Lautréamont

Foundation Domy Morgane, The Zurich based organization founded by the Swiss collector Pierre Hertzberg, has recently announced the publication of Lautréamont, a folio of prints by my dear friend Currado Malaspina. Dizzying in its range, the works are subtle reflections on the encyclopedic reservoir of erotic French literature.

In the United States, Malaspina has seen armaments of prudential cultural gatekeepers raining blows upon his reputation. In the eyes of one American academic, Malaspina is "... a sinking barge of ossified European libertinism." This new publication is being viewed in France as a gallant slap at the shrieking mice of political correctness.

I salute you Monsieur Hertzberg!

עבודה קיץ

Micah Carpentier, 1968

To tour the Louvre with Currado Malaspina is to be subjected to an erratic and idiosyncratic reading of art history that can be in turn both illuminating and annoying.

Take for example his description of Cimabue’s “Maestà”


“The first credible depiction of Hebraic pain from the world’s most famous yiddishe mama”.

Or Poussin’s “Saint Frances of Rome Announcing the End of the Plague in Rome”


“Cirque de Soleil on 17th century quaaludes”

This summer, Malaspina was given by the Louvre the distinct honor of curating an exhibition that to my mind was long overdue. Micah Carpentier: Les Autoportraits explores an under-appreciated aspect of the Cuban master’s capacious oeuvre. Including painting, drawing, film, photography and printmaking, the show delves deeply into the epic narcissism of this deeply flawed genius. The work is stunning in its scope and in its subtlety. Never has shameless self-aggrandizement seemed so lyrical.

The catalog is equal to the task as well. Written and designed by Malaspina, his pithy annotations are true to the characters of both the author and the subject. The caption under the photo reproduced above reads:

“The famously tone-deaf Carpentier photographed as a norteño balladeer in a straw (Le Bon Marché) cowgirl hat”

LE VIOLON D'INGRES

Like Hans Hoffmann, whom he knew quite well, Currado Malaspina likes to work in the studio naked. Unencumbered by cloth, ungartered of the smocks and aprons and all the other protective garments of the trade, Currado functions best within the lightness of his flesh. In fact, all who dare visit him at his capacious rue Gassendi studio must equally repair to the sheerness of skin.

Such was the occasion for the now famous mural-sized painting, Dix-sept which proudly hangs in the Elysée Palace’s Salle de Clairvoyance in the northeast Coeur de Tremblement wing. Composed of 17 separate panels, the painting depicts the unmistakable Malaspina in various postures of vitality and repose interspersed within a rascal’s gallery of several unidentified women.

At a recent reception for the foreign minister of Israel, Delphine Frizot, sous-préfet of the famously verdant Mésange-sur-Seine was overheard sneering “il semble que la pornographie est le nouveau passe-temps de l'état.”

THE ATELIER

"The hideous work of painting offers grace to those who greet its drudgery, not with groans but with gratitude." Thus wrote Gayland Fix in his preface to the catalogue raisonné of Currado Malaspina's work, "Malaspina: The Complete Oils" (Gallimard 2002).

To pay a visit to Currado Malaspina's Rue Gassendi studio is to perform a haj to a time-hallowed glade of unguarded passion. Jealously unkempt, the space is an unseemly spring of anarchy. It swells with the stuff of art in an ungainly stillness that haunts even days after one's departure.

Yet it is here where Adona's Motto, was painted and here where The Milky Garment series was nursed to perfection. For thirty years Malaspina toiled on such masterworks as Rightous Guild, Lightly Come The Babes, Don Juan Of Jerusalem, and Une Belle Une Moche. It was here where he and Lita Abruzzi foiled the arc of reason with their savage and accursed love affair.

I am now in Paris, visiting with my good friend Malaspina and we are sharing our painterly thoughts on the significance of flesh, the shape time and the rudded soil of the South.

SATORI IN PARIS

For years Currado Malaspina imagined to himself how he might die. He preferred the prospect of dying peacefully in his sleep but was certain that it would not be the case. Skin hemorrhages and progressive liver failure were much more in keeping with his personality.

His fears mingled so seamlessly with his obsessions that it was hard for him to discern with any clarity which of his fantasies were grounded in rationality and which were symptoms of a neurosis.

At the time it seemed to him that the only possible solution was to become a Buddhist. He had no real understanding of Buddhism, but sensed an equanimity would follow the assertion of faith.

MIDNIGHT'S PROMISE

Portrait of Currado Malaspina, 2009
Drawn by Dahlia Danton

“I was inflamed by him.”

It’s well known that the great love of Currado Malaspina’s life was Dahlia Danton. He would not be spared from the anxious agonies of his longings. To call her a cruel mistress would be to miss the point completely. Malaspina was complicit in the immaculate imperfection of their union.

She visited him at his new atelier on rue Gassendi, a small, intimate space that looks out on the Bibliotheque Georges Brassens. It was their first meeting in 15 years.

“I was inflamed by him,” is what Danton said to me when I asked her why she would subject Currado to such a savage reunion.

“And how did he look?” I asked

COBI ATOYAT

Currado Malaspina’s flimsy grasp on reality was evidenced again in an interview published in the spring edition of La Nouvelle Cosmopolis. He was interviewed by Loquecia McCart, the venerable independent curator known mostly for the succès de scandale surrounding the exhibition “J'ai Touché sa Chatte.” Asked to name his three favorite contemporary artists, he predictably rattled off Micah Carpentier and Dahlia Danton. What shocked McCart was the third artist he named.

“I had the privilege several years ago,” began Malaspina, slowly drawing out his story for maximum suspense, “to spend a week in Smyrna, lecturing at the Beylik Institute to a group of very gifted graduate students. It was my habit to begin each day by walking the three kilometers from my hotel to Konak Pier to a café improbably called Maimonides. Eddie, the proprietor, a portly man with a waxed handlebar moustache, always made it a point to personally serve me his freshly baked börek, pour me his dangerously scalding coffee and sit with me at a table with the most favorable view of the Port of Izmir.

“'In the Karatas,' Eddie said one morning referring to the old Jewish quarter in the city center, 'just off of Dario Moreno Street, there is a small spice shop where I purchase my za’atar and cardamom. Its owner, Yaris Atoyat, a most peculiar man, may be of special interest to you.' Eddie knew I was an artist, but that was all he knew of me, so I assumed it wasn’t the spices he had in mind.

“The following day, after my lecture, I took a cab to Arugete and Sons Spices to see for myself what Eddie was talking about. On the walls of the shop, whose cacophonic pungency wafted into the street in thick, invisible hallucinogenic waves, were literally hundreds of oddly rendered watercolors of nudes. They were the strangest, most disturbing images I had ever seen. They seemed both ignorant of and aloof from any western tradition. I had experienced nothing like this before or since.

“I introduced myself to Mr. Atoyat and asked who the artist was who was responsible for all the beautiful paintings. He beamed when he said ‘my son, my son Cobi Atoyat is the artist'.

“And so to answer your question, my three favorite artists are: Carpentier, Danton and Cobi Atoyat.”

Cobi Atoyat 2009

M E R D R E

When the documentary filmmaker Michel Fédérovitch approached Currado Malaspina with a proposal to collaborate on his interminably deferred Jarry project, Currado jumped at the chance. It had little to do with any affinity with the noted progenitor of pataphysics, nor with any absurd interest in the world of the theatre but rather as a means to avoid confronting a chronic creative block that had turned his Rue Cournot studio into a barren patch of abandoned, half finished, ill-conceived attempts at restoring his unearned reputation.

For the sake of cruel but just brevity let me just state that Currado Malaspina is a wretched embittered has-been whose best work is way behind him. Whether it be Alfred E. Newman or Alfred Jarry, it matters little to a man whose creative intellect is a parched mesa of insignificant confections.

Enter Fédérovitch, flush with the financial backing of the pecunious software developers from Sophia Antipolis, Conjurés & Soldats and Malaspina is off his ass and drawing.

If my tone is bitter it is merely a reflection of an acutely focused resentment grounded in the fact that the image posted above fetched a pagan’s ransom at Sotheby’s in the early spring auction. Sold to an undisclosed New York collector, it broke all previous Malaspina records at € 684,000

Ouch.

B A K A

In typical European fashion, Currado Malaspina ignorantly conflates concepts and images of non-Western cultures, churns them into a torpid mush and calls it art. In a recent group exhibition at the Musée d'Art de Hesian on Boulevard de Clichy entitled “Ragoût Est/Ouest,” Malaspina presented fifteen drawings based (very) loosely on the complex ethos of Japan’s pre-industrial military nobility. Titles like Imagawa, Tokugawa and Shingen suggest direct references to the Samurai, yet the flaccid naked figures with their tightly muffined hair look like caricatures of inactive Sumo wrestlers.

None of this pendulous ambiguity deterred soft drink magnate Tony Ichinomiya from buying up the whole series. He plans to build a wing on his Honshu summer dacha just to hang his substantial yet inconsequential Malaspina collection.

FAILING UPWARD

When the Corsican collector Moisés Natali purchased, sight unseen, the entire portfolio of Currado Malaspina’s Maldoror drawings from the unscrupulously successful Rive Gauche art dealer Samassi Arsène, not a few eyebrows were raised. When Natali returned half the pieces as “unsuitable for the home of my virgin daughters,” a wave of skepticism engulfed the 5th arrondissement like a tropical monsoon.

The dubious virtue of the Natali girls notwithstanding, the drawings themselves were not free from controversy.

When the tainted works were returned to the market, an exhibition was held at the Palais de Cupidité’s sumptuous Hall of Divinities. The critics were divided but the public was enthralled. A record shattering seven hundred thousand visitors were swept up by the art and the accompanying succès de scandale. Gary Hoffmansthal of The Guardian called it a “a crass circus of low-brow hucksterism that would make even Damien Hirst soil his cottons”

Les Chants de Maldoror

It all started on a dare. Georges Perec publicly challenged Currado Malaspina to read the entire oeuvre of Henri Barbusse. From the solipsistic eros of L’Enfer through the horrific violence of Le Feu all the way to the revoltingly hagiographic Staline: Un Monde Nouveau Vu à Travers un Homme.

Malaspina hated Perec with the passion one reserves for those one envies most. So while laboring through the turgid prose of Le Couteau Entre les Dents, Currado decided to do Perec one better. He added De Nerval, Sade, Laureamont and Mirbeau to the pot and in an empty gesture of literary bravado, invited Perec, (who at the time was clearly too obsessed with the barrage of critical attacks on the Oulipo group), to join him.

Twenty years in the making, Currado has recently unveiled his long awaited series of drawings based on some of the French literary canon’s most provocative works.
Exhibited recently at Gerard/Shah on Place Paul-Painlevé, these works show the breadth of Malaspina’s deep penetration into some of the most disturbing literature of our time. He has truly conjured a visual equivalent to the dissonance and beauty these works so strongly convey.

Whether it is true that his wife left him due to his complete absorption in this project is something I cannot verify with any certainty.

SYNESTHESIA

Synesthesia – or the merging of the senses – is an enterprise that Currado Malaspina has devoted himself to sporadically and unsystematically. Each time he attempts to make works of art to be “ingested” through multiple means he has failed with miserable nobility. Like the knight-errant Alonso Quixano, Malaspina is a mythmaker, an unpaid dreamer, a follower of phantoms and ultimately a fool.

He’s in Euboea right now, renting a small cabin on a quiet cul-de-sac on the east side of Chalcis. He told me that he is spending most of his time reading Juvenal’s Satires and listening to Parsifal on his I-Pod. Occasionally, in order to offset the blunting of the senses that comes from forced isolation and habit, he visits Madame Erzulie’s very upscale gentleman’s club where he has taken an unhealthy fancy to the portly nineteen-year old twins Indra and Inemes.

He is also making small sketches of imaginary Greek sculptures and sending them to friends with cryptic annotations written on the backs. I received the drawing above with the phrase “dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range” scrawled in a near indecipherable handwriting as if his hand were a club or a charred twig dipped in brine.

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.