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.

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

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!

Io sò io, e vvoi nun zete un cazzo

The art world is a weary chaparral of bitter rivalries and inconsequential dog-feuds fought into a draw. Currado Malaspina is an undecorated, ignominious  veteran of these hostilities but as he approaches his sixtieth year he is showing early signs of  fatal exhaustion.

Could the cigar-smoking, womanizing, brandy sipping bon-vivant be losing his edge?

I am speaking here about an uncharacteristic act of apparent unsolicited generosity. It seems that last April, at a dinner party at the home of the art historian Dr. Orestia Shestov, the subject of what is euphemistically called “emerging artists” came up. In attendance that evening was a miscellaneous assembly of curators, critics and collectors with a few artists thrown in for comic relief. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I was present as well though partially distracted by an evangelical desire to get completely hammered).

Currado began by rattling off the names of about half a dozen inconsequential sycophants who could be counted on later to provide him any number of reciprocal services. While a heavy brume of disinterested boredom descended upon the table like morphine, Currado began an impassioned pitch for the hitherto unsung Emilian painter Cathar Crucesignati.

Cathar Crucesignati

Crucesignati, a twenty-seven year old self proclaimed artistic secchiona (roughly the Italian equivalent for nerd or geek), studied with Cervello Stravaganti at L’Istituto di Belle Arti Modena and became something of an invisible protégé for the famous minimalist painter. She caught Currado’s attention when he saw her work at a group show at The Bureau de Liaison Culturel Français Italien (full disclosure no. 2 – I was with him then too and was singularly unimpressed).

He has since never missed an opportunity to sing her praises and promote her career (full and painful disclosure no.3 – he never did that for me).

And now, all the nagging and pestering of his influential contacts have yielded for Crucesignati her first one woman show in Paris.  Bain de Boue, an exhibition of some 35 paintings and drawings revolving around the theme of mud bathing will open next week at Galerie Arrêtdeporte on rue de la Huchette.

Bagno con Cappello, Cathar Crucesignati, acrylic on canvas, 2013

As for my final full disclosure, I think that my once discerning friend Currado Malaspina is showing the first signs of intellectual cognitive decay.

IN SEARCH OF WASTED TIME

A gaggle of bug-eyed admirers waited by the back door of Jovan Bohuslav’s brand new 400 square meter Belleville gallery. The opening had a spillover mob clogging Rue Louise Weiss  irritating the locals and causing  concern among the sapeurs-pompiers de Paris who were standing nearby.

My friend, Currado Malaspina was having his first exhibition in five years and the highly anticipated event inflected the French hipster crowd with a uniquely American style FOMO* anxiety.

Carnaval des Désenchanté no.6, Currado Malaspina 2004

The work, if you could call it that, was an immense series of immense watercolors depicting every single site and street of the 12th arrondissement. The entire project – which was carried on in complete secrecy – took Currado over fifteen years to complete. Oberkampf, Ménilmontant, Bastille, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Daumesnil, Bercy, Malaspina covered it all with a kind of methodical happenstance. Wherever he happened to take his daily café et croissant aux amandes was where he began his search for his urban motif.

Quite frankly, apart from the sheer depravity of the project, its compulsiveness and its irrational revisionist posture, the work is rather boring. Perhaps its saving grace are the 12 or so pictures depicting the famous Carnaval des Désenchanté  in the Bois de Vincennes. These have a eerie Fellini-like strangeness that continues to haunt me even now.

Carnaval des Désenchanté no.1, Currado Malaspina 2004

The critical reception to the works was hostile when it wasn’t indifferent but that has not deterred the public from visiting the show in droves. The paintings quickly sold out and there is talk of Malaspina beginning a new series in the Quatrieme.

If that is the case, I think Currado better work on his renderings of water.

* social media argot for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’

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.

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