CYNIC OR SAGE? DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

There are some for whom flamboyance is a skimpy veil of obfuscation. They behave in ways so conspicuous that their legitimate selves become lost in a tangle of histrionics. Others operate within a humble sussuro of confidence and competence discreetly going about their daily tasks with graceful sprezzatura.

And then there is Currado Malaspina.

With his fustian baritone and his all-weather green felt hat Currado manages to make everyone around him feel simultaneously welcome and degraded. It’s an odd talent and I don’t think it’s anything conscious but when he enters a room the air suddenly thickens with the dread of anticipation.

He’s like two people operating within an elastic dramaturgical derma. You never know which Currado you will get.

This is annoying.

But it’s is also breathtaking, for how many people are there who can captivate and repel you with every single interaction?

Malaspina is just that sort of personage, even when he’s most irritating.

Especially when he’s most irritating!!

But, as he likes to say, fais gaffe!

When you get even the least bit attached to this mercurial Frenchman you find yourself caught within a mesh of his manipulative influence.

Only a Svengali of such exquisite effectiveness, one who can mesmerize even the most jaded and cold, would be capable of producing a body of work so popular and ubiquitous yet so totally bereft of any real meaning.

 As Currado always says “thank god for ignorance!!”

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.

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.