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 …