A SHORT LESSON IN HISTORY

The art of bad photography is a lot harder than it seems. Within the holy trinity of Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter there lies an elusive aesthetic of militant conformity that is easy to see but much more difficult to master.

Beside the boilerplate of nature and food our glutted bank of collective imagery contains shoes, hair, architecture, street signs, headlines, animals, manicures and billions and billions and billions of small children. To someone trained in the visual arts the monotony can be a bit staggering.

To my former boyfriend, the French Marxist painter Currado Malaspina the democratization of photography is a very positive social phenomenon that is well worth watching. To dismiss it all as an empty expression of desperate narcissism is to risk losing a valuable opportunity in studying a societal/aesthetic shift that is practically unprecedented.  Not since the 18th century when Faber-Castell began mass producing pencils have we seen such a massive wave of graphic amateurism.

On a recent trip to to the Bavarian town of Schwanstetten where the first wooden graphite stump appeared in 1646, Currado discovered in the archives of the municipal library thousands upon thousands of crude drawings of precisely the types of things regularly posted on Facebook and Pinterest.

Bratwurst and sauce, pencil on paper, anonymous, 17th century

It seems that various forms of social media image sharing has been around a lot longer than we care to admit. Currado goes even further in asserting that the cave paintings of Lasceaux are nothing more than daily “posts” representing the unsubstantiated claims of third-rate hunters.

To Malaspina the imagery is a form of Paleolithic branding, the sort of reputational inflation one sees on business résumés and Linkedin profiles. Instead of wild claims of fluency in Latin and concert-level musicianship, the artists of Lasceaux were asserting their unlikely expertise in animal husbandry.

To those who ridicule the digital age for its superficiality Currado wags an admonishing emoticon. To make hash of the hashtag is like snubbing one’s nose at 750,000 years of glorious human mediocrity.

CONNECTIONS

A ringing truth more resonate than revelation, more terrifying than prophesy and more damaging to one’s ego than the caustic reverberations of a bad review. I’m referring to the many oracular pronouncements that come from the mouth of a beloved mentor. For years I was enthralled by the slanted wisdom of Currado Malaspina.He coaxed me into questioning my rigid and and constraining orthodoxies and shamed me into a lassitude of careful, obedient compliance.  What I thought I knew I questioned and what I questioned was reduced into marginality. Currado’s charisma and sheer persuasive bellicosity had me cowering like a kitten.

Currado Malaspina, Istanbul, 2006

I didn’t know who I was anymore. I lived like a dull reflection of myself buried beneath the shadow of an acclaimed master. My friends envied my privileged position as the amanuensis and lady in waiting to one of France’s most famous contemporary artists.I was Currado Malaspina’s assistant, his lover and his confidante and I was miserable living the dream in the City of Light.

Danton and Malaspina, Paris, summer 1999

Be careful what you wish for. Enthralled to a living legend locks the normally creative mind into an aurelian shackle of diffidence and servility. I put Currado above all else, above my needs, above my ambitions and worst of all, above my work. I was a cog in the enterprise of furthering the career of an already inflated vedette de la monde artistique. I worked night and day on curating his image, burnishing his reputation and creating a climate of constant anticipation.

Untitled monotype, Currado Malsapina, 1998

At the time his work was a boilerplate of cheap scandal and facile provocation. That it was also demeaning of women was a fact that conveniently eluded my besotted inattention. In retrospect it’s hard to believe how blind I was in my compliance and capitulations.

Such is the predicament of the young, grasping artist. In a field crowded with identical aspirants the conditions for success are a vague blueprint of strategic compromises, ethical lapses and a muddled pub crawl through the anuses of the famous and the well-connected.

In today’s lexicon it’s called networking.

Back then it was called prostitution.

POLITESSE IS FOR LES OISEAUX

There is something so exhilarating about indignation. Feigned, righteous or otherwise, being pissed is good for the circulation. Having grown up in the midwest it took me a while to figure this out. Meeting the French painter Currado Malaspina teased the corn husks out of my hair and turned me toward the true path of artistic ire, resentment, petty rivalry and professional wrath.

“There’s nothing like a good, mean-spirited intellectual brawl full of ad hominem attacks, libelous invective, empty threats and punishing assertions bordering upon the precipice of conventional civility.”

That’s how he put it to me years ago after he took me to a party at the studio of one of his oldest friends, the sculptor René Lacarte.

He and Lacarte were old school chums with as many shared memories as shared mistresses. Their friendship was as durable as one of Lacarte’s monumental cor-ten steel sculptures and it allowed them to communicate with a callous and sometimes brutal candor.

Currado had just completed an exhibition of large-scale works on paper, the subject of which, many critics observed, bordered on the gratuitously sleazy.

Currado vigorously defended his work claiming that considering the contemporary absence of any normative taboos they were as innocuous as a pastoral vista of Ruisdael and as void of provocation as a Madonna by Zurbarán. Lacarte countered that Ruisdael was far from innocuous and Zurbarán is as highly charged today as he was in the 17th century. He called Currado ‘un mauvais menteur‘ a French insult that is far more wounding than calling someone in English a bad liar.

The party ended with blows, broken bottles and dramatic declarations of permanent war.

I was shocked.

The next morning René joined us for croissants at Café Procope as if nothing had happened.

And in fact, nothing had.

COEXISTENCE

Several years ago, while suffering what could only be described as a crisis of creativity, the Paris-based painter Currado Malaspina sublet his Rue de la Harpe studio and moved to Istanbul.

The move proved auspicious in more ways than one.

Unless one has been hibernating under a boulder these past few years, Malaspina’s Palimpseste has crossed your radar. Though the most serious drawings from the series are well behind him, (he has recently signed a six-figure design deal with the clothing company Noitanbreh, licensing it to use Palimpseste motifs in its recent line of golf shirts), scholars are still debating the sources and allusions of this complicated and at times fascinating work.

Few realize that Palimpseste began on that extended trip to Turkey.

One of the perks of being a European art star is acquiring private access to major monuments and museums well after they close to the general public. Such was the case for Currado in Istanbul where with the help of the recently indicted former Minister of Cultural Affairs, Ohannes Evranaki he was able to study the frescoes and mosaics of the Hagia Sophia without the distraction of gawking tourists and their ubiquitous cell phones.

He was able to make detailed drawings, take countless photographs and was even able to climb a specially constructed scaffold in order to measure the works in relation to the space with absolute precision. When Currado becomes curious about something, he becomes a thoroughly obsessive, if not entirely systematic, researcher.

The remnants of two cultures are embedded on the walls like estranged lovers shackled to a cruel conjugal bed. They press against each other with an oddly aggressive tension teasing one another with the fantasy of an unlikely reconciliation.

Jesus and Mohammed tagged to the walls of this vast cathedral of piety and intolerance, consigned to coexistence by the sole virtue of time. Together they create a peculiar visual counterpoint that immediately struck Malaspina as both magical and brutal. He spent hours studying the work, returning day after day with his tape measure and drafting pencils until the Turkish authorities began suspecting that he was either a raging lunatic or an operative of the Mossad.

When he finally returned to France (I believe his visa was revoked), he had sketchbooks full of images and notes.

As an added momento, he also returned with a severe crick in the neck.

NON VENI PACEM MITTERE, SED GLADIUM

Vice, as is often pointed out, is infinitely more compelling than virtue. The central role of sin in the iconography of medieval art and literature is ample evidence to illustrate the point. These ubiquitous twin poles of psychology remain robust to this day but with much less disorder.

Currado Malaspina put it this way in a recently published interview with the mystery writer Dimitri Hectopolis:

“There’s a comforting harmony in our predictable and conventional tastes. On the whole, lower-income Americans are drawn to gluttony while their upper-class well-educated fellow citizens prefer greed. We French still favor lust and the whole world is united in its infatuation with violence.”

Currado’s latest endeavor is a lovely meditation on what he describes as “perversity, corruption and rot”  (la perversité, la corruption et la pourriture). Based on the Laudario di Mangiare il Fegato a 14th century luxury manuscript commissioned by the lay confraternity of Sienese potters and dyers, Malaspina’s modern rendering of this book of song is filled with chilling depictions of martyred Christian saints.

The Stroking of Saint Pasquina, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Fifth century martyr, Saint Pasquina of the Mystic Eyre who was beaten with sharpened stones, flogged with a spiked horse hair whip and then boiled in a cauldron of burning oil was a favorite subject of the Tuscan artisans who commissioned the book of hymns that serves as Malaspina’s point of departure. Currado has created an entirely updated version of these violent events, adding irony and whimsy to the traditional gasconade of self-satisfied terror.

I personally find these subtle and lyrical new works to have a deeply innocent, almost confectionary sense of compassion and piety. Their obvious autobiographical allusions permeate the pieces with the tenderness of honest confession. That others find the work misguided and grotesque speaks more about repression and a general discomfort with the legitimacy of natural urges and fantasies.

I salute Currado and the fathers of the Catholic Church for being the consummate curators of the human condition!

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.

VACANCE

Paysage 14, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Every August, like every decent citizen of the Republic, Currado Malaspina heads south to the famous French regions of leisure and repose. For one full month he manages to forget that he is Malaspina the provocateur and becomes the gentleman that still manages to lie nascent within him.

Gone are the skanky silhouettes of sweat and steamy sex that have become the Malaspina brand. Summer is the time to spread the stiff legs of a workman’s easel and get busy sur le motif.

Paysage 21, Currado Malaspina, 2013

In August what stands erect for Currado Malaspina are Aleppo pines, scrubby holm oak and groves and groves of olive trees. His pictures are redolent with the suggestive scents of anémone des jardins, seven-leaf cardamine, cowslip and clove.

August is when Currado becomes the true, virtuous romantic, free from the flagrant puerility that has earned him his name.

I love to visit Currado in the summer. His house just outside of Bonnieux is an oasis of courtly refinement and European civility.

And he never lets me lift a finger.

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

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