VINTAGE MALASPINA

It's as if the years haven't touched him.

Everything about my good friend Currado Malaspina speaks to his undying
naïveté. It's as if life's cruel hypocrisies have evaded his comprehension. Like a child, he trusts that whatever ill besets his world will self-correct, like a weighted scale or a waterfall. His raw, artless demeanor is defenseless against the agents of rancor and when his kindness is answered with callousness he remains inoculated from every slight.

How can one live like that, you may reasonably ask.

Alone, aloft and oblivious.

Início do Recluso, Portugal

As he grows older my friend Currado spends more and more of his time reading and writing in his small cottage in the Sitio neighborhood of Nazaré. This lovely coastal village, about 120 kilometers north of Lisbon is the perfect place for a Myshkin like Malaspina. 

Far from the belligerent tohu and bohu of the 6ème, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood where Currado has lived for nearly forty years, and equally distant from the opera buffa that has characterized French politics for the past decade and a half, Nazaré is the perfect place to maintain the quixotic hope that in the end 'everything will be alright.'

But there's a cost to his willful nonchalance. Leaving his legacy in the trust of those who see Malaspina more as a brand than as a genius is a foolish and risky gambit. If one decides to stand aloof, a sordid cast of wretched indignities may rain upon a man of honor like confetti. There is no limit to the small humiliations a visionary might suffer at the hands of the unwashed circus barkers and trinket peddlers. 

Even if it is Mis en bouteille au château. 

ACULTURAL LITERACY

For the past year or so, whenever I asked my good friend Currado Malaspina what he'd been up to I always received the same deflecting response:

Pas grand chose

(not too much).

Little did I know that the ever-enterprising Malaspina was consumed in the singular task of trying to write a best-seller.

In France there is no real market for the traditional American bodice ripper. In a country whose literary tradition includes highfalutin filth by the likes of Isadore Ducasse, Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis du Sade, minor shades of gray have little or no appeal.

Currado Malaspina is determined to change all that.

With the recent publication of Les Petite Morceaux de Gratitude, (inexplicably the English language version will be called The Flame of Philomène) Currado is attempting to reconfigure centuries of French sexual mores.
  

In the US, Malaspina likes to observe, sex, like sports, is enjoyed more as a spectator than as a participant. Fantasy is preferred over achievement and fetishism is more of a fad than an inclination. Knowing that with globalization popular culture trends exclusively toward America he keyed his book with a more repressive bias anticipating a French turn toward puritanism.

Whether his bet pays off is of little consequence since he has optioned the book to Burbank-based Duchateau Productions with several big names already attaching themselves to the project.

FITNESS IN FRANCE

Leave it to my buddy across the pond, Currado Malaspina to find the only health club in the EU to allow nudity. Modeled on the ancient Spartan ritual of Gymnopaedia, members are encouraged to do their paces while fully peeled.

Famous for their Kouretes classes, close cousin to Pilates but a bit more martial, this unusual fitness center attracts an eccentric yet devoted clientele.

Although there are two similar gyms here in California - one in Humboldt County catering to the pot-bellied pot growing community the other in L.A. buried in the canyons of Bel-Air not far from the Getty Museum - neither one, Malaspina insists, can hold a fisherman's candle to the one in France. (Currado stipulated that for discretion's sake I withhold the name of his birthday-suited spa as it is frequented by several well-known members of his beloved Socialist party). 

The highly unorthodox atmosphere has a practical component that's hard to refute. Unlike conventional gyms, this one doesn't need scores of high-definition television screens bleating frantically from every corner. Why bother when there are better distractions available while performing one's rote exertions?

All the dangling and drooping aside, it's been noted elsewhere that exercising in the rough is better for the circulation, creates boatloads of free-radicals and greatly enhances the production of vital digestive enzymes.

Though it's unlikely that this will grow into an enduring trend there are already indications that the popularity of unclad calisthenics has yet to peak. 

Can bald-ass Zumba be very far behind?

 

POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN

My good friend Currado Malaspina has an uneasy relationship with nature. His indifference to plants, oceans and animals is not uncommon among the European intelligentsia. No less of an authority than Jean-Paul Sartre famously described trees as "des obstacles gênants à une pensée claire."*

It is therefore nothing less than astonishing that Malaspina has been spending the past year and a half making plein-air watercolors.

A radical departure from his normal practice, these small trifles, produced in situ, are redolent with the detestable vapors of academic revisionism. 

Landscape, André Derain, 1930

This is no small matter.

Nowhere is the pernicious agon between progression and retrogression more tethered to Fascism than in France. One need only look at the questionable career of André Derain to find evidence for this uncomfortable yet valuable assertion.

Currado cries foul and claims an artful innocence when confronted with these facts but unlike the art world in the United States, in France ideas still matter.

"Sincerity is the comfort of infants and fools ."  

This oft quoted line from the Australian poet K. C. Stengel's epic Always Last, has been evoked as an apologia for artists' behavior from Danton to Dubuffet. But what's forgotten about this modern master of terza rima is that he was above all else a satirist and it is precisely the lack of irony that makes Malaspina's new work so insidious.

The critics are having none of it and Currado has been roundly condemned from every corner. 

It would be fitting to cite Stengel's quatrain in full for it is context that provides a deeper reading of his unusual ideas:

Gone are the nights of stories and tales
Sincerity is the comfort of infants and fools
Echos of lies lie deep in the shales
Smothered by mothers and brothers and schools.

 from Always Last, K. C. Stengel 

*Cumbersome obstacles to clear thinking

      

The Bodhisattva of la Rue de la Bûcherie

Professional art training is a much different affair in France than it is in the United States. With very little value placed on advanced degrees or university affiliations artists tend to work much more independently than they do, say, in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. The approach in Paris is much more liberal, freer and less tethered to the academy, be it of the traditional variety or, as Robert Hughes put it, "the academy of the avant-garde."

My friend Currado Malaspina is the perfect example of this systemless system of art education. He has availed himself of the grand legacy of French painting but he is neither stifled by it nor feels compelled to repudiate or condemn it. His is the Middle Way, the method of an artist comfortable in their artistic skin. Whatever aesthetic innovations are stumbled upon he accepts with the grace of the fortunate rather than as the spoils of the aggrieved.

 

Palimpseste I no. 16, Currado Malaspina, 2012

One could argue that with the absence of an anxiety of influence Malaspina is condemned to an oeuvre that simmers beneath the boil but that would presume that he is a naïf. There's a cunning side of Currado, a side that misdirects as it lures the inattentive eye into a maelstrom of subversion.

Whether Currado is just a dabbling journeyman or an apostle of some new disruption still remains to be seen. What is certain is that as a character he is sui generis, a man untainted by trend and untouched by any prevailing taste.

Hélas, could he be one of the last authentic egghead savants?

i don't LIKE

I have to admit I love Facebook.

It's petty, it's trivial, it's intrusive and above all, it's addictive. It lures the wise and the dim-witted alike. Highbrows and housewives find common cause in their compromised time and looted privacy. The trivial normally celebrated by Tweeners is now attracting the intelligentsia while our new lingua franca has become the profoundly predictable shared link. Even my good friend Currado Malaspina has been caught in the clutch of this invisible community.

He spends hours examining photos of friends whose children seem to be living in a perpetual state of curated ecstasy. He composes pithy quips and engages in clever repartee with near strangers whose abundant free time is matched only be their poverty of meaningful insight.

But what is important to me in all this is not what he is doing on Facebook (full disclosure: I don't have a Facebook account so don't bother looking me up) but what he is not doing, which is, of course, his work.

Here in Los Angeles the competitive atmosphere among artists is as mild as a young camembert de Normandie.  Not true in other places and I find no worthier antagonist than the formally fierce Currado Malaspina. 

He recently spent two months in a rented Spanish cottage in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles courtesy of the French Ministry of Culture and Anthropology (yes, such a governmental body exists!). He was commissioned to study the various sectarian communities in the area and in addition to filing a detailed report, create a body of work in response to his findings.

I believe he spent most of his time texting, drinking bad wine, chasing a combative Dahlia Danton and bantering with his new friends on Facebook.

To my great relief the work he completed on his stay was nothing short of abysmal.

North Kings Road, mixed media on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

TILTING CONTRARIETY: A MAN AT WAR WITH HIMSELF

More than midway through life's journey, my good Gallic friend Currado Malaspina finds himself at a crossroads. He feels the frosty augury of death with an immediacy bordering on fear. The snowy down that coats his wrinkled face belie his still vigorous  constitution. At yet he's obsessed with the idea of an impending infirmity. That he still frolics with damsels half his age changes nothing of his gloomy foreboding. He sees the Book of Revelation as his personal talisman and he reminds anyone within earshot that "the Lamb has opened the seventh seal ..."

On the other hand, there is a competing force that guides Currado like a divining lodestar. He explains it with a famous French syllogism: All men are dogs - Malaspina is a man - Malaspina is a dog.

The pleasures of the flesh are never far from Currado's mind and it is this very tension between the sybarite and the sinner that tears his mortal soul apart. He wants desperately to be at peace with his god before he dies but in his recognition that life is fleeting he needs equally to bathe in the corpuscular present. The sad truth is that the deadly trespass of fornication is a venal kindness he simply cannot do without.

Not too long ago Currado began to track his urges in a notebook complete with strange little drawings. He annotated those drawings with cryptographic jottings
whose specific meanings even he sometimes forgets. His struggle with the antagonistic clash between religious redemption and sensual satisfaction is his defining motif and his markings betray the seriousness of his ambivalence. Through logarithmic calculations and pictorial juxtapositioning Currado has reconciled the opposing forces of his nature in a jarring display of graphic rationalization.

His message is clear: If I can draw my way through the torment no ill can ever befall me.

It is completely idiotic but that's what happens when you've gone to a Catholic school in France with a fairly decent art department.

TRACTATUS FURIOSOS

While the reveries of most rational men dissolve into the ash of bitter experience my good friend Currado Malaspina continues live in a state of hopeful anticipation. The shale and bog of middle age have yet to dampen his fanciful dreams. Though fame has always been within his easy reach, success or the kind of success that Currado finds meaningful has not.

His eccentric notebooks are full of the jottings of a madman. Incoherent scrawls in a motley tapestry of crude miscellany allude in a host of languages to lost opportunities, abandoned plans and bitter jeremiads against named and unnamed adversaries alike. He seems to have forgotten nothing and what may appear insignificant to others loom in the foreground of Malaspina's imagination like a limestone cenotaph.

 

But through it all there's a strong thread of buoyant optimism within the pages of his frazzled pads. Encoded in his private dialect are cheerful predictions of personal progress and renovation. Atonement seems to be the most dominant trope and a self-effacing melancholy is braided through his boasts like the verses in a villanelle.

That he has agreed to have his journals published in not surprising in a man whose life has been one of public indiscretion. What has surprised the critics is that he has agreed to have the work edited and annotated by the inscrutably thorough but far from disinterested art historian Orestia Shestov.

It is not unlikely that through it all we may learn the truth behind their tangled tryst of many years ago. Perhaps therein lies the source of Currado's unlikely optimism.  

THANKS FOR SHARING

Some might charitably call it the kinky seams of apprenticeship others would discard it entirely as artistically irrelevant but there's one glorious fact upon which everyone agrees: The early work of Currado Malaspina is at long last a scalding, bullish commodity.

Les serments et des lettres #3, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

For over thirty years my good friend Currado has been warehousing reams of his juvenilia in a nondescript storage facility in Nantes. Unbeknownst to just about everyone (including myself), about 50 kilometers from his summer home in Pornic a gold mine lay in abeyance, waiting like a lost key to reveal its forgotten virtue.

Les serments et des lettres #12, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

The staggering self-confidence of the young Malaspina is something unfathomable in today's atmosphere of intellectually abnegating social score-keeping. 

From Facebook to LinkedIn, the inflated contemporary narratives of our half cooked professional classes are a living testament to our chronic insecurities. Every minor episode of our pathetic little lives is now duly recorded and promiscuously chronicled as if to say "here are my fears which are touchingly concealed behind the tattered veil of fictitious triumph." Is an anthropomorphic pet or an over-priced poorly prepared meal truly a significant sign of personal achievement?

 Seen in this light, the subdued and gradual nurturing of Currado's gifts appear nothing short of visionary. Abjuring even the reflected light of fame, my dear friend labored silently until the furrows of imperfection began to align and his unique conceptual armature bolted itself to actual, living works.

His ethic is a relic but his market value is as real as a treasury note. 

And now that Currado is finally flush he has even found time to play with his kitten.

 

ART HISTORY - RESET

A small scandal is underfoot. 

The creation myth surrounding Currado Malaspina's internationally acclaimed Palimpseste series is facing a serious challenge from, of all places, the Persian Gulf. 

Palimpseste #3, Currado Malaspina 2012

These familiar images have come to be associated with the very idea of Currado Malaspina. For lack of a more dignified term, it has become, to a large measure, his 'brand.' Despite the intricacies of his highly developed yet personal cosmology, the obscure nature of his far flung hermeneutics and the eloquent expertise of his obsessive yet lyrical execution, the works themselves have become, like Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Carpentier's Song of Degrees, a mere humdrum, misunderstood facsimile and a self-replicating unit of popular cultural significance or put another way, a celebrity.

The plot has now taken an unexpected geopolitical twist with the emergent claims of the hitherto unknown Persian artist, Müshil Mehemrodrageh.

Like many Americans, the French carry a cloying colonial

Müshil Mehemrodrageh

prejudice that claims that only the West is capable of serious artistic innovation. The idea that the Iran of the ayatollahs could produce a painter of merit within its own borders, working within its own institutions is about as likely as finding a decent slice of pizza in Jakarta or a croissant au beurre in Minsk.

And yet, the Teheran-based Müshil Mehemrodrageh has not only been producing a steady stream of sophisticated pictures for the past thirty-five years but he may also be the rightful and legitamite progenitor of Malaspina's alleged chef d'oeuvre Palimpseste. Reviewing the evidence, the conclusion of many specialists, critics and diplomats is both disturbing and rather damning. 

Bildar no. 4, Oil on linen, Müshil Mehemrodrageh 1980 (courtesy of the artist)

The recent tempest surrounding these works has even eclipsed the nuclear issue, at least for the moment. The renewed claims of Persian cultural supremacy have once again taken center stage. The ire against the French has been so caustic that the Iranians are considering ignoring Francois Hollande's offer of relaxing economic sanctions.

"Keep your goose liver and your smelly cheeses," deputy foreign minister Omar Boabache recently said at a particularly bellicose news conference, "between Russia, Turkey and Japan we're doing just fine without all your effeminate exports! Say goodbye to our fancy rugs and delicious pistachio ice-cream not to mention our oil. You can faire le bise my ass mes amis!!!"

I heard that Mehemrodrageh recently hired someone to taste his food and check under his car for funny looking balloons.

I guess even paranoids have enemies.

 

COMMITMENT

Things are looking up for my good friend Currado Malaspina.

The tentative rapprochement with his erstwhile collaborator Dahlia Danton now looks, on the surface, like a fait accompli.  

They have put their aesthetic differences behind them (at least for now) and have decided to resume their artistic collaboration (albeit on a trial basis).

As most of my readers remember, together with the likes of Komar and Melamid, Gilbert and George, Harvin and Fitzsimmons and the Starn Twins, Danton & Malaspina were a fixture in the late 20th century Creative Couplet Movement.

As reported by veteran arts pundit Sergei Sergie in the culture blog Rough Toast, the pair were informally invited to submit a proposal to the forthcoming aRCHIVE (13) exhibition tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2015. 

Few people have forgotten their politically charged pieces from aRCHIVE (12). Casting the leaders of the G8 nations as protagonists in pet portraits, Danton & Malaspina challenged the whole notion of sovereignty, global resources and the so-called war on terror.

Like many simpleminded tendentious works of art, it created a burlesque atmosphere of scandal and recrimination.

Puppy, Danton & Malaspina, 2011

If not for the deft damage control by the two chief curators, Jimmy De Stantio and Marta Castelammuffito the exhibition might have been shut down. The publicity was fantastic but neither Malaspina nor Danton could handle the tumultuous aftermath. They cracked under the strain and ended their partnership amid mutually acrimonious accusations of aesthetic betrayal and commercial capitulation.

Though Danton thrived as a solo act (she has representation in three different cities including Foucault/Hurston in New York), Currado never seemed to recover (he is currently teaching).

I suppose it's just a matter of temperament.

IF YOU'RE A FAMOUS ARTIST IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

Few tourists venture to the eastern Crimean hamlet of Staryi Krym which is precisely why it was there that my good friend Currado Malaspina celebrated Christmas.

Known mostly for the 14th century Surb Kach monastery and the equally ancient Ozbek Han mosque, this Tartar town is the perfect place in which to disappear.

And while he spent a quiet fortnight relaxing at the peninsula's rustic though adequate spa (he loves mud baths, olive branch thrashings and deep intestinal massage), he was nonetheless noticed by some of the area's more internet savvy young people.

Image from the Facebook page of Rusça Sakav whose caption read "the Black Sea darkens under the shadow of Currado"!

It is often forgotten that Currado is a reluctant recluse. He enjoys the spotlight and has spent many years cultivating the image of a bed-hopping, barroom brawling bon-vivant. It is simply that through the years he has grown weary of the constant pressure to perform.

Most people don't realize how hard it is to behave like an artist. 

And so he is always on the prowl for obscure, anonymous places where he can retreat, reflect and decompress from the arduous routine of being a notorious French celebrity.

Maybe next year he could try Orange County.

ART AND POLITICS

The Austerlitz mural project has been a daunting task. Ever since my dear friend Currado Malaspina accepted the commission it has been one misadventure after another.

Designed as a massive 30 foot wide variation on his famous Palimpseste series, Currado has employed a small army of young assistants to complete the picture on time.

The problem is that his heart is simply not in it. He no longer craves the respect and recognition he once did as a younger man. He is also relatively well-off, considering that a typical work fetches somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy-five thousand euro.

He seems to be just going through the motions and he's consigning more and more of the creative work to his most trusted aids.

As a result the quality of the draftsmanship has markedly suffered but as Malaspina rightly points out, this was also the case with Rubens.

I suppose what is most disappointing is that the City of Paris is equally ambivalent. Commissioning Currado in the first place began as just a political payoff, an act of craven, insider cronyism where some lower-level bureaucrat did some creative accounting in order to placate a government minister who happens to share a mistress with Malaspina. The result is that nobody is happy and for the foreseeable future there will be a large blemish of a picture greeting the innocent commuters of a perfectly adequate though over-lit Metro station.   

DAHLIA DANTON

The French have a nasty, petty way about them. There's a stain upon their collective character that can be summed up in the following famous unattributed aphorism:

  

Il n'y a pas une grande vertu d'être laid. 

And while my dear friend Currado Malaspina is quick to add that while there is no great virtue in being ugly there is equally no great shame in being gorgeous.

Dahlia Danton with Currado Malaspina (date unknown)

 "Je suis un esthète, he declares at every opportunity as if by claiming to be an aesthete he reserves for himself the right to treat people like Ming Dynasty earthenware or rosewood Shaker chairs. "I love to surround myself with things of beauty."

To regard people as ornaments or mere objects for the delectation of the senses is seen in the United States as something uniquely anti-social. No so in France my friend Currado insists. To use human beings in order to inspire and add refinement to one's life and to advance one's personal artistic enterprise has, to me at least, a uniquely feudal feel. But this is precisely how Malaspina operates.

And as such he insists on surrounding himself with beautiful women. 

It is highly questionable whether he is capable of treating any of these women as equals.

There is however one notable exception.

Dahlia Danton

And she knows it!

THE DIGNITY OF AGING

Freud correctly observed that man's imagination fails while trying to imagine death. My good friend Currado Malaspina reached a similar conclusion after recently undergoing a medical procedure to remove a benign skin lesion below his left ear.

Lesion of Honor, watercolor on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

A fleeting glimpse of oblivion can result in several outcomes. Slapped with the realization of inevitable decay can be a deeply humbling experience. A realignment of values in favor of the ethical, a tilt toward selflessness and gratitude is a typical reaction under these circumstances.

This, of course, was not Malaspina's response at all. For Currado an epistemological approach toward rectitude is a non-starter. He wears his reputation as a trou-du-cul with great pride. His brief brush with mortality only amplified his narcissism.

"The brilliant flame of dissipation"  (la flamme brillante de inconduite) is how he puts it, a life illuminated by sin. Nothing animates Malaspina more than the wretched glow of excess. Now that he has received his clean bill of health he is determined more than ever to satisfy his Caligula-like appetites in full.

"I am a monster," he told me the other day on the phone. 

Yes, Currado but how's your prostate?
  

TAEDIUM VITAE

The illusion of election is not something unique to artists - most religions contain a clause to that effect - but my good friend Currado Malaspina has taken this fantasy to an alpine extreme. His business card for example is a glossy self-portrait with the caption "Currado Malaspina: présenter une demande à Google."

That such a search would likely yield about two dozen pages of results should not in any way elevate the Internet into some sort of arbiter of high-cultural currency. Think for example of searching the name Lorena Bobbitt or the phrase "recipes with frozen vegetables" and you will see my point. 

Malaspina 2005

His work, though far from uninteresting, ranks well below that of his much younger contemporaries. On any given day, a leisurely stroll through the galleries of Williamsburg, Beleville or Brunnenstrasse would quickly disabuse any baby-booming nostalgic of the antique perception of Currado Malaspina as a cutting-edge or 'cool' artist.

Curators continue to insist upon his relevance but that has more to do with the average age of the museum trustee (62) than with the enduring nature of Malaspina's minor triumphs. 

Malaspina's arrogance, to be fair, is simply a mechanism for his spiritual survival for how else does one justify a life of abject selfishness. How to explain the four wives, the countless mistresses, the neglected children and the infinite injury imposed upon friend and foe alike? 

 I pity the poor guy because I'm sure that in his heart of hearts he knows his life has been one long bagatelle of imperiousness and boredom.

Maybe with his last remaining years he could divert his ennui into something more benign.

Like getting a pet.

A FATEFUL MISDIAGNOSIS

Currado Malaspina's unlikely interest in Hebraic orthography is quite accidental. It began at Paris Sportif the posh central Paris health club where my friend Malaspina gallops on the elliptical with chubby government ministers and not a few former 'vedettes de cinema francais.'  

While rifling through a pile of damp and salty smelling gym shorts in the lobby's perdus et trouvés (much to the consternation of the Police Nationale, the French have an unusual custom of placing a ragged lost and found box in conspicuous corners of a public buildings as if the nation were one big kindergarten classroom) he found what he thought was an innocent shopping list. 

In fact, thinking at first that it was Arabic, he showed the paper to the weight coach Yazid, a Berber from Mauretania by way of Madrid whose knowledge of Semitic languages was less than perfect. 

"C'est amharique," he helpfully said, inflecting his voice with the swarthy authority of the whole of Africa. And with that he roughly translated the text as "two baguettes, 100 grams of sliced ham, four bottles of Côtes de Gascogne ...." etc. etc.

It wasn't till much later that Currado learned that his crumpled sheet of paper was a lovely little lycée exercise of rhyming Hebrew couplets describing the traditional fast day of Tu Bishvat. 

By then Yazid's deception was of little import. Currado was irrevocably smitten by the naked graphic power of the flexed square lettering.

And this was the genesis of Palimpseste, Currado's great, enigmatic ouevre which has managed to simultaneously enrage la communauté Israelite and excite la communauté des collectionneurs.

Tant pis.