WHEN I WAS YOUNG

There are things in our past that in a just world could vanish from our record if only we had gone to traffic school. I’m speaking, of course, of mistakes of misspent youth, inebriated confessions, impulsive leaps of faith and above all else, mercenary romances whose tactics, though foul, yielded expedited rewards.

Those of us blessed with the fairer features favored by the rougher sex have been taught from a young age to leverage our gifts toward gain. In a rigged world dominated by men, guile and deception are countenanced by the asymmetrical circumstances that govern professional hierarchies.

As my mom, who was second to none in the feminist department, used to say: “If you got it, flaunt it!”

I guess what I’m doing here is a bit of retroactive penance. I’ve come a long way since those callow, calculated days of crass careerism. Now that I’m an accomplished woman, an artist of undeniable merit and a mentor to a new generation of young women making their way in the world, I’ve come full circle. Judge us by our merits on a level playing field and sisters, don’t stab one another in the back!

There’s always going to be those who want to crush us and diminish us and reduce us to that demeaning condition of mascot and eye-candy. But I say, let’s come clean, admit our past indiscretions and move on from a position of strength and self confidence.

So here goes.

As most of my readers know, my career was, to say the least, facilitated by my notorious liaison with the French artist Currado Malaspina. At the time, rumors, though true but nonetheless vicious, circulated in the art world that I was something of a “kept woman.” I admit that I pursued this romance for practical reasons and I endured the indignity of acting as an exotic accessory in order to further my ambitions.

Malaspina has recently published a few images in advance of an illustrated memoir to be published by Gallimard in the fall of 2017. It’s a masterstroke of a French publicist and a young social media maven and this highly anticipated publication has already aroused the interest of a few key players in Hollywood.

Fine.

But the best way to head off a scandal is to meet it head on (or so my publicist and my young social media maven have advised). Here are a few of the images that are trending and I’m sure there will be more as time moves on. Make of them what you will but be sure that I fully intend to publish a powerful countervailing narrative that will flip the scales in favor of empowerment!!

 I have to admit, the old guy does have talent …

MA CAILLE

As a young naïve art student fresh out of Surseburg, Indiana, a place where to this day the local Seven Eleven closes at 5, I was as trusting as a buck-toothed toddler. At Pratt where I studied painting with Reginald Scottsman, Cimona Westworth and David Schoffman, I discovered a new world which till then was as remote as the moon.

I did a lot of unspeakable things of which I am ashamed of but for now let’s focus on the good.

Scottsman was a traditionalist and with him I discovered the depth and variety of the classical tradition. He had no truck with abstraction and anything produced after the year 1890 was considered suspect. He was as exacting as he was knowledgable and he backed up each of his tendentious claims with mountains of visual evidence. That his breath was always fouled with the odor of sour milk and battery acid only added to his old-world gravitas.

Wentworth, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. Glacially uninflected with an intellect so severe that at times I found myself imagining her as The Grand Inquisitor . Her world was one of modernist, Hegelian orthodoxy and it was more than telling that she had a photo of herself (frowning but obviously ecstatic) standing side by side with Rosalind Krauss. From professor Wentworth – and she was always professor Wentworth though I was sure it irked her that it wasn’t Dr. Wentworth, for in her day they had yet to award PhD’s in studio art – I learned about the supremacy of the IDEA and that while paint and pigment were fine as things go they were mere vessels for the conveyance of concepts of only the highest moral rectitude. This appealed to my midwest Protestant upbringing which was why my toughest time was with Schoffman, the epitome of New York’s slovenly tradition of loud, emotional over-exposure.

French artist Currado Malaspina

From David, and he only answered to David, I learned to appreciate the senses with as little embarrassment as I found possible. He was a great champion of the French painter Currado Malaspina and invited him to sit in on our class each time the peripatetic Parisian was in town. Malaspina took an unfortunate shine to me – he alternately called me ‘my little cabbage’ or ‘my little quail’ – and it was hard for someone like me who had only recently fallen off a barley wagon, to resist his continental charms.

Malaspina roped me into doing something that with the passage of time seems so outrageous that to this day I can’t believe I agreed to it. I suppose I fell in love with him in a twisted sort of way. He was so charming and so persuasive when he spoke of Rodin and the artist’s imperative to “rescue the kingdom of the flesh” from the purveyors of “les idées secs.“

He didn’t trust the American art models – at least the ones made available at Pratt – so he asked me to work with him on his now famous book The Baba Kama Sutra.

from the Baba Kama Sutra (The Tangled Spider)

Luckily my mother died before the book was published (it’s still unavailable in the U.S.). It was printed in a very limited edition and I’m told it’s quite the collector’s item. I never received anything but a bruised buttock and a curt ‘merci’ but I suppose I had it coming. I’m much more business savvy these days and I always get everything first in writing.

All the same, it’s kinda cool to know that I was an essential collaborator in this very unique work of art that remains, to this day a centerpiece of Contemporary European erotica.

FEAR & SELF-LOATHING IN LOS ANGELES

I’ve always admired Los Angeles artist David Schoffman, not only for his intelligence, though he is wickedly smart, and not only for his movie star good looks, though he is a striking hybrid of John Malkovich and Billy Bob Thornton, and not even on account of his incredibly beautiful paintings. I’ve always admired David Schoffman because he is the only heterosexual man I ever met who didn’t hit on me within the first five minutes of meeting me.

Most guys look right past my achievements and directly start staring at my chest. They can’t imagine how a woman as attractive as myself could possibly have anything significant to say.

The first question they ask when they see my widely exhibited drawings is “Are these self portraits?”

Implicit in the question is the improbable notion that a female artist could approach the nude from a position of empowerment.

I take terrific pleasure arriving at my openings hanging on the arm of some straight-laced corporate type. It drives the striving deadbeat bohos crazy!

But hey … these paper pushers have the decency to buy you a decent meal before they begin with their drooling bouquets of crassly veiled innuendo.

But let’s get back to where we started – with Schoffman, gentleman par excellence.

He seems to appreciate me for who I am and he respects my work as a peer. He’s a mensch who opens doors and carries bags and when you talk to him you are confident that he is truly listening. He has a gentle, caring way about him and his soft mellifluous voice is strangly soothing even when he’s ornamenting his speech with strings of odious expletives.

He’s old-school in his genuine awe of women and I’m sure that he would make the absolutely perfect mate.

Unfortunately I can’t stand nice guys …

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES TO NOTHING

When I set out to write what amounted to a glorified chapbook about my odd friend Currado Malaspina I had to do a tremendous amount of research.

First I had to convince Currado to give me access to his voluminous archive of drawings. I spent three weeks at his rue Fénelon studio poring over one ratty sketchbook after another. I don’t think Malaspina himself knew how much work he had stuffed on his shelves and buried in his drawers.

He must be one of those obsessive/compulsive types because unless he’s eating, drinking or attempting to inveigle some comely admirer into his pathetic and filthy little bachelor billet, he’s typically sketching away on some crazy project or another.

I chose about twenty drawings that seemed to have some sort of rough coherence. We argued for days but he finally agreed to allow me to present them as a series with what seemed to me an appropriate title:

 PALIMPSESTE

When I got a proof of the book back from the printer I invited a few trusted friends over to give me their honest assessments.

Nearly everyone, including my mother, thought I was crazy.

First of all, There’s no love lost between Currado Malaspina and the art insiders of Los Angeles. Most people here are tired of his snobby dismissal of anything having to do with California. He has spent years making it abundantly clear to anyone who will listen how he disdains what he calls le frivole Hollywoodienne.

Nobody understands why I have anything to do with him, especially after he pilloried my first and only exhibition in Paris in a review so odious, so gratuitously negative, so loathsome and base that La grande écrevisse, the magazine that published it, felt the need to add a conciliatory editor’s note, distancing itself somewhat from what it feared some of its female readers might find offensive.

But I’m a Buddhist and I can forgive, plus I’ve learned the hard way never to burn a bridge while you’re on the greasy way up. (full disclosure: Currado has arranged for me to interview Hisedea Yokidoki for a long-form essay that I’m pitching to Harper’s on subversive ceramics ) 

Anyway, even though my colleagues here are completely nonplussed, when I finally got the actual book in hand I was thoroughly and completely excited!

… and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve already sold 1500 copies in the States alone!

I’ll have a book signing soon, probably somewhere in Culver City so please stay tuned!

MY KANT

Why is it that every man that wants to sleep with me invokes the categorical imperative?

Well, not every man, just married men – young guys treat moral philosophy like Medicare, something nice that’s best deferred till later.

I have a friend, an older gentleman, who visits me in the summer because he loves the beach.

 

He never wears a bathing suit and if he takes off his socks and rolls up his pant legs it’s as if he went skinny dipping at Woodstock. I like him precisely because he is eccentric for how many true eccentrics are still around?

Sure, you have your nut-jobs – especially in Los Angeles – but the cultivated original is a breed apart.

Anyway, this friend, who refuses even to be photographed, would like nothing more than to make love to me and for some mischievous reason I adamantly refuse. As Robert Musil pointed out in an age where poetic ideas still mattered, an amorous woman is far more clever than a man of character.

Since my friend is married – I don’t think it’s too much of a betrayal to say that he lives in Paris and he is in his early 60’s – one could plausibly argue that adultery might deviate from the Kantian idea of universal law.

But it’s funny because nearly every married dude I go out with can come up with some marvelous refutation of this fairly basic premise. Complete fidelity to one’s wife, I’m told, falls under the category of “imperfect duty” and therefore its moral imperative is somewhat hazy.

Still, I argue, these circumstantial duties are no less binding. This infuriates my brainy suitors and it is especially infuriating if I’m wearing a bikini.

Men are swindlers and women know this. The metaphysics of morals must be argued persuasively if I’m going to consider dropping my panties.

These guys think that if they can theoretically legislate a universal principle, some maxim of scruples, some normative code of behavior than I’ll melt into their arms like some velle brutum. But fellas, I have news for you, determinism and debauchery are a thorny pair!

So every summer my European friend returns to his wife tanned and disappointed.

These guys should try Wittgenstein.

A little silence can go a long way.

Je est un(e) autre

I shouldn’t drink.

You’d think I’d know by now but the lesson has yet to sink in. I’ve watched my friends get pissed and pass out and it’s not a sexy picture.

And yet all those fruity cocktails they make these day are soooo irresistible and soooo feminine. I had one the other day that was made with date nectar, mint leaves, Cuban rum and pineapple juice. It came in a tall, beveled glass with a twist of citron curled around its lip – it almost looked like a traffic cone!

I had four.

In the space of an hour.

It was great!

When I’m tipsy I let my otherwise cold and stiff demeanor relax and I find I like myself a little bit more. The drunk me only casually resembles the sober me. We both look great in heels, we both speak French and we both enjoy being the center of attention.

The drunk me has trouble walking across a room in pumps but is able to quote Lautréamont and Villon without the slightest stumble.

While in both states I crave the limelight in only one of them do I unfailingly succeed.

(Guess which one)

We all have multiple sides to our personalities and each one is equally illegitimate. I resist the unworkable ideal of authenticity. Clearly we act on multiple stages and we consistently adjust our attitudes accordingly.

So for those of you who don’t like me I have two things to tell you.

Join the club.

and

Just wait. Another Dahlia is sure to appear within minutes.

Unless, of course I’ve had too many Mai Tais

LIFE IS HELL

Sometimes the best ideas are the most obvious.

I wrote a book. I thought that the premise of the book was brilliant and that there was no other book like it. I was sure that if I put the manuscript in the hands of the right publisher the book would be an instant best seller.

It’s a “self-help” book and granted, the book had something of a niche market but still, in the right context and with the right promotion I was sure that the book would cross over into a much wider readership.

I got an agent and together we pitched the idea to at least fifty different outlets. I didn’t want to self-publish because I find that route a bit too desperate and a bit too vain.

I have a folder buried in my computer with each and every rejection email I received. Most were your standard sort of brush off but a few were actually encouraging so I decided to soldier on.

And then it hit me.

Europe!!

Of course, the final frontier! Unlike the United States, Europe isn’t saturated with “How to Live a Better Life” type books. In places like Italy, France and Spain people are too busy living to be fretting over whether they are sufficiently empowered or not.

I asked my friend Currado Malaspina to take a look at my manuscript. He made a few suggestions and changed a word or two here and there and within a month he translated the whole thing.

He even hired one of his interns to illustrate it!

The book is coming out in the fall but there’s already quite a buzz around it.

New York Times Best Seller List …. embrasse mes fesses!

CAN WE TALK?

 I recently joined one of those reading groups that I swore I’d never join.

It’s a small group of mostly unattached artists who meet once a month to discuss … well … the art world (few of us pretend to have read any of the assigned books). It’s basically a cantankerous conclave of bitterness, envy and resentment and so it was no surprise – this being L.A. – that someone suggested we all read Diary of a Mad Diva by Joan Rivers.

We were all probably pretty drunk because nobody objected (except my friend Tripp whose idea of a page turner is an Ivan Klíma memoir or a Cambridge Companion to Tang Dynasty Verse).

Collective inebriation has a nasty way of mistaking happiness for joy. My happiest moments are usually those where I’m at a bar or a party, where the music is loud and everyone is completely pissed. To me there is no stronger sense of community. It’s only later when someone reminds me that I spent a good hour and a half in deep, dewy conversation with a twenty year-old theater major that I realize I wasted another evening in Mudville.

Not one easily drawn into commitments, the most durable relationships in my life have usually been with food. I’m specifically drawn to imported camembert on lightly salted multigrain crackers, roasted Marcona almonds, large green Greek olives, prosciutto and gorgonzola crustini and flamin’ hot Cheetos.

In other words, my favorite foods are the ones that go really well with alcohol. (Cheetos are dreamy when combined with violent sports and weak, arctic American beer).

We have this rule in the reading group that whoever hosts the meeting gets to propose our next book. Last week it was my turn and I went all out. I bought a bamboo mat and a rice paddle and made enough sushi to cater a small bat mitzvah. Which is to say we drank a few silos of sake and deconstructed poor Joan until all that was left of her was a dangling eyelash and a push-up bra.

It was all great fun and I suppose I was pretty tanked because gangly, acne-scarred Tripp was beginning to look pretty darn good while I found myself staring into his horn rims blathering about Daniil Kharms.

It’s amazing what a desperately drunk woman would do to impress a guy. So now I’ve got this overeducated performance artist sending me links to University Press book reviews and texting me at all hours with politically insensitive quotes from Michel Houellebecq. But the worst part is that everyone is mad at me because they despise this month’s selection.

Except Tripp.

He loves it.

HOMAGE TO A SCHMUCK

My friends, I do declare, you can have it all!!

You really can live the American myth of having it all as long as you’re prepared to be a little bit of a “dick.” (The Uncommon Dictionary of Casual Euphemism defines a dick as someone who easily and thoughtlessly puts their own objectives and interests ahead of others).

As Fox News points out nightly, only natural selection should be trusted to anoint the winners and consign the losers to their well-deserved neglect. And so it is with art.

For years I’ve cultivated dalliances and alliances with cold strategic purposefulness. I basically divide my contacts into two categories: The useful and the kind.

The useful are those who supply the rungs for my ascension. The kind are the unwitting dupes who still believe in trust, fairness, talent and integrity.

Jerry Montarosa is a wonderfully talented guy of the second category.

Montarosa in his Venice studio

We dated for a while back in the 90’s and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. (Important rule: If you are committed to having it all, never, ever lose a contact!). The guy is a prince – a true mensch of the first order (Important rule: Collect mensches – the decent are always the most easily duped).

Anyway, Jerry is one of those artists who talk dreamily about “process” and “the generative power of line.” He speaks several languages, has traveled extensively and seems to have read every important book ever written. You’d never know it though. He is the most soft spoken, humble and unassuming person I have ever met. His whole life is devoted to this kind of monastic yet ecstatic form of sensuality. He is constantly working in his studio and it seems that everything he touches is sublime.

He’s also a really crappy networker. If non-brand were a brand Jerry would be a trademark.

I make it a point to get together with him and check out his work at least once or twice a year. I think of it as corporate espionage.

Jerry Montarosa, Oil on canvas 6 x 14 feet. 2014

The mural-sized painting above is only one of about half a dozen similar works that Jerry has hanging about his studio. They literally can take your breath away. They are stunning, bravura performances of improvisation, technical mastery and impeccable design. They seem to somehow rescue the tired themes of nudity and gesture from the scrapheap of figurative redundancy. Through their obsessive repetitive insistence they manifest a raw concrete graphic presence that is both mysterious and new.

They’re also practically invisible.

Jerry the Good firmly believes that it is wrong to exhibit his work before he is completely satisfied with his results. He’s committed to completing at least fifteen more of these giant paintings until, as he puts it, “the ideas are fully played.”

Well, I for one have no problem playing Jerry.

Dahlia Danton 2015

I’ve basically lifted his idea wholesale and have made my own Dahlia version of the writhing commotion of fleshy forms formatted as a polyptych – (Important rule: Always listen to smart people and use their words in your artist’s statements).

With my next big show coming up in the fall I expect to be, once again, the toast of L.A. while Jerry ponderously struggles after another “noiseless nuance.”

Dahlia Danton 2015

BELIEVE ME!

I  look at honesty as a luxury. It always struck me as an impractical and unattainable extravagance that is neither effective nor desirable. Outcomes decided by facts are as rare  as summer truffles and are generally limited to acts of violence and coercion. Everywhere else in life deception is the preferred method in shaping events to unfold in our favor.

Or, for that matter, in our disfavor. This entirely depends on one’s skill. There’s always the possibility of being outfoxed by a better liar.

Dahlia is never outfoxed.

Just the other day I chipped off a bit of dazzling nail polish while trying to stretch a canvas (my assistant had the flu … or so she claimed). I called my manicurist and told her that one of the bright sparkly cuticles she so carefully fashioned the day before didn’t survive my drive home. It doesn’t matter whether she believed me or not, the customer is always right. I went back the next day for a free do-over and she threw in my toes in the bargain.

Love, in part, is about generosity and the ability to empathize and share. Power by contrast is about the talent to withhold. Since the most precious commodity in life is truth, denying someone the truth is the ultimate exercise in manipulation.

Art, as we all know, is the king crab of prevarication and whenever I’m asked to give advice to young artists I always recommend that they start by reading Sade, Cicero and Malaspina. That people still take their work at face value is a testament to the potency of willful miscommunication. Had these three disingenuous geniuses written from the heart, literature as we know it would be a kiddie pool of lukewarm bromides and cruelly crafted inanities.

As it is we’re inundated with earnest hacks and house cats while our vaulted “world of serious ideas” is now curated by the likes of Oprah and Dr. Phil.

Take it from me – next time you’re late for work with a hangover tell the boss you had a flat tire. Believe me, if she spends any time at all on the internet she will certainly believe you.