cry, we smugly roar through life’s uncertainties, using the language of conviction to express the hesitant disquiet of irreconcilable doubt.”

Repo’s words come to mind as I ruminate upon the current state of my kinship with Currado Malaspina. My love for him has made me vulnerable to his fickle conceits. And yet, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

Homo homini lupus perhaps sums it all up, however glibly. Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” observed that, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

In Currado Malaspina, I have found both needs bundled into one onerous receptacle.

Je suis coupable.

PREDESTINATION

Few people remember that Currado Malaspina was born on October 1st 1953 and that his godfather was Francis Picabia. It was at Currado’s christening at L’Église Saint-Suplice where Picabia horrified the congregants by declaiming over the chorister’s sweet rendition of “The Little Road to Bethlehem,” his oft quoted aphorism, “It’s really only nonentities who have genius in their lifetime.”

Picabia died the following month and the episode in church became an absent hour in the Malaspina household.

One can’t help but speculate whether the luminous star of Picabia’s difficult intelligence somehow lodged like a paperweight within Currado’s subconscious. When one thinks of Malaspina’s work one realizes how he has consistently operated within the solemn, slow voice of satire. Currado’s limitless capacity for impudence, his constant sniffing for sacred targets among the croupiers of the art world, his indifference to consequence, all evidence an irrational tenderness toward Picabian self-sabotage.

Currado Malaspina continues in his sixth decade, to be the incendiary guttersnipe, thumbing his trunk at the Brahmins of le beau monde. He convulsively makes art that throws a disquieting light on our melancholy failures.

Currado truly is a “monster of courage.”

FRIENDLY CONTOURS

Alfredo Bossi’s strange volume “Squared But Not Unlovely,” is a compendium of profiles, containing charming vignettes of interesting people. Arranged in alphabetical order, the book begins with an uproarious reminisce on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and ends with a heartbreaking screed about Chinese painter Zhao Wuji. No entry exceeds a page and some are just a paragraph or two. The texts are superimposed over a typically unrelated image. None of the images are attributed, though some are easily recognizable as Bossi’s own work.

Between Gilka Machado and Michael Melchior is a leaf devoted to Currado Malaspina and his well-documented fear of shadows. Well acquainted with phobias, Bossi’s account avoids all mockery and is one of the book’s most quotable sections.

FREE ENTERPRISE

Last spring at the Institute for Advanced Lateral Studies in Tours, Currado delivered a lecture entitled “The Cruelties of Choice”. In it he laid out what has by now become a familiar theme for people who follow Malaspina’s work. Essentially it describes artistic volition as a series of accidental “wagers,” intuitive predictions made in what Currado calls “the broken mist of misdirected reverie” (rêverie mal dirigée”).

Though well received by the audience at the time, his thesis became extremely controversial when the text was later published in the literary journal Faucon. Michel Encapuchonné, director of L’Ecole Niveau Bas de Paris was “dumbfounded by its witless arguments, gaseous yearnings and clownish inurgency.” Writing in L’Arte Aujourd’hui Brigitte Mamelon called Malaspina “a desperate blow-hard who mangles sentiment with spurious intellectualism and improvable daydreams.”

Currado was understandably hurt and dismayed but remained extremely practical as the events unfolded. Sensing an opportunity, together with the impresario Markus Ohrenschmalz, he staged a public debate at the Palais Garnier, which was televised live on TF2. The spectacle proved both profitable and entertaining and at the present time Currado is negotiating with Cable Statique for a regular series of provocative interviews and disputations.

The working title, loosely translated is “Try To Make Me Cry.”

PAS LAID

The wandering intellect of Currado Malaspina is well known. Embroidered through the myth of the man are tales of his staggering erudition and demonic wit. Few people outside France however, know what Currado looks like. Though lionized in Europe, his name in America scarcely stirs a whimper, (my loyal readers excepted).

Ruggedly handsome, he is often confused for Russian film star Pyotr Mamonov, a fact that has yielded several comical and embarrassing consequences for both of them. Due to his very public affair with fashion model Nicolosa Giannini, Currado has been a ubiquitous presence on European television. And when the photojournalist George Pollexfen published his best selling book “Men,” it was Currado who appeared on the cover.

It is for this reason that I am posting two pictures of my dear friend. The first is clipped from the “Style Desuet” section of the March 18th edition of Le Figaro that accompanied an article about flower arrangements particular to the 18th arrondisement. The second is the cover of Pollexfen’s book.