Julian Schnabel’s MapQuest

Pajama-clad Julian Schnabel goes nautical—shows off dead-fish handshake—and butchers some perfectly good cartography with 'Navigation Drawings,' unveiled to a celebrity-strewn sea of fawning fans at Manhattan's Sperone Westwater.

By Michael Ruffino

Click here for more images of Stephanie Seymour, Harvey Keitel, and other celebrity art patrons!


Schnabel, right, with Harvey Keitel.

We felt reasonably obliged on Tuesday night, at Julian Schnabel's packed exhibition at the Sperone Westwater Gallery, to show Schnabel a piece about him from the last issue of our magazine, including, we thought, a dead-on line portrait of him by well-respected RISD art professor Fritz Drury, and set out to find him in the giant space. Artist and joy-Howitzer John Newsom, a surreal naturalist who happens to be naturally surreal (and who would later in the evening spar with gravity, exceptionally, in the Bowery Hotel's lounge), pointed us toward Schnabel, saying, "He's over there, in big crazy glasses and yellow pajamas." A subdued Schnabel, found to be in dark-blue pajamas and very normal glasses, following a handshake akin to releasing a brook trout back into the water, observed his portrait. "That doesn't look anything like me," said Schnabel, and closed the magazine in our hands.

Stephanie Seymour, left.

Schnabel, who did not bother to change out of his bedclothes for his exhibition, again, has taken to defacing vintage nautical charts with swipes of paint, in—we’re sorry to say—a style far too “modern” for us to understand. His purpose, we read, was to release the charts’ “informational content,” by which we assume he means their formally inaccessible “money content.” Looking at the maps, hung upside down or sideways and now rendered almost completely useless to the ship-bound, we couldn’t help comparing Schnabel’s seemingly random smears to the cartographer’s painstaking efforts to render portions of our planet with absolute precision, and trying vainly to peer through Schnabel’s additions to the “informational content"—depths and elevations, best we could figure. We were served a quarter of a glass of bad wine, briefly introduced to a small dog wearing a dress shirt, and handed the catalogue printed to accompany the show. In it, David Moos writes, “Schnabel’s work is rooted in exploration… trying to find the difference between epiphany and commonplace,” something we would have thought by definition to be quite clear, which made us feel a little sorry for Julian Schnabel. Moos, who we left on a window ledge, goes on, we imagine.

Charlie Rose, left.

One art-patron, wearing a pork-pie hat, explained to his Asian girlfriend that the works contained a great deal of “tension,” not noticing as Al Pacino passed by, containing much, much more. In our experience the appearance of Al Pacino just about anywhere causes people to blurt out religiously based profanities, and this affair at the Westwater was no exception. In spite of Schnabel’s art and the continuing presence of Schnabel himself, Harvey Keitel, Stephanie Seymour, her husband and polo player Peter Brant, the Mutt ‘n’ Jeff-ness of Charlie Rose and Dick Cavett, Jeff Koons, and so on, overheard most all evening was people asking each other if they had been lucky enough to see Pacino cut through the room, say nothing, and—invisibly—leave.

As we angled through the chattering throng toward the exit, a young girl, ostensibly an art student, reuniting with her friend at the coat-check, dejectedly related her attempt at engaging Schnabel.

“I just totally struck out with Julian Schnabel,” she said.

So did we, we suppose, and we hope she finds herself, as we have, no worse for it.