False Claims and Vaporous Assertions

Unbending in his vehemence the Cuban master Micah Carpentier remains the unrivaled virtuoso of the Latin American avant-garde. People still talk about his hoarse,orphic voice and how it conveyed such authority and melody and grace.

So much of his work is the stuff of legend considering how after a brief embrace by Castro he was shunned and reviled by the official Communist commissars of art and culture. Some of his works were successfully smuggled out of the country, some were hidden or stored in remote corners of his beloved Havana and some were destroyed either inadvertently or out of malice.

For years I had heard rumors about a lost grand mural. People talked about a strange, cryptically encoded, autobiographical masterpiece. They spoke of a furiously painted carnival of lusty flesh, an ironic homage to early Etruscan erotica. Others spoke of an overtly seditious critique of totalitarianism and compared it to Guernica and Los Desastres de la Guerra.

 It appears that the lost mural has been found!

Los Amantes de la Partida Entre los Polos de Competencia del Deseo, Micah Carpentier, 1968

Recent renovations at the Palacio de Aldama uncovered a previously unknown wine cellar that still bares the inscription "Libaciones Almacenan Aquí Miguel de Aldama." Inside this crypt, rolled like a carpet and encrusted with mold, Micah Carpentier's lost masterwork Los Amantes de la Partida Entre los Polos de Competencia del Deseo was discovered. Three meters high and over five and a half meters long, the work was in desperate need of restoration. In a unique arrangement with the Península Ibérica Instituto de Conservación y el Revisionismo, the work left Cuba for eighteen months and was subjected to the most scrupulous and comprehensive process of repair and research.

I was among a privileged group of scholars and specialists who were invited to participate in this amazing endeavor.

David Schoffman at the Península Ibérica Instituto de Conservación y el Revisionismo, 2011

One piece of disturbing but not altogether surprising scholarship emerged from the study of the mural. It seems that Carpentier had at his disposal at least half a dozen assistants helping him complete the work. Among his team, two names stood out. One was Sidhartha De Corazon who today is considered one of Mexico's great political cartoonists and was instrumental in preparing the glassy oil gessoed surface that was critical for the painting's resilient pigmentation. The other was my good friend Currado Malaspina whose contribution to the work still remains vague.

What has been made absolutely clear by this enterprise is that Malaspina's much heralded series Palimpsest, a work of unquestionable quality, is for all intents and purposes a direct, naked and shameless derivative of Carpentier's Los Amantes.

Palimpsest #3, Currado Malaspina 2011

 What a stinking disappointment!

Désir

Currado Malaspina woke up on the morning of his 50th birthday with the terrifying realization that he had yet to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This was no idle daydream nor a further weakening of an already tenuous grasp on rationality. He had already won just about every significant prize the Republic of France bestows upon its artists, including the Grand'croix du Mérite, the Chevalier d'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the coveted Prix Laval for artistic collaboration. It only seemed just that he also win a Nobel and since there is no category specific to the visual arts he presumed that the Peace Prize was the only realistic option.

His scheme was as simple as it was absurd and the odd thing is, he almost pulled it off.


Malaspina never really took an active interest in politics - he is far too narcissistic - and despite the French fashion for detached anti-Zionism he never presumed to take sides in the Mideast. It is precisely for this reason that he hatched a plan to settle the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews once and for all.


He called it Désir - the first Palestinain/Israeli dating service!

With one office in Jericho and another in Ramat Aviv Malaspina's staff of twelve tireless love brokers tried to package and promote the idea of reconciliatory miscegenation. Never losing sight of his real goal, Currado hired the wily publicists of Heugot SMT to spread his quixotic gospel of peace through love.

He was prominently featured on Quattordici,  the popular French television news magazine that's a cross between TMZ and Sixty Minutes. He was interviewed in The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement and the International Herald Tribune. There were stories about Désir on Al Jazeera, CNN, CBC and the BBC. He was profiled in The Forward, Le Nouvel Observateur, The New York Times Magazine and the Huffington Post. For months, the Israeli press became obsessed with him eclipsing stories about both Iran and Eurovision.

His client list included Palestinian soccer star Ibrahim Koolatim-Utim, the West Bank writer and socialite Sooha Chazava and Niri Gas-Ruah, the star of Israel's top reality program Metachat Ha-Talit. But alas, fatwas and death threats proved far too incompatible with concupiscence. Wife swaps proved even harder than land swaps and religious taboos didn't mix well with aphrodisia. Currado's plan was short-lived.

Niri Gas-Ruah on her way to a "love-connection"

For now the Peace Prize is still on hold.

SUDDEN EXPOSURE

The Ci'sponto Art Fair is part spectacle and part high-minded cultural subversion. Serious collectors make it a point to avoid this biennial event. Very serious collectors never miss it.

My good friend Currado Malaspina was stirred from his convalescence in order to curate the booth of his Swiss art dealer, Johann Gier. His approach was rather unique.

Just outside Ci'sponto is the small fishing village of San Viscere di Testa, an idyllic untamed paradise in the Cinque Terre. Aside from the occasional mudslide that typically tears several of the small travertine casolari off their foundations, life in San Viscere is as close to perfect as one can imagine. Malaspina descended upon this shangra-la with an unusual proposition.

He offered the local fishermen 500 euro to draw or paint a portrait of their wives - naked! (Silvio Berlusconi owns a villa in the neighboring Anobuco al Mare so the denizens of San Viscere are not easily scandalized). He received over four-hundred pictures and some were rather well done. 

Ritratto di mia moglie, Luana-Maria Pistoi, 2012 Benno Pistoi

 He installed these eccentric works salon style in Gier's 200 square meter space. 

The wives were not amused.