LIBIDINAL INTENSITIES

Currado Malaspina, Paris, 2012

My old friend, the jarringly impetuous Parisian artist Currado Malaspina has an infernal temper. Like a drummer's brush, he skirts the surface of civility until neither prayer nor plea can prevent his rage from crashing violently down.

I remember one episode in particular where a capricious remark from a young critic made the long dead dance and the musty crypts quake from the crush of Currado's reaction.

Spark Boon, a recent survivor of the CalArts graduate program was in Paris on a research grant looking for meta-narratives in Lyotard's bank statements and laundry lists. Malaspina, as a young member of the Collège international de philosophie in the 1970's knew the great French theorist and Boon contacted him to ask a few questions. 

It should be noted that Lyotard and Malaspina shared a deep and abiding mutual distrust, but young Spark Boon had no way of knowing this in advance. When he innocently inquired about Currado's thoughts on Adorno's "negative dialectics" the fine timbers of reason collapsed and an untrimmed tirade exploded like Mauna Loa.

Spark Boon, Rome, 2012

I have to say that beneath the weight of Currado's wrath, young Spark Boon handled himself admirably. He is a promising scholar and a thoughtful and original critic. I am impressed by his character and his wit.

Though I am not too impressed with his French.

Dommage ...

A TATTERED COAT UPON A STICK

My good friend Currado Malaspina is consumed by the constant cadence of his ebbing vitality. While still well within the feckless youth of old age, his certitude is less certain and his dominion considerably less dominant.

Finding neither joy nor comfort nor love in the fleeting liaisons that still furiously fill his clock, Currado marinates his misery in long, doleful letters to his few remaining friends.

His chief correspondent is the irresistibly exquisite Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.

Currado Malaspina and Dahlia Danton at the Tigres Library, Madrid, 2004

"My heart is a heretical bar fly showing little deference and less remorse. I am greedy for forgetfulness," he recently wrote from Tangiers where he still owns a villa overlooking Cape Spartel. "I long for honeyed conversation curved with lies and false hopes."
(Ms Danton has given me access to most of the letters exchanged by her and Malaspina, apparently unconcerned about betraying a confidence)

I have to say, I have little compassion for my old furtive friend. Most men his age are consigned to a life of bearish nostalgia, a sad phantom of imagined recollections of heroic lechery. Currado by contrast seems to be perpetually incanting a libidinous libretto of voluptuous celebration grounded in fact.

Currado Malaspina, 2012

 "Heaving hips and gamboling breasts," ("hanches lancinante et les seins gambadant) "are the secrets to a perfumed longevity," was how Rodin put it in his 1902 letter to Constance LeVrai. Although it is an uncertain wager reading an artist's work for biographical clues, Malaspina's recent drawings may provide a window into his mid-life preoccupations.

Could they possibly be meant as monuments of a self-professed magnificence? Or are they noiseless lamentations of impending impotence?