A Terrible Disappointment

The economic situation has claimed another casualty. Another wonderful art gallery has closed its doors. After working for six strenuous weeks preparing for this exhibition, compiling a series of rice paper ink drawings and several photo montages, I was informed yesterday that Galimar Torber and his beautiful wife Sen Sen Shive have filed for chapter eleven.

I was so looking forward to this show in particular because I love any opportunity to visit Los Angeles. Now I’m stuck with a large box of useless invitations.

I guess I can use them for bookmarks.

THE BROKEN MANDOLIN

When I recounted this reminiscence for my friend, the filmmaker Sandor Vasquez, I had no idea he would attach it to one of his video tone poems. I was half-asleep, had no make-up on and was slightly hung-over from a long night of transgression and dissipation.

It’s been seen by so many people by now, I figured I’d post it on the blog and see how the chips fall.

To answer in advance the most commonly asked questions:

Yes, the story is true  -  No, I did not write the narration  -  No, the narrator is not Marai Falci  -  Yes, I have been to Schoffman’s studio recently  -  and Yes, I actually do have an agent.

EUROPE

Me and my dealer Gali Velasco

I confess. Unlike many of my colleagues, I absolutely love my art dealer. Gali Velasco of Grande Cuve is the kindest, shrewdest, and best-connected artworld big shot I have ever come across. He is charming, witty, sophisticated and charismatic in that slightly sexist European way. He has represented me for the past five years and in that time I have  had my work in more Art Fairs than I can remember. Though his hard knowledge of painting is a bit thin, he makes up for it with his immaculate manners and keen sense of opportunity.

We are planning my next exhibition for the fall of 2010 and I’m starting a new series of small enamel paintings on copper that I hope will be a nice new gimmick that will keep my collectors interested.

Le Frisson Abattu

Menaced by the memories of a hopeless love affair that began with radiance and ended in the vile fires of misplaced faith, I left Paris in 2007 hoping never to see or hear from Currado Malaspina ever again.

And now this.

I stumbled upon this short film and my spine aches.

LAMPS OVER A PARAPET

Perfumed Portrait #14

The critics are baffled by my new work. Jeanne DeHovitz in The Journal called the work from the Perfumed Portrait series “dead branches with a pelican’s beak of vapid pretension”. Luckily, the collectors were thrilled, (of course, most collectors who read reviews do so while moving their lips). The show sold out and if I’m even remotely an economic indicator than the recession may very well be history. I may even re-hire my assistant.

 

This summer I have been traveling through North Africa. I have encountered, quite by chance, the art of the Sahmaghreb, a tribe of indigenous nomads who can trace their roots to the Iron Age.

The image above is an amulet used by their priestesses (it’s a Matrilineal society!) to ward off reproductive obstacles.

I’m writing this from an Internet café in Casablanca, sipping arrack from a porcelain teacup.

C’EST MOI!

Having just read the latest post of The Bitter Furies of Currado Malaspina I feel it behooves me to reveal the identity of at least one of the female figures featured in the now infamous piece.

La gamine est moi.

WORKING VACATION

Dahlia Danton

I recently returned from a Mediterranean sojourn where I was invited to speak about my recent series of terra cotta sculptures based on Etruscan priapic amulets. I gave talks at the Anatolia Institute of Design,  Graphika Haifa, Corfu’s Workshop for Industrial Innovation and the Mersa Matruh College of Art.

It was grueling but exciting and my work was received with great interest everywhere.

I stopped in to see Currado Malaspina at his summer home in Cospicua and the picture above shows me in his lovely garden.

5797 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD

from the series "Even Sleepers Are Workers"

I have long eschewed the Los Angeles artworld’s penchant for kitschy marketing monikers which implicitly cede its aspirations toward seriousness in favor of New York.

MOCA’s Mondrian Mondays and its equally portentous Night of the Living Masters, LACMA’s Early Renaissance Singles Weekend, the Hammer’s Post-Modern/Post-Partum: New Mothers Paint exhibition are all cases in point.

The Culver City ArtWalk, a worthtwhile, and potentially even important event will take place on May 30th. Advertised as something resembling a daytime pub crawl with pony rides, I’m told by an insider that the reclusive David Schoffman may be offering a few drawings from his Even Sleepers Are Workers series at a gallery so newly minted it has yet to have a name.

This typically clandestine maneuver by Schoffman is designed, as usual, to discourage the idle , disengaged collector. Furthermore, I’m told, the drawings will only be found in the gallery’s back room and one must actively inquire about them at the desk.

Help confound Schoffman’s childish stratagem and visit the gallery at 5797 Washington Boulevard. Maybe we can coax a more public posture from the city’s most adored anchorite.

THE INDEX OF INTERRUPTED SINS

from "The Index of Interrupted Sins"

El Índice de Pecados Interrumpidos, the small diary found in Micah Carpentier’s Havana studio after he died is one of many diaries kept by this unusual artist. Together with The Book of Muffled Cries and Mis Divorcios, the Pecados is a highly stylized, idiosyncratic document of human weakness and moral frailty. An amateur philologist, Carpentier’s workable knowledge of biblical Hebrew allowed him to delve into the Iron Age conflation of sin with crime. As a lifelong citizen of communist Cuba, the resonances were clear.

The images above are from the section entitled Decalogue.