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

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!

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.

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.