BRANDING IN AN AGE OF SENSUAL DEFICIT

Seen through a jaundiced 21st Century lens I suppose we’d characterize the Van Gogh brand as Crazy. During a simpler, quainter time when I was studying painting in art school fancy words like ‘discourse,’ ‘dialectic’ and ‘disjunctive’ were bandied about as if their definitions were self-evident. Now the talk is all about marketing.

Maybe the professors are still filling disinterested ears with Laconian linguistics but the students, I can assure you, are just fidgeting with their i-phones.

That said, us oldsters have to keep up with the times and if that means maintaining an Instagram account then so be it.

My dear friend and erstwhile lover Currado Malaspina has always, as the French say, “seen beyond the baguette.” In a very unassuming and innocent fashion he’s been cultivating his own brand for years. Now he’s ready to exploit it to its fullest effect.

So to Caravaggio’s Thug, Modigliani’s Tubercular, Pollock’s Alcoholic and Warhol’s Androgynic we can now add Currado Malaspina’s Priapic Olympiad!

My sister Hope knows all about this stuff. You might say she’s a full-time branding self improver. Her library at home is stacked with books on how to distinguish oneself and get ahead. Leaders Eat Last shares a long, sagging shelf with Principles of Corporate Governance, Executive Power Moves, Time Management for Dummies and Perfect Mindset for Team Motivators.

Why waste valuable time with Proust when you can learn all about the habits of highly effective people between the glossy soft covers of a remaindered trade paperback?

I’m not exactly sure what Hope does for a living but I can tell she really loves it. She gets so animated whenever she recounts some tawdry tale of inter-office intrigue that I truly believe it has a weird erotic effect upon her. She works for a mid-sized corporation whose interpersonal ecosystem has the same sort of social suffocation of a small provincial college. As a result there is never any shortage of fodder for petty, political machination and drama.

Our immigrant parents were world-class lunatics who considered praise an unseemly form of extravagance. I think that’s why Hope is so drawn to the corporate structure of reward and affirmation. Being a manager is very gratifying to her and I know it means a lot when she receives encouraging compliments form her boss and from her peers.

It’s funny because we had the same exact childhood but I guess some people are perpetually triggered by the misadventures of their imperfect past.

Anyway, Currado has met my sister several times and though he finds her insufferably boring he’s at the same time quite taken by her desperate need to fit in and belong. He claims that this fetish to conform is a uniquely American phenomenon but any close reading of European history would strongly argue otherwise.

But Currado being Currado, Hope’s hopeful hopelessness has given him what he thinks will be a million dollar idea. Using my sister as a microcosm of an entire continent’s Calvinist restraint, he’s certain that an urgent craving for pleasure and lassitude lies nascent beneath the surface. Recognizing that there’s a puritanical allergy toward spontaneity he’s devised a codified template to address what he sees as a national spiritual malaise

And so began Currado’s now famous 10 Habits of Extremely Contented and Well-Cultivated People. Focusing on the California model of naive optimism and maximalist aspiration, his gimmick is the promise of happiness through rote. Follow his breezy, uncomplicated steps and you too can enjoy life like a Parisian!

It’s as absurd as it is successful but rather than take my word for it, judge for yourself. What follows, in short form, are his 10 sequential conditions for bliss, legitimized by the imprimatur of notable and respected celebrities:

1. Eat well and in heathy moderation. (Gerard Depardieu)
2. Spend time with friends and cultivate the art of argument and conversation. (Orestia Shestov)
3. Dolce Far Niente. (Albert Camus)
4. Enjoy sex. (Serge Gainsbourg)
5. Drink 0.40 liters of wine a day. (James Mayer Rothschild)
6. Read fiction and attend the theatre regularly. (Micah Carpentier)
7. Pursue sex. (Philippe Soupault)
8. Be honest – there’s less to remember. (Mark Twain)
9. Laugh as much as possible. (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing)
10. Develop a talent for sexual intimacy. (Henry Miller)

Yes, I know it’s stupid and I know it’s a gimmick but I honestly think that Currado is on to something. Americans are addicted to lists. They also easily defer to what they think are experts. In their obedience they will undoubtedly follow his manifesto and just like all good citizens, when they fail they will only blame themselves.

What could be a better brand than blind obeisance?!

DIGITAL DIGNITY

How things just pop up on the internet is one of life’s great mysteries.

The other day while doing a search for cotton khaki shorts I came across a photo of Margret Thatcher ankle deep in the Mousam River in Kennebunk, Maine.

I once googled the phrase “best tasting laxative” and I instantly found myself sorting through a fascinating catalog of Canadian holidays.

Who knew that schools were closed on Bobby Orr’s birthday?

But things quickly become less funny when after a periodic self-search (admit it, you do it all the time) I found something  both awkward and embarrassing and what’s worse, after years of meticulous curation and painstaking cultivation, my carefully crafted online brand is now compromised beyond redemption. .

Since I was a child I always dreamed of becoming a glamorous movie star. The fact that I couldn’t act never seemed to deter me. I did nearly everything to climb the oily ladder toward my goal. No audition was beneath my stunted dignity. My standards were so low I even considered video art as part of show business!

And such is the origin of that wicked clip from YouTube.

I was lured into the lurid by none other than the disreputable French impresario of the improper, Currado Malaspina. He assured me it was all under the easy aegis of Art. 99% of that afternoon’s work lay in the digital detritus of the cutting room floor and yet the most incriminating 4 seconds is now available to any imbecile with a cell phone.

How can I possibly scrub this puerile trash from the amorphous online universe where it threatens to scratch the eyes out of my precarious career?

I knew I should have been an actress!

THE CRUEL KARMA OF THE COVETOUS

It’s been years.

Sometimes it seems more like a lifetime.

I fell hard for the French painter Currado Malaspina.

I was young, he was famous … what the heck did I know?

To think I even introduced that cad to my mom!!

But in retrospect, who could blame me. His work was so sophisticated, so wonderfully executed, so rich, so beautiful and so ………. French!

Palimpseste #36, Currado Malaspina

He was married when we met and was twenty years my senior. I was a callow and impressionable American art student whose command of French never got beyond ou est le Métro and laisser vos mains graisseuses hors de ma cuisse.

 I saw in Currado a father figure of sorts and I put my complete trust in him. That we soon became lovers is no credit to my judgment but like I said, I was young and innocent. Though I had no right I was jealous of his wife and I used to fantasize about the buses that would crush her and the vague diseases that would mortally afflict her.

It never dawned on me that my moral compass was spinning out of control.

Then I found his little carnet d’esquisses and my compass suddenly stabilized, pointing due east back to the good old U.S.A.

From Currado Malaspina’s I Modi sketchbook

That salopard was using me. He was drawing us with his voyeuristic Staedtler Pigment Liner sketch pen from every angle in every pose and even adding some positions I can’t even remember and quite frankly seem rather impossible to boot.

Hey wait a minute!!

I was never a blonde!

TOLLE, LEGE

My friend, the enigmatic French painter Currado Malaspina had something of a religious conversion in the most unlikely of places. Currado, the consummate cosmopolite who is equally at home in Rome as he is in Istanbul had his unlikely Milvian Bridge moment in the cramped, damp guest house behind my two-bedroom Spanish in Silverlake.

He was here last summer, somewhat in hiding, though it was an open secret among his friends back in Paris. Reeling from a series of bad reviews, bad romances and bad weather, Currado came to L.A. to take the cure.

He spent most of his times indoors – he finds neither the sun nor the ocean particularly salubrious – listening to Schubert and painting small watercolors of endangered fish. He would surface in the evening only to retreat a few hours later after polishing off a bottle of wine with a few crusts of coarse black bread and a thimbleful of imported cheese.

His self-imposed exile, like all attempts at purgation, was an unnecessary exhortation of homeopathic magic. Only through wounds, the theory goes, could one summon the messengers of atonement. (It’s no small irony that my next door Rastafari neighbors, finding no truck in torment, manage the same result using homegrown Big Bud marijuana).

Like a bereaved boulevardier he would roam the early morning avenues of L.A. muttering to himself in Corsican. No matter which direction he took he could never find that elusive boulangerie with the flakey warm croissants that would almost certainly make things right again. Instead he passed tire shops and hair salons and the deficit of pedestrian traffic only added to his already crippling sense of alienation.

And then it happened and everything changed.

On one particularly desperate morning the pursuit of breakfast pastries found Currado lost and disoriented in one of those nondescript ethnic enclaves that freckle our sprawling grid of relentless urban iteration. Stopping to ask directions from a young bearded man whose cheap suit and fedora reminded him of the London ska bands of the 1970’s, he was drawn into conversation by the promise of hot coffee and the hitherto unfamiliar bagel. I’m not exactly sure what nerve was hit and how but before you could say Chi Rho Currado was wrapped in leather straps praying not to collapse into a hypoglycemic coma.

Malaspina now goes by the name Carmi ben Abraham and like Cat Stevens before him, it wasn’t the wisest career move. He seems to be happy and his work is still progressing though it has taken an iconographic shift I still don’t quite understand. I’ll never know what transpired that morning in L.A. but since then whenever I see a big van parked on the curb I make sure to quickly cross the street to the other side.

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.

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.

Pro Phylacteries

Though I vehemently advised him against it, in early 2002, Currado Malaspina, the French painter known for his depictions of voluptuary, unhindered and at times deviant sexuality began experimenting with geometric abstraction.

Mon Ami Foucault, oil on linen, 314 x 1270 centimeters, Currado Malaspina 2002

And as if that wasn’t enough, all the paintings he completed at that time were done en grisaille!

It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly decided a to publish a cookbook.

Why this unexpected turn of events? There were many theories floating around at the time ranging from rumors of a withering libido to an irrational infatuation with the United States. Whatever the motives, the public wasn’t buying. He was pilloried by the press, ignored by the critics and spurned by his faithful coterie of collectors.

Finding himself in a professional diaspora, Malaspina turned inward and began a long-standing flirtation with the Baha’i faith, an interest which continues to this day.

He has since abandoned non-objective painting and has returned to the semi-smutty style that has earned him his notorious reputation.

But he has never forgotten his love of Haifa, the center of the Baha’i faith. And while many of his rock star friends insist on boycotting the Jewish State he still occasionally returns to Israel for short visits. He especially enjoys early morning visits to the Wailing Wall.

I think  he gets a little turned on by all the leather.

PIETRO_ARETINO.NET

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.

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!