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’

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.

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.