AN UNLIKELY ALLIANCE

 

 

Art critic Spark Boon and Currado Malaspina, Cannes, 2013

Sullen and desultory, my crisis stricken friend Currado Malaspina recently submitted to an extensive interview with the young New York curator and art critic, Spark Boon.

Boon, it seems, has made a name for himself as a repentant disciple of deconstructive intertextuality. His master's thesis at CalArts, Bakhtin, Barthes, Caselli and the new Dialogic Drawing was published by Stopped Clock Press with the much less ponderous title: Plagiarism: A Love Story. His position at the time was that the physical properties of paper inevitably linked all graphic material into one hypertextual ecosystem. As such, Michelangelo's drawings are the aesthetic equivalent to a driver's license, a child's notebook or a lottery ticket. It was a stirring piece of scholarship and it quickly earned Boon the reputation of a fulgent, up and coming public intellectual.

The story goes that Boon's Road to Damascus moment came when his girlfriend enrolled him in a life drawing class at the Art Students League in order to wean him off Ritalin. He was so taken by the prolonged patience he was able to achieve while drawing that he began to devote himself almost exclusively to his newfound draftsmanship. This in turn compelled him to reevaluate his whole perspective on the post-modernist canon, turning him into a sniveling apologist for the outdated notions of beauty, craft, form and quality.

Spark Boon, charcoal and pastel on paper, 2012

This in turn, brought him to Currado.

Spark Boon's sentimental recidivism and Currado Malaspina's pathetic 20th century modernist perspective are a perfect match. They recently spent many hours together in Cannes where Currado was recuperating from eye surgery. "His fawning attention is repellant," Currado wrote to me in a recent email, "but I hear he's a big-shot ('ayant une réputation non acquises') in Brooklyn, so I figured, why not?"

Why not!? I can think of about 200 reasons!

GUILTY OF POSSESSION

My bitter friend, Currado Malaspina sizzles with contempt at the mere mention of the word propriétaire. "Dante should have reserved a special place in his infernal fantasy for the landlords, bankers and the owners of Quick," he told me on more than one occasion. Currado has been renting his Place Paul Painlevé studio from the swindling slumlord Edvard Schchitonya for over twenty years and holds this elegent Russian émigré in delicious contempt.

Portrait of Edvard Schchitonya, watercolor and pastel on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2011

Currado once confided in me that to soothe himself into sleep he imagines poor Edvard in his ubiquitous soft yarn Norwegian turtleneck ski sweater writhing in a puddle of his own vomit screaming "au secours nom de dieu au secours!"

What riles Currado the most is that Schchitonya's avarice exceeds even the wretched, contemptible but somehow acceptable norm. His voracious cupidity surpasses even the tolerated levels of craven profiteering that we have grown so accustomed to in this Olympian age of greed. He seeks not only gain and surfeit but sincerely finds a perverse sense of accomplishment in the suffering of others. 

Case in point, Sandrine Pijnenburg, Currado's next-door neighbor.

Sandrine Pijnenburg, Paris 20013

  Known by everyone in the neighborhood as Sabtoosh (Sandrine's oddly appropriate diminutive of uncertain provenance), Pijnenburg has lived in the building since 1969 when it was still owned by the French-Algerian playwright Aggassi Hanasi. When Hanasi died the building was sold by his son Yehuda to a shill real estate development company called Rvota owned by the Russian oligarch Sergei Turgenev. Somehow, through machinations far too byzantine for Currado's math deficient mind to comprehend, in 1993 his landlord became Schchitonya.

Now, through the obscure Napoleonic "Droit de l'asile" a law that is invoked in France about as frequently as the law prohibiting women from wearing pants, Schchitonya is evicting his tenents in order to make the flats available as tax shelters for his Moscovite business partners.

Needless to say, Sabtoosh is none too pleased. According to Currado, Schchitonya has offered to buy out the 90 year grandmother for 20,000 euro, barely enough to afford a squalorous one-bedroom, rat infested tenement in some affronted suburb like Saint-Denis. She flatly refuses and is now embroiled in a bitter lawsuit that is eroding her life savings like an arctic glacier.

And why isn't Currado vulnerable to the rapacious Russian's appetite for profit? Why does he remain undisturbed in his bohemian atelier?

It's all in the family.

 Edvard Schchitonya is married to Malaspina's little sister Emelie. 

Emelie and Edvard Schichitonya on their honeymoon in St. Petersburg, 1998