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.

COAXING THE LEECH

“Wall Street is my street!”

“If you can’t adapt to the times, get out of the way.”

“‘Epater le bourgeois’ is a self-defeating slogan for slow-witted nostalgics.”

“There’s money to be made in the art racket.”

“Il faut arnaquer le riches!”

Mars Walk, acrylic on panel, Aslaug Akershus 2012

This was a new trope from Currado Malaspina, coming on the heels of the recent reemergence of the French Socialist Party. I found the former guardian of bohemian valor with a new religion. The heroic contrarian of the Parisian avant-garde has softened into a middle-aged artistic quisling.

He explained this transformation as follows:

“It’s utterly futile trying to revive the dead arts. This is an age deaf to the sublime. To think otherwise is to be hopelessly naive. Instead of ‘wringing lilies from the acorn,’ artists are wresting euros from the flush. This is the new golden age. The collector class has never been more imbecilic!”

One thing that hasn’t changed is Malaspina’s breathtaking arrogance. Like Capaneus on his bed of sand, Currado rails unrepentant, consumed by the catechisms of commerce.

I learned later that Malaspina now works under a pseudonym. He passes his new work – large colorful acrylic paintings of astronauts – as the work of a twenty four year old Norwegian graduate student named Aslaug Akershus.

ON IMAGINATION

I love footnotes. A book without footnotes is like tea without honey. Subject to the moths of erudition, the marginal asides and discursive digressions are the rock and rod of reading. Undiluted excursions into the labyrinthine world of footnotes always lead to the enchantments of the unexpected. It was on such a donnish journey that I chanced upon a curious anecdote from the colorful life of my friend, Currado Malaspina.

Leafing through the badly beaten pages of a 1971 Vatican Library edition of Fabrius Patavium’s “The Medicinal Qualities of Millet And Rye,” that quintessential masterwork of 15th century speculative science, I stumbled upon the following note:

“During his tenure at the University of Athens between 1967 and 1969, the painter, Currado Malaspina participated in a clinical trial, testing the viability of Patavium’s claim that millet milk intensifies potency. Fragments of the journal Malaspina kept during the course of this study were published in the Hampshire College Review. (“Grain and Groin,” HCR, Vol. XVII, No. 4).”

A quick search on JSTOR yielded the apposite article, (I have since subscribed to the enormously eclectic and entertaining Hampshire Review), and though stingy on details it was a fanlight into yet another aspect of Currado’s complicated character.

Among the most curious entries in the journal dealt with what Currado referred to as his “dicey dream-world,” (“le monde imaginaire inattendu”). In it he describes his belovedly neglected kitten, Blanche who he kept for years but scarcely paid any attention to. It seems that Blanche was attracted to the smell of tobacco and each time Currado lit a cigarette, the kitten leapt upon his lap and rested its head adoringly on his thigh. He noted that through the years he had grown accustomed to this habit and greeted it with indifference. During the trial period, however, in which he drank four cups of millet milk a day, he found this practice oddly and uncomfortably arousing.

I am now looking at Currado’s work in a different light.

ASK THE EXPERT

Untitled drawing, Micah Carpentier, 1969

French publishing house Le Gardinier announced last week that acclaimed biographer Francine Nougaret has been commissioned to write the definitive biography of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier. Nougaret, whose previous subjects include U Thant, Sonia Delaunay and David Kusevitsky, is perfectly suited for the task. Her most recent book, “The Muse Has Wings: Nabokov, Saint-Saens and the Role of Lepidoptery in Art,” was the winner of 2006 Phalene Prize for non-fiction.

Needless to say, she has been assiduously picking the brain of Currado Malaspina. Perhaps no one alive knows as much about the notoriously reclusive Carpentier than Currado. They were together with Eldridge Cleaver in ’68, drinking white rum and eating croquetas in that dingy flat on La Rampa Street arguing about mambo and jazz. They were in Paris in the seventies writing dense polemical screeds for Le Revue Hebdomadaire, inciting a generation of art students toward acts of senseless aggression. And after the accident, Malaspina was at Carpentier’s bedside as he lay in the coma that ultimately claimed his life.

There has been much speculation whether this new biography, tentatively titled “Savage Afflatus: The Tragic Life of Micah Carpentier,” will reveal the identity of the woman who inspired Carpentier’s most lyrical drawings. For a while it was thought to be Sonia Braga. Some hypothesized that it was Estelita Rodriguez because of the gradient chin and the gloomy, jet-black eyes. Malaspina once told me that it was Borges’ 20-year-old niece, Rosalie, but I find that fairly implausible.

In any event, the publication of this new biography should be the next literary firestorm and Le Gardinier plans to release it in January 2013 so as not to distract the American public from the presidential election.