LOCATION LOCATION LOCUTION

My continental colleague Currado Malaspina and I were once described by a lyrically muddled art critic as "two vipers gnawing on the same rim" (due vipere rosicchiare sullo stesso bordo). Maybe it lost something in the warped mirror of translation but to this day I still have no idea what the hell she was talking about.

Her snipe (or was it a compliment?) was occasioned by one of our very rare collaborations, a two-person exhibition in Milan where we were roped into creating a site-specific installation putatively inspired by the work of Giulio Andreotti and Salvatore Riina.

Creating a piece in the shadow of this legendary pair of conceptualists was considered a dumb idea at the time and it remains a dumb idea till today. I give credit to the curators for succeeding in that rare phenomena in contemporary art discourse where a questionable premise maintains its flimsy durability despite the passage of time. 

After enduring the calamitous repercussions to my own fragile career I vowed never to repeat the awful mistake of linking my artistic fate with a lesser talent.

Unfortunately Currado is not that clever.

If Malaspina and I were snakes nibbling on the teat of professional triumph then he and the Los Angeles diva Dahlia Danton must be a pair of abstemious innocents staring at the seductions of a defeated dessert.

Anyone who has spent half a minute in New York City knows that the artworld there is indifferent both to women and to Frenchmen. Combine the two and you have a target as wide as the New Jersey Turnpike. Add to this the naked fact that Danton puts the super in superficial and I can hear the carrion crows smacking their silver nibs all the way to Culver City.

Chiana Garner and Garry Chiati, two formidable New York dealers who in a sane world should know better have decided to kick off their 2015 season with what looks more like a stunt than a salvo.

Maybe it's envy or maybe it's distrust but I am sincerely appalled at this naked attempt to seduce the East with these stale flavors of months long past. Pairing Danton with Currado is like serving quail eggs with Nutella and barring an act of god my two friends will gag on their own fermented vomit.

It's a pity. Danton fits so sweetly into the glistening swell of southern California.

 

HOMO LUDENS

Among the many childhood memories that race like hungry minnows through the tortured consciousness of Currado Malaspina are the commingling images of pain and play.

The medicinal vegetable juices with their punitive tastes and pale unappetizing hues that were forced upon him by his elderly, spinster great-aunt have left Currado, to this day, with an irrational aversion to turnips and chard. And yet together with that vaguely repugnant reminiscence another image trots to the surface that is neither nauseating nor unpleasant and that is the vivid recollection of the very same tante Odette's beautiful young nurse who lived with the family intermittently as the terminally unmarried octogenarian aged into near complete invalidity.

Another equally conspicuous contrast is that of the crowded urban playgrounds with their rusted Italian slides and antiquated swings where Currado received his first catechism in the many essential skills of inner city survival.

It was there where the local prepubescent punks were tutored by their not-so-elders in the arts of smoking, stealing and something that resembled fucking but was not nearly as refined. These same swings but in modified forms began to claim an infelicitous residence in the Malaspina summer estate in Brue-Auriac. Like squatters these swings slowly took over the long abandoned étable des vaches until the place looked like a poorly planned daycare center.

The children, on pain of severe corporal punishment, were forbidden entry into what looked to them like an earthly paradise. The former barn was the exclusive domain of Malaspina's father Sordello and if a child suffered the misfortune of getting caught meandering around, or worse, actually swaying blissfully upon the apparatuses, a beating "à l'Afrique du nord" would soon follow.

The pieces began to fit together only many years later when the infamous erotic sketchbook was discovered. 

As my readers know, Sordello Malaspina was a part-time scribbler and a full-time philanderer and like a punctilious scrivener he would record his many conquests with small awkward and detailed drawings.

It's nice to know that at least somebody got to play!

THE THIRSTY FARMER

Regardless of one's age one never ceases to see one's parents as somehow exempt from the pale of human passions. To imagine a mother parched with thirst, singed with regret, exhilarated by the prospects of circumstantial renewal or deflated by the disappointments of unrequited dreams would be to diminish her to an inconceivably approachable minor key.

To imagine a father's erection would be even worse.

In a farmhouse in the small Provence village of Brue-Auriac, a place known more for its vineyards than for its deviance, my dear friend Currado Malaspina inadvertently unzipped the filial veil and was shaken to his very core.

On one of his semi-annual visits to the family estate, Malaspina, more out of boredom than out of curiosity, started rummaging through the musty neglected barley field grenier. Buried under a bale of moldy boxes and antiquated hand-tools Currado discovered a small cahier d'esquisses that was both astonishing in its variety and shocking in its content.

It seems that Malaspina père, the great stride piano genius known simply by his forename Sordello, had kept a diary of sorts, chronicling his various infidelities. Like Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's classic novel The Key, the sketchbook, rather than being some secret trove of conquests and perversions was meant to be discovered and examined in depth. Sordello hoped to use the carelessly concealed journal in order to communicate to his indifferent wife the range of her husband's appetites.

After his initial revulsion - the drawings all depict Sordello wearing the very same green hat that has become Currado's hallmark - my dear entrepreneurial friend saw a wonderful opportunity.

Why not package a new, digitally remixed anthology of Sordello's studio recordings (never a big seller in France or anywhere else) with a posthumously collaborative sex manual! Compiling the most inventive positions and assigning them clever new names, the book has become a son's homage to a revered father.

It would be fair to say that papa's priapic prowess, though impressive, is nothing like his decidedly European rendering of Willie The Lion Smith's Fingerbuster.  

But of course, he was known as someone who never missed an occasion to practice.

 

BEHIND EVERY GREAT MAN IS A SCREWED UP WOMAN

With the unfailing clarity of hindsight it now seems fairly obvious that the sacred matrimonial covenant struck between Evelyn and Currado Malaspina was doomed from the start. One retrospective look at their faded wedding pictures and the grassy edifice upon which their union was built begins to look more like a landfill than a potential garden of eden. Like an epic tale told in verse each photo depicts another unfailing prognosticator of the disasters that awaits. 

We'll launch our deconstruction with the march from Lohengrin.

Notice the bride Evelyn as she carefully navigates the step from what appears to be a country cabin or dacha of some sort. The man to her right upon whose arm she leans for support is not her father, though her father was very much alive and quite well at the time. The man, in fact, is Evelyn's physician, a strange choice for such an auspicious occasion.  

This kind old man has since passed away and buried with him is one critical key to understanding the inevitable events that followed.

Now consider this next photograph where an unidentified gentleman stares at the camera with a vacant grin that only could be described as bemused. I was recently told by someone who attended the wedding that the individual in question was a local ferry captain who by French law had the legal jurisdiction to perform the ceremony. Note too that a much slimmer and younger Currado seems vaguely indifferent, even somewhat unfriendly and in his suit and tie looks more like a maître d'hotel than one of France's most controversial artists. 

All this could easily have been ignored had not a prying, young provincial journalist discovered this odd image in the municipal district Department of Records.

In this photo we have a striking assembly of what appear to be family members. But whose family one could reasonably ask. By all accounts the families of both the bride and the groom boycotted the wedding out of principle. Malaspina's mother - his father being by that time long dead - violently objected to the union based on the suspicion that Evelyn was a practicing Freemason. Evelyn's parents by contrast, were put off simply by Currado's profession. 

So there you have it. Presumably the most important day in a couple's life together and their wedding is attended by near perfect strangers. Not a single individual depicted in the photographs can be reliably identified. It was as if they had staged some sort of Potemkin wedding only to be followed by a flimsy marriage made up of silt, sand and sticks. 

Is it any wonder why Malaspina's work is so bitterly cynical and misogynistic?  

LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN

Like most of us, my good friend, Currado Malaspina carries a painful atavistic legacy that has left an indelible spiritual laceration upon his sensitive soul.

Call me perverse, but I find the whole thing hysterically funny.

I wouldn't necessarily be going out on a limb by describing Currado's work as flat-out deviant and borderline sick. He has made a name for himself in his native Paris and beyond as a graphic purveyor of infantile erotic parodies and mawkish mockeries of carnal calesthenics. It's almost as if the poor shmuck never stopped snapping his wet towel in his middle school's vestiaire des garçons.

But upon closer examination of his ignominious obsessions we find a more complicated genesis, one stemming from an inherited infirmity that is both shocking and embarrassing.

You see, some time in the late 1950's, Currado's father, the late, great jazz pianist Sordello Malaspina was struck with what today we might euphemistically call a "penile dysfunction." Blessed with a beautiful and devoted wife - Currado's dear mother Evelyn - Sordello made a solemn, catholic vow never to betray her with another woman lest he forfeit his near magical command over his music.

Like a character out of Marquez, no sooner had the oath been made that Evelyn ceremoniously proclaimed in front of a congregation of family members assembled to celebrate the baptism of Currado's younger brother Marcel, that heretofore she would sanctify her commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ by entering into a convent!

From that day on, or so legend has it, Sordello went irreversibly limp.

Such tragedy could have easily been privately laid to rest had not Currado's brother Marcel unearthed a curious document found in the family grenier.

It turns out that Sordello, in a desperate chaste attempt to prod his uninspired prick back to life compiled what might be referred to today as a sex manual. Lushly illustrated (one must assume by Sordello himself) and annotated with titles, notes and detailed instructions, this awkward little volume presumably did nothing to emancipate the pianist's penis. 

  As a comic coda to this tragic tale it turns out that Malaspina's lovely wife Cecile confided to her spouse mere minutes after their nuptial vows that she was a full-on lesbian and had not the slightest intention of ever sharing his bed.

As Tacitus remarked many centuries ago, "Alas how what befalls the elders is visited upon their progeny with an even greater vengance."

Or as we say here in the States: "What comes up must go down."

SLAVE OF LOVE

 Like the ripening of fruit or the wear on a truck tire the dissolution of bliss transpires over time. But when that dissolution becomes complete it arrives with the abrupt clap of a thunder storm.

My good friend Currado Malaspina was the last to see what we all saw for years. His marriage to the wonderful writer Nanine Coléreux had been a train wreck and a sham. Uxorious to the point of cloying madness, Malaspina invested every lyric of his soul to the curation of what he thought was the perfect romance.

Though he is known to the world at large as a notorious roué, in truth he is as loyal as a cadet. His work, which is raw and raunchy and replete with puerility is merely a sad expression of a broken heart.

That he has enacted his bitterness on the conspicuous stage of the international art scene only adds to the gloomy emasculation of his despair.

In truth, he worshiped his bride. He was loving and protective to a fault. What was obvious to his friends but was as obscure as a cuneiform to Currado was that the object of his devotion was a false and unworthy idol.

He was troubled that as a gifted author she never received her real due. To the critics she was an anomaly. A smart and difficult writer wrapped in the body of a supermodel. Every mention and every review written by a man made constant reference to her looks. 

It drove Currado crazy.

He would rail at every insensitivity and cry foul at every patronizing sexist bon mot. Headlines like Short Skirted and Shortlisted: The Babe Bestseller Vies for a Goncourt or Red-Lipped and Lovely Coléreux Pleasures with her Luscious Prose would have Malaspina dilating with rage. 

But unfortunately my naïve friend had it all backwards.

All the while that he felt that his wife was being publicly groped in the press, it turns out that it was he, Malaspina who was the offending party in Coléreux's mind.

All his soft caresses and professions of love were read by his wife as nothing but belligerent expressions of ownership. The tender post-its that he surreptitiously left on the bathroom mirror, these cute haiku-like affirmations of timeless unconditional devotion were read by Nanine as vulgar claims of his alleged droit de seigneur.

His short text-messages that were meant to punctuate his lover's day with periodic bouquets of unsolicited affection were read by his wife as if they were the randy rantings of a starstruck stalker.

His small surprise gifts meant to endorse a decades long relationship with the frisson of youth were taken by Coléreux as oppressive innuendos that reduced her to the condition of chattel.

Once the envy of all of Paris, his love went stale  and he was the last slob in the city to find out. 

But if his new work is to be taken as a window on his current recuperative condition, I believe my dear friend Currado is convalescing just fine.

 
 

IN SEARCH OF SANDIER PASTURES

Even sex among the great unwashed is a noiseless evasion. The sublime tantric truths of slow time - those subtle skills elongated by the music of the muscles and paced by the calm atavistic winds of antiquity - are lost arts to our hyper-interconnected slaves of efficiency and speed.

My good friend Currado Malaspina has his own private cross to bear. His work is seen by some as the bumbling fantasies of an impotent imposter. His crude canticles to the pleasures of the flesh seem more like idle boasts than bonnes idées.

Currado Malaspina 2014

As is well known, Currado's mid-career has been a chaste chase after feral sex and puppy love. His various misadventures have all been duly chronicled both in the tabloids and in his work. His disappointments, though far from catastrophic, have etched their aftermaths into the creases of his damaged dharma.

My impression is that at this point Currado would even settle for the American form of transactional lovemaking though he has spent a lifetime inveighing against it.

So while he juggles his concupiscence with his ponderous self-pity an aching heart weighs heavily upon his will and on his work. 

He may be happier here in southern California where the sun shows no mercy and the sea is an ocean of possibility.

IN PRAISE OF THE ORDINARY

"I find great comfort in crowds," crowed my good friend Currado Malaspina as we watched the throngs of tourists winding their way towards Beijing's Forbidden City.

"An uncritical mass is nothing but a messy consensus of inoffensive organ meat".

"... and it's a beautiful thing to behold."

One never knows when Currado is being completely serious. There was indeed a mystic beauty in the ordered chaos of Tiananmen Square. As we watched the brass chorus of brightly colored synthetics dolefully saunter along the roped paths I wondered aloud if Mao would be spinning in his crypt.

"His favorite color was grey," barked one of the locals, ignoring the western convention of minding one's own freakin' business. After assuring our new found friend that we were interested in neither a foot massage nor a lottery ticket we followed the flock toward the Yellow Crane Pavilion.  

"Thank God for ordinary people," sighed Currado and I think this time he was being sincere. 

"Without them, where would we be, but us, if we suddenly disappeared it would scarcely stir a bedbug."

Currado Malaspin, 2014

And reflecting on my good friend's latest work I'm afraid this time the rabble would be right.

A LONELY (AND FUTILE) CRY FOR YELP

Always a keen observer of contemporary life my good friend Currado Malaspina is not as aloof from popular culture as one might have assumed. Currado stays keenly abreast not only of uniquely French societal shifts but also trends and inclinations within the rest of Europe as well.

His current hobby-horse is the so-called smart-phone addiction.

The commonplace and primitive understanding of human potential limits our capacity to performing one task at a time. This formulation, as anyone under the age of thirty-five will tell you, is a relic. An entire generation has acquired the deft, practical skill of eating full meals, talking on the phone, checking the internet and texting all while expertly navigating a mid-sized car through complex urban traffic. The occasional accident or fatality not withstanding, most of the time this practice is carried off with routine efficiency.

What Malaspina doesn't understand is that the smart-phone is a modern miracle and ignoring its potentialities would be like ignoring similar technological advances that have markedly improved our quality of life.

Where would we be without automated telephone responses when calling our doctors, utility companies and customer service departments? Remember those bleak years of being connected to breathing human beings whose limited empathy only served to exacerbate our stress?

And how about those dreary trips on public transportation before the age of the ear-bud? The buses and the trains were filled with people reading the newspaper and you know how depressing that can be. As if knowing about some war or natural disaster in some remote part of the world  could actually change things.

 Malaspina, with his characteristic penchant for exaggeration, sees all these high-tech developments as signs of dire intellectual decline and artistic decay. When he sees people sitting around a dinner table scrolling through their Facebook feed he sees only rudeness while most of us simply see boredom. 

Physical social interaction does not, by definition, necessitate total cognitive or emotional engagement. That idea is as antiquated as the 8-track!

What porn has wrought to sex, a subject dear to Malaspina, social media has done to intimacy and most people see that as a good thing. Thanks to the internet our cities and suburbs are no longer blighted by XX rated movie theaters and bookstores. And thanks to the smart-phone no one is expected to even feign any uncomfortable expression of interest or warmth.

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ORIGINS AND INSERTIONS: AN ANATOMY LESSON

That which begins with infatuation ends inevitably in repulsion. No one knows this golden rule better than my wounded friend Currado Malaspina

 But he has only himself to blame.

If one claimed the right to successive grand passions it would seem like an act of emotional avarice. Complete love visits a man but once if it deigns to visit him at all. Most of us are fools who spend their lives ignoring the stars until finally settling on a mate out of simple fatigue. A few of us stay keen to the senses and with generous hearts find the imperishable romance of fairy tales.

Luckily, this last group is so rare it spares us the agony of our envy.  

Malaspina met the love of his life either too early or too late.

Aimée Bûcherie on the rocks, date unknown

Twenty-two years his junior, Aimée Bûcherie was a dazzling beauty. When she stood beside the grizzled Malaspina she was often mistaken for his niece. As unlikely as it seemed on the surface, their relationship was a locked room of perfect compatibility.

Those of us who indulged the needy, neurotic French artist did so out of loyalty and rarely out of affection. None of us in our small circle of friends could quite fathom what this brilliant and vivacious young woman saw in our old petulant painter.

But love is blind, or some other equally annoying cliché must have accounted for his incredible good fortune.

Maybe we were simply jealous for in Aimée we all recognized our own unrequited fantasies and with a degree of meanness only artists seem capable of achieving we all secretly hoped for disaster.

Our prayers were soon answered.

As is well known, the imagery in most of Currado's work is completely void of subtlety.

It is less well-known that Currado, despite the awkward, cartoonish nature of his drawing, always insists on working with live models.

 
He rarely uses professionals preferring to harvest compliant women through chance encounters in barrooms and cafés.

Aimée worked full-time as a coordinateur de projet in a mid-size government department in the 7th arrondissement. She was known for her diligence and dependability and always put in her full 35-hour week. Currado could set his watch by her comings and goings and always made sure to wrap up his work by 4 o'clock so he could go the the vegetable market and the butcher shop before Aimée returned home. 

On the one day - feeling the early symptoms of what later developed into a nasty grippe - that she returned home early, Malaspina was working on the very piece that had made him the bête noire of polite French society.

La visite de la Plombier, Curado Malaspina, 1994

... and was using himself as the male motif.
 

NIGHT GAMES

As most people over the age of forty know well, sex is incompatible with marriage and the fault, according to my good friend Currado Malaspina, lies typically with the wives.

"Inside every tender beauty is a dormant Lady Macbeth," claims the notoriously misogynistic painter. "Within the first few years of matrimony the blood begins to thicken until all that's left are a few drunken memories, a scattering of hopeful toys and half-a-dozen badly illustrated books showings poorly foreshortened positions demanding the nimble agility of a yogi."

And this he told me well before the era of the personal computer.

Here in the States, Johnny Carson was considered one of the most effective means of birth control. In the old days most couples accustomed themselves to a fusty bedroom ménage that invited all manner of late-night TV hosts to drone the unamorous toward their wilted somnolence. Now of course, midnight is when our bone dry fingers scroll the surfaces of our blathering tablets as we examine the equally sexless status of our middle-aged peers.

Currado, who owns neither cat nor cell-phone, is having nothing of it.

He still believes in romance and its resurrective capacity to combust through variation.

His omnivorous appetites are legend and if his biographer Jean-Claude Démoutriade is to be believed his drawings are a living document to his ideals. "There has never been a more autobiographical European painter in history," claims Démoutriade, "including both Faun Roberts and Picasso."

"Monogamy is for seahorses and dreamers," insists my dear friend Malaspina, "and life and love are things to savor and grab for they are as fleeting as the indifferent winds." 

A lofty sentiment for someone who has obviously never played Ninja Chicken.