DESPACITO

Call it a case of unintended consequences, collateral artistic damage or simply an example of our natural attraction for undeserving demigods but my good friend Currado Malaspina has become something of a folk hero in Latin America.

He's referred to as "el extraño," and his image can be found on walls and stalls from Mexico to the Dominican Republic. He's a favorite among art students - but that's probably because of the legendary 2005 Museum of Contemporary Arts Guanajuato (MOCAG) exhibition Dónde está Duende where he featured portraits of the famous Telenovela starlette, Danaë Jerónima.

The fact that his fame has extended to the general population defies simple explanation.

He's often depicted in the company of Che or Fidel or Hugo Chavez but I've also seen his smug, silly portrait sharing space with Enrique Iglesies and Roberto Clemente.

One would think that Malaspina, whose Spanish rarely extends beyond "cerveza fría por favor" and "eso viene con plátanos fritos" would be an unlikely luminary among Latinos. But it probably began with his improbable friendship with the late Cuban master, Micah Carpentier.



I think Currado was in some way responsible for smuggling Carpentier's paper bag drawings out of Havana and into Paris.

Whatever it is, they seem to love him down there which is fine since nobody north of El Paso has ever heard of him.

And if there is any justice in this world it will remain that way.

DROUGHT

On the face of it, it looks like my dear friend Currado Malaspina is retiring from the art world.

These days he spends most of his time taking long walks through his native Paris, admiring the architecture and nibbling on lightly buttered ficelles that he prepares in advance and packs in neatly folded rectangles of wax paper.

Occasionally he steps into a church and sits in a pew to rest. Sometimes he is almost calmed by the solemnity of the place. He finds the dim lights and the redolence of incense and mold strangely erotic. Sometimes he is moved toward the precipice of awe.

Not an ecclesiastical awe, though I wouldn't rule that possibility out entirely, but by a reverential recognition of what Guy Debord might have characterized as the 'spectacle.' By this I mean that Currado respects sanctity only as an historical remnant and it is precisely in the successful commodification of religion where he reserves his admiration. To him prayer is the ultimate form of artistic conceit. 

It's at that exquisitely lucid moment of cynicism where Currado takes out his small brown carnet de croquis and makes a quick, clumsy pencil sketch, marking the time and date on the back.

Like many contemporary intellectuals who draw comfortable salaries from academia, journalism or politics, Malaspina has lost his faith in institutions.  Artists are typically slow in accepting the fact that their participation in what is clumsily referred to as 'the discourse' is redundant. People no longer have time for ideas and even less time for those who interpret ideas. The bitter truth is that the insular community of self-anointed custodians of high culture are considered by most reasonable people as an adolescent bunch of lazy cranks.

Gone are the days where brilliantly encrypted paintings left the public ruminating on the mysteries of genius.

Currado is tired. He tells me that people never realized how difficult it was for him to sustain the myth that shrouded him like a cassock. Life is simpler now. Long walks and harmless sketches done on the fly are now his greatest pleasures.

Perhaps it's old age and the simple wisdom that accompanies one's recognition of mortality. 

Or maybe he's just out of ideas.

SNAP TO ATTENTION(span)

One must give credit to my insufferable friend Currado Malaspina. He keeps up with the times, marching doggedly, (and awkwardly), into the sparkly labyrinth of social media. 

He's got his fuzzy, fleshy ear to the ground, updating his apps, upgrading his apparatuses and regularly adding addenda to the constellation of his neocolonial technological reach.

Look him up on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, AppleTalk, Bailiwick, CreateTT, DogWhistle, Evite, I-Friends, Goodreads, eHarmony, IntelPPro, JDate, KindleCommunity, Linkedin, eMore, eNough, OfficeCaddy, PaintersTalk, QueerConnect, Reference.com, Savvy, Tinder, Upromote, Vimeo, WordsWithFriends, Xannoymous,YouTube or ZZZ and you'll see what I mean.

This is a silver chromed age where egoism and insignificance are fastened like bolts. Malaspina's supple conceptual range allows him to produce tons of mediocre work in a variety of tropes and methods. When he's not making room-size installations with rainforest trees and scented dirt or filming himself wading in the Ganges wearing a lime green suit, he's painting cheerful vistas of Père Lachaise.

 His naked opportunism and his propensity to share has lost him all but a few loyal friends. People are simply afraid to be implicated within his overexposed personal narrative.

  Currado is the driverless car of the art world and what he has lost in friendships over the years he has gained a hundredfold in his galactic association of bovine followers.

He used to be lively company full of wit and intelligence. Now all he seems capable of saying is:

VIVE

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ÉLAN VITAL

My dear friend Currado Malaspina is obsessed with time.

As far back as I can remember he has tossed around the inconclusive implications of temporality like a philosophical hacky sack. What is duration and how does it apply. Is it fixed to the cycles of the moon? Does it register like a metronome, like a heart, like a breath? Or do all these barbed and back-breaking slow years of toil only point us to our pointless degeneration and unavailing demise?

Or is there something urgent about our rented exhalations? Is there a good enough reason for us to persist and to make things, grow things, destroy things and love things?

Currado has been keeping notebooks all these years, compiling observations, speculating and composing existential riddles hoping to find a key. It's a personal parlor game with no apparent consequence other than the avoidance of the very real and messy task of living 'in the world.'

Now, as he enters his seventh decade, understanding time seems more pressing - even desperate.

He recently confided in me that nobody, not even his father and certainly not his mentors, effectively prepared him for old age. It seems like there's an unwritten convention among the elderly to withhold valuable information. It's as if the potential windows of comprehension have been soundproofed. The young observe the ancient but are denied their depth.

And so he's left, bereft, fumbling after some significant form of cosmic consolation.

Aloft in the metaphysical, Currado has fortunately retained the passion and the vigor to continue pursuing the corporeal. Yet these days his knavery is cast with a ponderous, theoretical skepticism that turns romance into field-work. What was once characterized as a fling is now considered an "experiment," but if you ask me it's just a case of the blind leading the blind.

TEACHING IS A CALLING

Between 1987 and 1993 my dear friend Currado Malaspina went legit.

Before then (and since) he never paid attention to the norms and mores of organized society. His fly is metaphorically unzipped, he’s a filterless fag, a freeman, an outlier, an anarchist, a perennial nonpartisan . He says what he wants without disclaimers or qualifications. If he steps on your toes with the bluntness of his tongue the problem is with you for he is without guile and too indifferent to care. He neither judges nor condemns. He is at peace with his temperament and if you accept Currado at face value you will be rewarded beyond measure. 

But if not, well ... prepare for some discord.

Between 1987 and 1993 Malaspina experimented with conventionality. For years, art schools and universities had tried to lure him out of his studio. Generous offers from as far way as California and Beijing tried to tempt the reclusive master. He finally succumbed to the improbable position of Maître de conférences “ at the École Supérieure de Conception et Idées in Rennes.

It was a rough time in Currado’s life. He had just separated from his third wife, the art historian Orestia Shestov and he felt the need to get away. Rennes, a six hour train ride from Paris seemed both close and far enough and the school had a solid reputation for academic independence and a pluralistic approach to contemporary aesthetic discourse. 

After his first semester Malaspina became a legend. He inspired both awe and envy in his many colleagues but with his students he was unambiguously adored. As a life drawing and painting teacher Currado was known for his theatrical presentations that included just enough technical, hands-on, craft-oriented specifics to justify his rambling and tendentious philosophical discourses.

Among his severest critics was Sagwau Imlauer, a little known photographer who made a small splash on the international fashion scene with his candid polaroids of Boy George. Imlauer was what we call in the States an associate dean, someone with too little power to be dangerous but just enough to be annoying. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to wage a prolonged campaign of intellectual immolation designed to demoralize his more famous colleague.

It was explained to me recently that adults become teachers because they are incapable of collaborating with peers as equals. My interlocutor went on to explain that the abiding commonality among educators is an enfeebling lack of self-esteem that can only be remedied by the rigid hierarchy of schools. Students, as a permanent underclass, allow professors to assert their unquestioned advantage. These same advantages, he went on to explain, could never be reproduced in the private sector.

I’m reminded of this grim view of pedagogy when I recall Currado’s five year impersonation of a teacher. Despite his success and the subsequent success of so many of his students, to this day biographers and critics see those five years in Rennes as a professional collapse. People still cling to the idea that Malaspina was indulging in a strange, self-medicating narcissistic ritual of bombastic intimidation and ego uplift. His detractors hit pay dirt when a few years ago the term “bully” finally entered the French pop-psychological lexicon. “Currado le bully”   ran one recent headline in the literary journal “Pournotre,” (penned by one Prof. Sagwau Imlauer).

For those who know him well the real reason Malaspina remained a professor for so long was his frenzied liaison with Axelle Polina, department chairwoman of Sociocultural Anthropology. 

Together, it seems, they engaged in an extremely in depth study of the biological and psychological characteristics of the human species through a series of controlled experiments.

So much for an inability to collaborate with peers …

WHO PUT THE 'P' IN PRECEDENT?

When my dear friend Currado Malaspina heard the president-elect attribute his predilection for urinating on Russian prostitutes to his onerous dread of microbial bacteria he found himself nodding in sympathy.

Avoiding conventional penetration with uncertain partners has been Currado's longstanding practice for many, many years. That such an esteemed public figure confessed to the same sexual protocol provided my friend a comforting sense of validation.

Malaspina's germaphobia has been something of a gift. While eliminating an entire range of possible pleasures it has forced this eccentric and resourceful French artist to indulge in fetishes and improvisations that are typically unavailable to the average casual sybarite. 

This newfound affinity with the imminent leader of the still free world has filled Currado with a strange sense of pride. He hopes that in the course of Trump's upcoming term of office many other marginalized forms of gratification will find frank and open expression within our shared culture. Men and women all stand to prosper under this refreshing, new regime of candid carnality.

 America - the greatest micturition on earth!!