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For many years the career of Currado Malaspina was a brackish, destitute furl of quiet latency. Here was a man with a solid body of interesting work, with yearly exhibitions and favorable press yet unable to reach a level of true preeminence. He was well-known in Paris during the 70’s and 80’s but in the art world at the time that was a parochial achievement at best. Outside the francophone world the name Malaspina meant next to nothing

Then he met me.

Exhibition announcement designed to be seen exclusively on Twitter feeds. (courtesy of XNet DzN, 2013)

What most artists caught between the Reagan era and the Internet age fail to grasp is that ‘social capital’ is far more important than talent. Though Warhol could not have been more explicit in his prophecies, the artists who came of age in the shadow of the New York School modeled themselves on the poètes maudits when they should have been looking at the pitchmen of Madison Avenue. Long before words like ‘branding’ and ‘viral’ became bedrocks of our vernacular, the great artist/showmen recognized that paraphrase is far stronger and certainly more memorable than poetry.

One could plausibly argue that this pact with the devil compromises the quality of one’s work but if no one sees your work, what good is quality? What the spirit of the age has instructed us is that it is far better to be accessible than to be interesting. A recent article about the distinguished periodical The New York Review of Books – currently celebrating its 50th anniversary  – boasts that it has a readership of approximately 140,000! Forgive me for being blunt but BuzzFeed’s list of the “23 most important selfies of 2013” received a quarter of a million hits within the first two hours of its posting!

The fact that within a few years of meeting me Currado Malaspina started tracking somewhere between the poet Vachel Lindsay and the indie band The Afghan Whigs speaks for itself. Now that he is fully set up with Buzznet, Flickr, Skyrock and Twitter he has sprinted way past both Don Knotts and Artisanal Dim Sum.

Maquette pour le Marquis #3, Currado Malaspina 2010

Of course, I guess to some extent the works helps a little.

But really, does anyone ever talk about Agostino Carracci anymore?

Agostino Carracci

THE UNGIFTED CHILD

Childhood is everything. The map of our characters is indelibly drawn by the time we reach puberty. We carry the baggage of our upbringing like a battered trunk and just when we think we’ve successfully discarded its contents at some distantly remote bus station or railway yard, there comes FedEx returning the torn familiar vault of our nagging inconvenient past only to be sorted again, repacked and safely stored away.

Malaspina in Cannes, 2009 (Courtesy of Presse IPM)

The French artist Currado Malaspina and I were lovers between the spring of 1998 when I was a 22 year-old graduate student till the winter of 2001. In that time I witnessed both his brilliant courage and his brittle insecurity. I’ve thought a great deal about those distant years and they have served as a cautionary tale regarding my own development as an artist. You see, Currado and I, though over twenty years apart in age, are very similar and those eerie similarities are what pulled us apart.

Currado’s father, Sordello Malaspina was a Roma musician of moderate ability and exaggerated pretension. Like my own father his imprint was the result of his absence rather than his influence. The course of Malaspina’s career has been one long search for his missing father’s approval. I know scores and scores of artists but I never met anyone who curated their reputation as carefully as Currado. It was never important whether his work was any good what mattered most was how it was perceived.

Untitled monotype, Currado Malaspina 1998

The esteem of critics, the admiration from peers, the cultivation of curators and the ultimate validation of the marketplace are the abiding values that guide his practice. One could easily argue that his fawning obsequiousness was the perfect recipe for his success. His spineless scraping and his cowering flatteries have brought about strategic alliances that are the envy of his more talented contemporaries. There is no boot too insignificant to lick, no backside too inconsequential to kiss. His relentless search for a faded father’s love has contorted his character into nothing but an appetite where naked desire denies him him of the possibility of any real depth.

Dahlia Danton, 2013

I hope I can elude Currado’s sad, despicable pathologies. The burdens of our past are the stones in our pockets drawing us down into the well of unrelenting despair. The only possible antidote is the authentic genius of real competence and for that one needs discipline. Malaspina is a lost cause. For me there still may be some hope.

HABIT

Like many people, Currado Malaspina’s sense of optimism and personal well-being is intimately tied to the daily evacuation of his bowels. Nothing restores his faith in himself and his place in the world like a quick and unencumbered movement. He typically visits the lavatory a few short minutes after completing his second cup of early morning swiss-pressed coffee. He joins neither book nor newspaper to this enterprise preferring the prompt efficiency of concentrated effort and determined resolve.

I know all this because I was living with him in Paris in the late 1990’s and I witnessed all his circadian habits with the bemused scrutiny of an amateur anthropologist. Currado would express to me all his strongly held views on his personal hygiene thinking that this kind of intense  intimacy could somehow replace the more risky, emotional kind. His scatological obsessions were strictly physiological and he suffered little levity in the matter. He was easily offended by jokes and despite the easy accessibility of hilarious material Currado remained stoic in the face of puns, hostile to sarcasm and impervious to irony.

I once sent him a small water closet watercolor and inscribed the back with the famous aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Objections, evasions, cheerful mistrust, and love of mockery are indications of health: everything absolute belongs with pathology.”

He promptly sent it back to me with his own favorite Nietzschean citation: “Honesty is the great temptress of all fanatics,”  adding menacingly in bold red ink “Sois prudente ma coquinette!”

Lesson learned.

When it comes to great men of uncanny genius never underestimate the vital necessity of ritual.

THE ISLAND OF THE LOTUS-EATERS

When Currado Malaspina was a little boy growing up in the Marais his best friend, Yves Bernard-Djouza – who later in life became the television actor Bernie Beignet – spent his summers visiting his grandparents on the island of Djerba. As was the custom at the time, young Yves would return to Paris in September with a small gift for his “meilleur ami.’

Typically these took the form of paper kites and spinning tops, small sand clocks, ships in a bottle, brightly colored marbles or balsa wood airplanes. One year however, Yves came back with the strangest gift of all:  An old book apparently pilfered from the library of his nono Sammy Djouza, who acted as the unofficial beadle of the Hara Sghira synagogue.

Young Currado would pore over the indecipherable pages and their exotic typefaces whose arrangements reminded him of mazes. He loved the feel of the worn, brittle paper, stained with use and discolored by the sun. For years Currado kept the book on his nightstand, a sort of talisman protecting him from what he always called his ‘sleep-devils’ (diables de sommeil). During the years when we were together I found the book rather creepy but never dared to challenge the strange power it had over the equally strange Malaspina.

When he first started working on his Palimpseste series, I didn’t immediately make the connection.

But now, many years later, I can see how a person inclined to interpret the world visually sees even books and words from the point of view of form. Those who have ascribed every manner of metaphor and allusion to Malaspina’s Palimpseste series have completely missed the mark. For Currado, beauty is everything and the realm of the senses is more than enough to captivate his lush, limitless imagination.

La haine du domicile

French writer, filmmaker and visual artist Currado Malaspina can’t seem to sit still. Obdurate abnegater of both the pleasures and securities of bourgeois domesticity, Currado is dangerously inclined toward the vertiginous experiences of a nomadic flâneur. On a recent trip to Dar-el-Salam on the east bank of the Upper Nile he was so savagely mugged by a pair of angry teenagers that he lost two central incisors and the highest three registers of his vocal chords.

“It’s the price you pay for adventure,” he calmly explained to me last week in Cannes where we were both guests of the Danish director Arvada Taremby. “I still love Egypt and I’d go back tomorrow.”

Currado Malaspina on the Mediterranean coast in Ras El Bar, Egypt

He went on to explain in his newly minted rasp (which I confess, I find rather sexy) how he can feel the rapture of perfect solitude only while lost within the commotion of a teeming multitude. He calls it the fierce, feral energy of untamed universal communion ( l’énergie féroce et sauvage d’ivresse d’universelle communion).

His passion and conviction were hypnotic. The poetic manner in which he expressed himself was both mesmerizing and vaguely familiar.

It was only later that I learned that Currado and Taremby have been working together on a screenplay based on the life and work of Baudelaire.

Encore dupé!

CONFUTATIO

When Iftakhar Segev first encountered the so-called Melbourne Fragment he was a naïve and inexperienced graduate student reading Milton at Cambridge. Today he is widely regarded as the world’s foremost scholar of partially illuminated, non-Christian medieval manuscripts. It was he who first detected the eerie similarities between the Zoraneale Orationem and Currado Malaspina’s now infamous Palimpseste series.

The so-called Melbourne Fragment from the Zoraneale Orationem, 1298

The Zoraneale Orationem, also known as the Laudario of Saint Agilufus is a 14th century illuminated book of hymns. Commissioned by the shoemaker’s guild or the Arte dei Calzolai of La Spezia, the pages of this gorgeous manuscript were torn from their binding and dispersed throughout Europe some time in the early 18th century. The so-called Melbourne Fragment was discovered lodged in the lathing of an interior wall of the West Melbourne Carthusian Cathedral of Saints Benedict and Paul by Benny Benputana, an Australian contractor, while restoring the church.  “They used paper for insulation in those days, we find that stuff all the time,” he told Cathi Pepetone of CNN.

This beautiful fragment, now part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Emile Sans-Vérité  in Pontoise is without rival in the history of pre-Renaissance hymnals. Scholars are divided as to the significance of the alligator (a crocodile according to Vincent Bout-Jacob) scribbled within the lower subaltern stanza but all agree that the leaf, taken as a whole, is the most beautiful of all the pages that have been authenticated to date. (A forthcoming volume reproducing all 14 known pages is due for publication by the University of North Carolina Press in the fall of 2016).

Iftakhar Segev’s breathtaking discovery of the Malaspina connection has only added more luster to this already breathtaking artistic detective story.

Of course, true to form, Currado denies everything.

Palimpseste II no. 4, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Un Civilisé Édenique

Currado discussing his work. From Spark Boon’s 2011 documentary “Malaspina Malcontent” 

Me and my former suitor and relentless infatuate Currado Malaspina were doomed from the start. We rarely if ever agreed. His irrational stridency was usually met by my tendentious petulance. His sectarian bullying was regularly matched by my inflexible fanaticism. His absolute certainty remains, to this day, the contrarian echo of my stubborn indubitability.

 There is, however, one thing where we continue to see eye to eye.

 A few years ago I participated in a conference in Barcelona with the ponderous title “Temperament and Artistic Turmoil 1890 – 1922: The Birth of the Obscure.” Currado and I sat on only one panel together (I would never find myself attending one of his monotonous talks otherwise) whose putative theme was something about 19th century American evangelism, Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, Freud and geometry. Currado got everyone’s attention when he began he piece in his stentorian baritone with the following assertion:

 “Ideas matter. Good ideas matter alot. Great ideas don’t matter at all.”

 Not an auspicious opening gambit for a room full of pointy-headed intellectuals whose full time job is to think.

He dug himself deeper into the muck of obscure speculation when he went on to sight a few dubious examples:

“A pool. Well, yes, that matters, especially in summer on a swelteringly hot afternoon. A gated pool is a very good idea with significant if not critical ramifications. A swimming race however – or better yet – an Olympic swimming competition does not matter one bit.

“Or to take a more recent and germane example, the phenomenon of Facebook. Undeniably, it is one of the best good ideas out there. Here’s a device which allows average people to fulfill a deep need for attention and validation. The idea of creating a mechanism by which unearned accolades are collected like head lice is a very good idea indeed. The fact that anyone with even the slightest sliver of self-confidence would find this whole enterprise absurd is profoundly irrelevant. And yet, the presence of this “social network” matters a great deal and has real and lasting cultural consequences. By contrast, actual achievement, deep and abiding friendships, expressions of personhood and individuation are all exceptionally powerful ideas but whose effects are vague at best.”

You could have heard hair grow. The auditorium fell into a deep, almost dreamlike silence. It was hard to tell whether this strange dormancy was the result of quiescent boredom or quiet rage nesting in temporary remission. What I do know is that Currado solidified his already considerable reputation as a meticulous, insufferable blow-hard.

His dramatic denouement only twisted the knife into his gangrenous notoriety:

“I am a French artist, heir the the legacy of Ingres, Watteau and Flaubert. I am a tireless warrior defending culture and refinement. I can tell you with an unyielding conviction that W. H. Auden was correct when he wrote, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen!’ Here’s to great ideas, may they pullulate and flourish within the hermetic sanctorium of the useless.”

I agree.

KING JAMES PIROUETTES IN HIS CRYPT

 Boredom and despair sometimes result is acts of eccentric piety and ponderous humility.

 

When “The Creeping Moss of Tainted Gladness” (La Mousse Rampante de Joie Perdu, Carillon 2007) was published in the United States in late 2009 my good friend, Currado Malaspina set out on a 47 city promotional tour which yielded little more than a mild case of gout and about 30,000 frequent flyer miles.

In the space of fifteen days, Currado did readings in Tuscon, Orlando, San Diego, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Portland, Reno and about a dozen other hotbeds of the international art trade. Firing his agent did little to assuage his deep, sepulchral depression.

 

To pass the time between his committments Currado drank overpriced mojitos in countless hotel lounges, glared blankly at the saturated images on his flat screen TV and reread the bible, though this time, Gideon’s version. “It’s a pilgrimage of pain,” he said to me over the phone one night from Phoenix, “and I find little of interest in this vast Christian country of yours.”

He took to doodling on the hotel stationary, little cartoons that reflected his moods and his readings. Most of these drawings have been lost (he claims to have made over seven-hundred) but a few have surfaced and reveal themselves to be quite charming.

INPRUDENT POSITIONS

Commissioned in 1997 by the reclusive Dulcinea Aretino to complete a suite of drawings based on Giulio Romano’s I Modi, Currado Malaspina began by trying to find the perfect model. This was no easy task considering the nature of Romano’s legendary work.

Grasping the intuitive fringe between naked and nude is a rare gift seldom found among those who labor within the dusty hedges of academic ateliers. He soon discovered that to most professional art models, supine was simply another word for inert.

To find the perfect model he employed an unorthodox method of appraisal straight out of the pages of Pasamonte’s 16th century erotic farce, “Dubufe.” Under the stress of spectacularly demanding poses, Malaspina’s models were asked to express vehement scorn for a past or current lover. If their passion manifested itself primarily in their faces, they were summarily rejected as unsuitable. If, however, their muscles convulsed in concert with their contempt, they were engaged as appropriately expressive subjects.

It was in this manner that Currado fell in love with his most infamous mistress, the wretchedly duplicitous Luscinda Sulla. Eminent as an unparalleled sexual shapeshifter, she was equally esteemed for her stunning beauty and her glittering intellect. In turn besotted and inspired, Malaspina completed the commission (memorably entitled “The Amusements of the Galley Slaves”), baffled by the yoke of his infatuation and the sublimity of his inventions.

The duplicitous Luscinda Sulla, 1997

A FRENCH CULTURAL TOURIST IN LOS ANGELES

Currado Malaspina

Currado Malaspina was recently in Los Angeles  attending a gala at BCAM, the relatively new contemporary wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It must be nice moving from the grey austerity of late autumn Paris to L.A.’s thick pomp of gamboling extravagance. Currado has an endearing weakness for women in gowns.

When his picture appeared in the Style section of Paris Match, obsequiously inhaling the wafted musk from the bare shoulder of Sotheby’s Katia Keenen, he was roundly criticized as an artistic milksop. Monique Triage went so far as to call Currado “the lapdog of American corporate collecting.” She went on to call LACMA’s collection of contemporary art “obsolete, shallow and fitfully striving.” “American cultural insecurity at its most conspicuous dysfunction,” was how Eli Betancourt described BCAM’s inaugural exhibition several years ago in Dossier 900. He recently reminded the French public that Malaspina’s “very public obeisance proves that the aging artist is woefully primal, perpetually nervous and painfully guileful. ”

Currado gave Renzo Piano’s building high marks but found the installation of the artwork akin to “the sanitized right-angles of Ikea.”

At the end of his visit he expressed himself rather charitably. “Don’t blame the packsaddle for the donkey’s mistake,” he said to me, invoking the earthy wisdom of Sancho Panza. “Nobody takes these empty hulls as anything other than the desperate braggadocio of the newly hatted class. But to pay the rent one must pull mightily on those with the lace sleeves.”

That last piece of commonsense came from his grandmother.