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!

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.

A TRIBUTE TO TZVI MALASPINA

Tzvi Malaspina in his Jerusalem garden, 1965

In 1983, in a dingy basement apartment in Jerusalem’s German Colony, “Le Societe de Lecteurs de Fernando Pessoa” was born. Presiding over its inaugural meeting was Israel’s prominent Dante specialist Tzvi Malaspina. The founding charter of this loosely knit guild of intellectuals and artists had as its stated goal the preservation of the creative ethic of what they called “delicate aggression.” “The frail imperfection of the life of the mind remains a palpable revolutionary posture,”*  was the opening gambit of this predictably flawed manifesto, “and no artist exemplifies this frailty better than the Portuguese poet Pessoa.” Currado, whose devotion to his octagenarian uncle was both touching and pathological, vainly struggled to revise this cloying alliteration, but was thwarted by his defective Hebrew.

In “The Book Of Disquiet” Pessoa wrote: “Not only do I feel that the verses I write do not satisfy me, but I know that the verses I am about to write will not satisfy me either. I know it both philosophically and physically, through an obscure, gladioli-festooned intuition.”

To Tzvi Malaspina, may his blessed memory be cherished and revered; this was the worthwhile life’s delicious affliction.

* L’imperfection fragile de la vie de l’esprit reste une posture révolutionnaire viable

חוסר שלמותו השברירי של החיים של הנפש נשאר יציבה מהפכנית אמיתית

FROM THIRST TO TRANQUILITY

Beneath the hushed mountains of Honshu Island, the mountains known as the Japanese Alps, Currado Malaspina began an arduous regimen of fasting and meditation. For six weeks he felt the weight of birds, the stillness of long, cold nights, the gentle blur of slowly melting ice and the vastness of a sky, radiant with unimaginably lush shades of blue and green.

It was in 1982, after the tragic death of his younger brother Sordello and Malaspina was gripped in an unyielding vise of hopelessness and despair. It was his indifference to his work that signaled to his friends how deep his sorrow had become. It was the set designer, Toro Agaki, who suggested the dissolving landscape of the Hida and Kiso mountains as a possible balm for Currado’s misery.

So uncharacteristic was his self-prescribed self-denial that those closest to him were certain that he had gone mad. What ensued was actually the series of drawings known as the “Hotaka-Dake Suite,” exhibited the following year in Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art. Since then, Currado has become something of an eminence grise for the Australian avant-garde.

DECONSTRUCT THIS

A silver crucifix dangled fetchingly low, giving a mixed signal of both piety and seduction. I sat with my legs crossed in the back of the small auditorium, hastily jotting down notes. At first, Currado Malaspina did not notice what he later described as “this uncombed dryad, this Erato of the urban nomads.” It wasn’t until he was well into the Q and A of his presentation that my “unearthly radiance” (his words, not mine) cracked a cleft into his morbid disquiet.

He was delivering his annual lecture at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, something he saw more as an obligation than a privilege, owing to his long-standing friendship with Jean-Paul Richard, dean of the Philosophy department. (His performances, always scintillating and always controversial were a staple among both students and faculty). Predictably, someone asked about Barthe’s “Fragments D’Un Discours Amoureux,” the death of the author and Malaspina’s famously erotic monotypes. Trailing a red flame of enough postmodern jargon to quell the most caffeinated graduate student, he launched into a summery of trendy refutations of Kantian unity until he noticed me uncomfortably shuffling in my seat. He was smitten.

As he tells it, his syllables began to scatter like street litter. He lost all industry and the perfect geometry of his comments turned hollow and unmoored by distraction. He’s uncertain to this day how the lecture ended. He suspects that Richard, sensing a shipwreck, intervened just in time.

Recounting the rituals of our courtship would make for an interesting posting, something I will defer to a later date. Suffice it to say, Malaspina began making a brand new series of prints whose authorship was very vigorous and very much alive.

CHE SI FUGGE TUTTAVIA

There’s been a growing interest in Malaspina juvenilia. As most people familiar with Currado’s biography know, his childhood and adolescence wasn’t warmed by hissing kettles and fresh baked bread. Currado Malaspina grew up in a France where the memories of war were still fresh. His early years were raw years, where the unspeakable remained unmentioned and the lies metastasized into a cankerous affliction that seen from the eyes of the youth, corrupted indelibly the France of Voltaire and Diderot.

Malaspina’s early work, like many of his contemporaries, was full of smoldering, bleak nihilism. His generation of provocateurs created a theology of contempt, shame and hopelessness. They worked with a cyanidal pessimism. They spat out manifestoes drowning in gloom and hopelessness. They distrusted beauty, despised commerce, turned their backs on god, on art, on aesthetics and put their complete trust in Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

Currado was only nineteen when he created his series “Shapeless Being, Fixed Time.” It was never exhibited and had only recently come to light when it unexpectedly appeared on the art market during last year’s spring auctions. Since then Gallimard published “Malaspina/Jeunesse,” a facsimile of a small sketchbook that Currado filled over forty years ago with strange fishlike drawings and cryptic annotations looking very much like wordy fins. Just last month, Sotheby announced the availability of yet another lost series of works from Malaspina’s early years. This one entitled “Two Parrots In Full Flight” is a group of 48 gouache drawings reflecting the 48 visions of Hell as recorded by the Almerian friar DeCampos Escuin. It is truly a haunting work, and rather astonishing that someone so young created something so odd and so deep.

It is especially astonishing since Currado’s work since then has evolved into something much more slight and much more superficial.

LITERARY LIBIDO

In 1999, Kirk Varnedoe invited Currado Malaspina, Matias Rojas de Oquendo and Christine de Pisan to join a panel discussion on Cervantes and Modern Art. The panel was part of a larger, two week symposium, ponderously titled “Coinage and Customs: Slowing Our Steps Toward the 21st Century,” that attracted record crowds at New York’s Symphony Space.

It was well known at the time that Christine and Matias were engaged in a very public row regarding Gerusalemme Liberta and Tasso’s insanity and perhaps that was why the audience was particularly engaged on the evening of their presentation.

Varnedoe presided with his customary elegance but that did not keep the atmosphere from quickly eroding into an intellectual roller derby. Malaspina was uncharacteristically measured in his comments, hauling out old warhorses about chivalry as the last gasp of mytho-religious expression and Cervantes as the inventor of the phenomenology of interpersonal association. The other two members of the panel, however, were not nearly as circumspect.

De Oquendo began by accusing de Pisan of “mute treachery,” for not stating that “circumstance is a condition of human life.” De Pisan returned with an equally scathing suggestion that de Oquendo had merely skimmed Hegel’s twelve hundred pages of Logik and had a Cliff Note appreciation of literature.

Years later, Malaspina described the evening as a “kiln of uncontrollable rage.” He described watching a small ellipse of sweat forming on the front of Christine de Pisan’s cobalt blue sleeveless chemise. He marveled at how she hissed her S’s each time she said Husserl. He explained to me how the spotlights backlit Christine’s upper lip, exposing a faint but unmistakable moustache. He said that despite that and other disagreeable features, he found Christine, foaming with indignation, an Edenic embodiment of perfect female sexuality. He said that while making a reference to “neque nubent” from Matthew: 22, she impishly turned her head toward him, licked the corner of her mouth and snarled.

Malaspina still smiles when he describes how later that night at the Belleclaire they ordered stuffed quail and Pernod from room service and engaged in a heated tournament of Paolo and Francesca.

Conflagration

Back in the early eighties, Currado Malaspina and I traveled a great deal together. From the Middle East, Africa and Asia to almost every country in the Americas, we ricocheted around the globe with the buoyant expectancy found only in the young. As could be expected we found ourselves idling in countless airports, train stations and bus depots filling long, intimate hours with conversation.

Even then, Malaspina was a formidable raconteur, and I remember listening a lot more than speaking. He had a boundless reservoir of stories to draw from and an unfading memory for people, circumstance and detail.

In ’82, when we were stuck for 48 hours in an old customs house in Souk Ahras, Malaspina told me the following story.

“The Danish artist Kai Gjellerup lived in Chicago for about ten years. He had a large studio on Calumet Avenue in a former insulation factory where he was working on ‘Regent Impasse,’ the monumental piece now permanently installed in the Art Institute’s sculpture garden. Every December across the street from his loft, a vacant lot used exclusively by prostitutes and heroin addicts eleven months out of the year became a Christmas tree emporium. Each year this seedy lot was cleared of its syringes and soggy condoms and was transformed into an urban evergreen forest illuminated by a wavy tributary of 75-watt light bulbs.

“After all his years in the United States, Kai was still unaccustomed to American Christmas. He was puzzled and disturbed by the connection between electronic gadgetry and messianism. He wondered why, in a country so solidly pragmatic, people unquestioningly accepted the cumbersome and expensive rituals designed to artificially stimulate the free market economy. Coming from Denmark, where spirituality and mysticism were expressed in a beautifully esoteric two thousand year old aesthetic, he couldn’t understand why, in the States the holiday remained so stubbornly ugly. And who, he wondered, was Santa Claus.

“So one night, he walked over to the Christmas tree lot, poured a few gallons of gasoline over the driest looking trees and set the place on fire. It was a beautiful blaze, more beautiful, in his estimation than any conventional celebration could possibly be. He lingered across the street admiring his handiwork until he was arrested.

“The legal ramifications dawned on him much later. He was tried for arson and faced deportation. For two weeks he faced a sympathetic jury composed mostly of African-American senior citizens. His defense focused on a legitimate anger directed at an unmistakable symbol of 2000 years of Christian anti-semitism. The fact that he was not Jewish was inadmissible as evidence for the prosecution and he was found guilty of two counts of reckless endangerment.

“He was fined $200, was allowed to keep his green card and saw his career blossom into its current stature.”

ODE TO THE PAVEMENT

Currado Malaspina has a hostile relationship toward nature. Like Frank O’Hara, he can only enjoy the feel of grass on his bare feet if he is certain the Metro is coursing below.

It wasn’t always so.

Years ago, when Currado’s two sons Yahweh and Octavian were young, he took them on what has since become known as “the ill-fated camping trip.” They went to the outskirts of Beziers, about ten kilometers from the sea and famous for its aqueduct and the St. Nazaire Cathedral. Currado figured he could spend some time with the kids, sleep outdoors, roam the countryside and finish the trip in town.

Paraphrasing Mathew Arnold, Malaspina is “self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored (and) self-secure” in all matters urban. As far as the outdoors, he is a complete innocent. Their first night, under the vast starlit sky, a soft wind made the sound of gentle castanets. Sitting by an open fire, Currado recited from memory a French rendering of The Raven, thinking the kids would find a special bliss in being terrified. “Plus jamais” hardly seems adequate for the dour refrain of “nevermore,” but seven year old Yahweh was sufficiently unnerved to have pissed in his jammies.

The imperial towers of Troy would have been a far less formidable obstacle than the lamp black darkness that separated the campfire from the car. Groping and fumbling like a blind man, Currado inched his way forward determined to change his wet child’s outfit. The loud clap was like the opening of Penderecki’s First Symphony, but without the blood. Currado had stepped foursquare into an opossum trap severing three dorsal veins and chipping his navicular.

It was nine year old Octavian, (today one of France’s top oral surgeons), who had the presence of mind to wrap the wound with his sibling’s urine drenched bottoms and find the camp ranger.

Currado was bedridden for two months and with the fervency of the Horatii, vowed never to set foot in the countryside again.