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 …