In Which We Experience The Subtle Ferocity Of Cy Twombly

photo by Mario Dondero, Rome. 1962

The Rush

by AMANDA MCCLEOD

Cy Twombly was born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Virginia on April 28th, 1928. The nickname Cy was passed along to him by his father, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, who himself was nicknamed after the famous pitcher Cy “Cyclone” Young. Twombly Jr. graduated high school in Lexington in 1946 and over the course of the next four years proceeded to study at the Darlington School in Georgia, at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Washington and Lee University back in Lexington, and finally at the Art Students League of New York where he would meet fellow artist and friend Robert Rauschenberg.

It was during his time in New York that Twombly became widely exposed to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.

Living in New York during the rise of American post war painting allowed Twombly incredible insight into the present art world. Of his experience as a young man amidst the new art capital of the world, Twombly recalls "In New York I lived in galleries ...I hardly ever went to school. I looked at anything and everything." It was here that he would create his earliest calligraphic or scribble paintings, influenced heavily by the paintings of Franz Kline.

Soon after his arrival in the city, Rauschenberg convinced Twombly to follow him to the famous Black Mountain School, where they would spend the summer and winter of 1951. In 1952 the pair would be awarded grant money by The Richmond Museum of Fine Arts, allowing Twombly to travel all across Europe and North Africa, ending the trip in Rome. Only a short distance to the Tyrrhenian Sea, Rome’s bustling city streets were studded with monuments and heavy with history, simultaneously modern and ancient, solemn and celebratory. It was here that Twombly would be exposed to, and inevitably fall in love with, Italy and its rich heritage and culture. In 1957, at the peak of his career as a young American painter and sculptor, he relocated permanently to Rome.

in Rome 1960

Actually, it wasn't all that scholarly, my reason for going to Rome. I liked the life. That came first.

I fantasize often about a young Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly sitting street side at a cafe, having coffee on a warm Roman afternoon. It is easy to see them both there, well tanned and wearing summer shirts, casually discussing the merits of assemblage and found objects in sculpture. Two of America’s greatest painters vacationing in a city known both for being holy and pagan.

An artist friend of mine once told me that Twombly and Rauschenberg, at one point during their initial travels, began to argue over the fact that Twombly was spending all the grant money on artifacts. Twombly, like Van Gogh (who once said he’d rather buy a Japanese print than buy a weeks worth of bread), would forgo food and even financial security for art.

untitled bacchus series VII

It was easy to become enamored with Cy the moment I read he was an American abstract painter who up and left the heart of the American art scene at its peak in exchange for a quiet villa. But this was not the exact moment I fell in love with his unique take on abstract expressionism.

I first witnessed his Quattro Stagione series on a cold February afternoon while visiting MoMA. I didn’t yet live in New York and had only been visiting with a friend, but I managed to make two trips to the museum during my three day visit.

I had spent the previous summer studying art in Florence, surrounded by the culture and language of Italy. At this point in my studies I was insatiable and wanted constantly to see and be surrounded by art. Upon entering the MoMA atrium that day I recalled having only heard of Twombly in passing. His name sounded funny and I couldn’t recall what slide was attached to it during my Post-War American Art lecture the previous semester. This all changed the moment I saw the towering Four Seasons and the word “primavera” scrawled haphazardly in pencil across the canvas. I stood there entranced as the white walls of the MoMA began to fall away and suddenly, without knowing it, felt myself as close to experiencing Stendhal syndrome as I ever have.

photo by robert rauschenberg

The Four Seasons, those are pretty emotionally done paintings. And I have a hard time now because I can get mentally ill. I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days

Because what exactly was I seeing here for the first time in person? The Four Seasons were equally symphonic and chaotic. It was painting but drawing, it was representation but not, it was brutal and delicate, equally calligraphic and gestural. Inverno (Winter) felt dormant and cold, Primavera (Spring) felt painfully temporal with its tiny hyacinth like purple splotches, and L'Estate (Summer) was blinding and dripping, as though Icarus’s wings had melted right upon it. There was the neon yellow of pollen and the deep crimson of dried blood. White paint permeated the canvases like a fog or a veil and reignited in me a barely bridled lust for painting and paint itself.

After that first encounter the more I read about Twombly, the more he became everything I desired from a painter and artist. He was an expatriate who continually subverted his own genre and culture, who did so almost gently and with whimsy, who breathed new life into seemingly archaic themes. A man who would not be confined to one medium or mode, who was informed as much by history as by his own impulses, and who, most alarmingly, was still alive and working 60 years into his career as an artist.

robert rauschenberg's photographs of twombly in Rome

To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a critical moment of sensation or release.

Twombly easily stood apart from his contemporaries, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, because of his general refusal to incorporate contemporary imagery and subject matter into his work. Instead of examining humanity at large through contemporary symbols and icons, Twombly paired the painterly impulse of the Abstract Expressionist movement with themes that are more in line with those of the poets Ovid or Rilke than that of a modern newspaper. This in contrast to Johns and Rauschenberg who would often use actual newspaper in their works, directly referencing the present, incorporating contemporary objects and imagery.

untitled Twombly work

People make too much of the mythological titles. For me they are just a springboard. They're especially alive here in Italy and in Greece. But it’s simply about human beings. Human emotions haven’t changed much.

When I look at Twombly’s work I am struck by his allegiance to both the past and present, to that which is inherent and that which is contemporary. His paintings are the incarnations of fever dreams, wrestling equally with myths and his own perception. His works are the result of raw impulse mediated with such devotion that the result possesses and mesmerizes us. His palette is at once dazzling and of the earth.

We are made to think of mud, sea foam, wine drenched mouths, plums, peonies, and flesh as much as we are made to think of greying marble and roman ruins. Language floats throughout his work as gregorian chants might echo in a cathedral. The phrases haunt, beg repetition, and demand to be swirled around the mouth and ruminated on. His use of language at time evokes equally the first words of a child and words murmured in the heat of passion.

Action must prove from time to time the realization of life. Act is therefore the primary sensation. In painting act is the formation of image, the mechanical action of its evolution. The direct or indirect impulse brought to exasperation in this high act which is invention.

- from an interview in L’Esperienza Moderna

What at first would appear to be childlike in his scrawls and smears will often reveal itself to be phallic, bloody, or relating to bodily fluids. His depiction of Leda and the Swan is not a charming pastel image of a doughy nude caressing a swan, it's the raw aftermath of a struggle. Here is a tumult of feathers, blood, scratch marks, phalluses, hearts, breasts, beaks, scars, and stains.

"Leda and the Swan", Rome 1962Twombly’s dizzying red Bacchanal series is as much blood as it is wine. If you’ve ever read anything about Maenads you’ll understand why these paintings evoke both frenzied fear and drunken ecstasy. These depictions are true to the very base of the mythologies from which they spring forth.

It is through Twombly’s reconsideration of these themes that he urges us to also re-examine their nature, and by extension of our own mythology, the nature of ourselves. Twombly himself has spoken of his works as sort of an experience, the resulting images are what is left behind. The art critic Roberta Smith noted that "his raw mark making could be seen as Surrealist automatism pushed to unprecedented extremes."

I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don't think of colour here and there. All I could think is the rush.

The MoMA acquired a sampling of Twombly’s sculptures. I visited them on the first viewing day and found myself no less enthralled. Of his sculptural work Twombly remarked, "I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for fifty years because no one would look at them, and I really liked having them around." It is clear to me why Twombly didn’t mind having these works around. I found myself hardly aware of my own presence when looking at his masterful assemblages. They are quiet works, not exactly monumental but none the less objects made to drink in and know. They feel ancient, beyond design as we know it today, just as his paintings often feel primordial.

Rauschenberg combine materials photographed by Twombly

Twombly has stated that “white paint is my marble”, and it is clear here that this is effective, because these sculptures appear classicized and almost spiritual. They embody a sort of playfulness in material that gives us a glimpse at Twombly’s sense of humor. A paint stir, a paper cup, or plastic leaves take on the feel of a mausoleum in their stark white incarnations.

Meanwhile brief instances of blue crayon and electric pink paint provide shock and excitement, their pigments suspended somewhere between subtlety and ferocity upon the white surfaces. One can even see the artist’s own thumb print imbued in neon pink, calling to mind a certain lipstick mark that was left on one canvas of Twombly’s triptych Phaedrus by the artist Rindy Sam, who could not keep herself from kissing his work out of adoration.

Q: Do boats have a particular meaning for you?

CT: Yes, boats. I like the idea of scratching and biting into the canvas. Certain things appeal to me more. Also pre-historic things, they do the scratching. But I don’t know why it started.

Q: It’s a very basic kind of mark making.

CT: Infantile.

I cannot bring myself to blame Sam for kissing one of Twombly’s works. How could anyone? Twombly has more often than not made me want to use my hands, to grasp either at clay or at paint or conte crayon, to speak and read in languages both my own and not. As Jerry Saltz put it, his work will make you start thinking between your legs. The very infantile and instinctual impulses that gave birth to his work make me want to tear into blood oranges and blackberries, to dig my hands deep into the mud, and to drink in color as though it were wine.

Twombly continually reminds me of the very pleasure that is to be found in merely existing, in being human, and in having the miraculous ability to control language or line, be it on paper or canvas. It is both painful and impossible to imagine a world without Twombly, but not nearly as much so as imagining a world deprived of his artwork. He is and will always be my favorite artist.

Amanda McCleod is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She wrote about the sculptures of Cy Twombly here.

"Queen of (K)nots)" - Matt Nathanson (mp3)

"Modern Love" - Matt Nathanson (mp3)

"Drop To Hold You" - Matt Nathanson (mp3)

The seventh studio album from Matt Nathanson, Modern Love, was released on June 21.

photo by robert rauschenberg

The Finest Artists of the Period

Elaine de Kooning recalls her time with Mark Rothko

A conversation with Picasso

Alex Carnevale on the life of Fairfield Porter

Hilton Kramer on the legacy of Mary Cassatt

The surrealists and Giorgio de Chirico

Amanda McCleod and the Whitney Biennial

The unfamiliar masterpieces of Bonnard & Vuillard

Molly Lambert takes an art class

Will Hubbard and Franz Kline together at last

Amanda McCleod and the sculpture of Cy Twombly

The studios of the damned

Joshua Bauchner on Anselm Kiefer

Amanda McCleod sails along with JMW Turner

Alex Carnevale on the meaning of the self-portrait

Will Hubbard connects poetry and painting

Wal Mart, Lexington, 2007, Photo by Cy Twombly

In Which A Baby Is More Important Than Any Of Us

No Proper Setting

The letters of the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson are so voluminous that their editor, George F. Butterick, did not live to edit all ten volumes of their exchanges. The letters themselves cover only the years of the 1950s, when Creeley was beginning to write the first poetry that would make him a worldwide name with his collection For Love, and Charles Olson began to teach a generation of artists at Black Mountain. Both were possessed by an idiosyncratic letter-writing style that prefigures modern poetics and speech. They did not meet in person until they had exchanged letters for many years, and although both were married throughout, their intimacy goes beyond the artistic and the emotional to reflect the pairing of two like minds searching for each other in the wilderness.

olson walking with robert duncan

Black Mountain, N.C.

tuesday may whatever it is

May 9th, 1950

my dear robert creeley:

this is going to be a note, only to tell you i have been on the road for ten days, and will write you the moment i am back at my desk

but i want you to know how very glad i am that you saw Morning News, and that goes for y & x, and the new two, too it is fine

it did startle me, you speak of education, & plan to speak up: nothing could be truer, when poets are the only pedagogues

i don’t think you could know that you would catch me, with yr letter, when I was at Alabama College does a speech on verse and showing Cagli drawings And now i am here at this little hotbox of education, to do the same

i shall try to put down something on education for you: USE, it is the use they make of us

above all things resist, to be sick at heart: we are forward and it is such gratification, that you are ready to go with me

love,

olson

talking to fanny howe

Olson must have been stunned to receive Creeley's response, for what other individual in the world could be tuned into exactly that wavelength?

Littleton, N.H.

May 18th, 1950

Dear Olson,

Good to have your letter, and very good of you to have sent the copies down to the people. Hope to be able to make this up to you, somehow, sometime. For the moment, my thanks.

These letters from you: good to have the fact of your concerns, which, as it happens, mine. The distortion that can come in with an over-emphasis of mistaking EP‘s thought, or the Dr’s for that matter: cripples many that wd be of use. This not to protest that I have the word from God, etc: but that I’m capable of recognizing its misuse in the hands of others: which they might take as ‘friend.’ Usual. But sad, as in the case of Eliot and EP.

Particulars: letters have driven me a hell of a ways from that in the past months, but also: back again. The job of making sense for a particular dozen: worse than I might take it, for the magazine, where there wont be the emphasis on ‘individual’ explanations, etc. I.e. some duds cant see their nose, etc. I cd name names, etc. But pointless. The point: that I find you interested and willing to help before you’ve seen 10 yrs of ‘successful’ biz.

I wd make this an offer, subject to what time you have to work with, and subject to what you may think of the 1st issue, wht you can get from these letters, etc: you to judge: that if you want to take an active hand in these matters, beyond what you mean as a contributor, and as such, will count on you for staples, etc.: to take up, often, those matters pertaining to the center, by way of reviews, etc., the dirty work. Leed & I cant do it all. Some doubt now as to whether or not we can put reviews in this 1st attempt, since they are all written by the same violent hand, mine, and the rapid succession of CLIMAX, wd tell on a man. As Leed put it: this isn’t criticism, it’s the expression of a taste! Which, as it happens, was what I meant it to be, not taking the paraphrase, etc. the digesting of a book in public, to be the best thing you can do for it. What I wd take as better: pointing to ONE GOOD REASON why any damn fool might become less of one, by reading it, etc. Anyhow, you will see the difficulty. Reviews, for example, cd be put to good use in this way: beyond getting to books not given general attention: that others don’t treat, etc — they can be used to cover related ground which we cant get to directly in the criticism. Just there, in other words, that anything from good housekeeping to astronomics can be made to bear: granted a head. Anyhow, that’s one thing. A lot besides. Getting material: always a bug. But think it over, and we can get to the particulars when you will. You sd have a better idea than you do have before you go one way or the other, so hang on for the moment.

Robert Creeley

As the two became better acquainted, the one-eyed Creeley looked to Olson as a mentor who could not only read and give feedback on his prose work (the main focus of his efforts at the time) but who could recommend other directions for his prolific appetite for reading. The following letter, which was never sent to Olson and found among RC's papers, examines his struggle with the form.

Littleton, N.H.

August 30th, 1950

Dear O/

Unfair. My wife says of the enclosed: it doesn't make any sense, not that it is wrong (like Ez had sd, also bitterly of you, that) in matters superficial, but that it is wrong at bottom. Against the light. I can thin of damn little that is not against the light, & yet am committed to the belief that at the bottom, the very, there, only: light. It gets beyond, exact, matters of the simple run of coherence as I might, here, tell you a story, a story, in a matter of some 25 words which could satisfy that, completely, wholely, altogether. The end of it. But nothing is the end, in prose, is that, exact. I am after, trying, to pick up that thread, as the only way occurs to me is: myself and the variations possible upon my experience. My wife thinks that everything I write is 'true' or that it tries to force its way thru to that 'quality.'

I am not in any sense a moralist, more than I can be, a transmitter, thru which work: forces, moral or otherwise. I ask only that exactness, that the words keep with the head/as that carries thru, to consciousness, what charge the emotions are capable of. The complex. To that, to only that, should any art commit itself. It is to have no hesitance between what the head is thinking & the hand is putting down. To force that coupling. To NOT avoid. Well, I throw this at you, only as it is something just done, and about which, since it is, I know or think very damn little. I don't care for any one instance more than any other: one instance.

There is no stasis in this business. Nothing to pin down. No: as my wife laments: point. Pride, & a good deal else, makes any such effort a pain / obnoxious and lamentable, to those who try to stomach it, alongside & not in. The process. As love, as any instance, is enough — does it matter one damn whether or not it 'happened' & yet there it is, what she hates there — my logick for having fallen in love with this one, as she is there in the story, and why? she asks. And I ask the same. I don't expect or even want an answer. I am, if she would want an answer, which I don't think she does, or needs, in love with her. In love with, other, possibles. As any living is. But what I wd pin down: wd be the only 'way' of a thing, since I think all else wd be false in the frame given. The act of writing belies the conclusion which it might get to - because it is when I've finished, that it all occurs to me, what might have been done. But I have already done something, whether right or wrong, and what these mean...it's done. As it came, it had its logic, because it came. Not sophistry, but NO: actual, it grew. It was the 'way.' A failure. Up to what framed it — that I tend out, from others, into a language, & a speech, reasons, that I have no right to expect them to know. My own failure. That I haven't a language, or a depth of caring to make me concerned with communication.

I am, like all, perhaps, if sentimentality is a quantity, and not a mood, waiting to come to life. I know, & try, to put only, what seems now & again, to come there, as out of me: living. Which is often a joke. But the attempt. That is my own attempt.

Perhaps this has a logic that I having written it, and she having her own place here, can't get. That would be the main question — what does it come to, beyond what I must think.

Yr lad/

Creeley

The following letter emanating from the south of France prefigures, if only in some small way, Creeley's masterpiece "Anger."

Fontrousse, Aix-en-Provence

January 9, 1952

Dear Charles,

Beating my head on the stories this morning, trying to get something finished of that Musicians, i.e. I had held on to the first page. But nothing doing. It scares me, but I can't see what else. It seems very dry & dead.

Otherwise, I get out a little more, but that is not much pleasure. I'd forgotten how damn dreary the bix of people can get, or how dull, say, the usual conversations. The policies are as much here as they are anywhere. Either one is most light & gay, or most serious, and I can't make either tone with any damn grace. (I wish you might see me, trying to.)

The whole damn frame, call it, is way the hell off. Not that I haven't some damn security in simply thinking of what might happen, any damn time, and anywhere. But to move it, — that I damn well can't make now. The story, above — it should be something to go on. I have just the two people; more than that, I have them in ways that are in my own feel, etc. That is, there they are, just in the room, and sitting, the whole space of it falls in, and what to do, they are thinking, and what more precisely, to say. In any case, there is hardly a music to hear; that side of it, the echo, is very far off — even in actual miles. They hear, if anything, just that echo of it, and both feeling that i would be so great have that way of it, to make those sounds, say, they are, envying, each very separately, the supposed feelings of these others who can play, as my mother used to have it, an instrument.

But more than any of it, — they are simply sitting there, just in the room. The walls are somewhat steep even, there's not much more light than just one high window, which must be only a foot above the actual street level. It is a cave of sorts. The woman is married, but all there is, is things, etc. Table, chairs, a couch in the corner, and beyond, in the next room, he can see the refrigerator, etc. They take it that it wouldn't honestly be any problem. But what are they in love with, because it is, very clearly, not each other. She loves, say, her husband, one supposes, even less, but she is not at all in love with the man who is, most literally, there. Himself, he doesn't quite know; looking at her, I expect he wonders if it isn't a good time, as one had thought of back such a long time, - conquests & all such dreams, etc. But god knows there is some music. She is playing records, and the sounds, familiar, etc., interpose something else, so that she has begun to dance, of herself, etc, and he is put off by the apparent staginess.

The conversation might well begin just there. There is hardly a damn thing to lose, and he might even turn the damn thing off, etc, though I know he won't. He watches, anyhow; he has that way of doing anything, and can sit it out, and feel something is done even by that. But they will be forced to say something: somehow they are there, the logic of it only their knowing one another, and something not at all right in either one. I don't see how they can not talk, but what they might be saying, or will — what I haven't yet been able to find my way into.

So, I sit. The sun just begins to come through here, — about 10:30, I think it must be now, etc. Last night I got some shelves up, and have, at least, things where I can get to them. Yr picture, likewise, now up. no frame, sadly, no proper damn setting - phew. But can see it now simply, and I like it.

I got a check from ND yesterday: $26.68. Five damn stories. It say,s in the letter with it - $800 is what they have for total sum coming to contributors on this first issue of 2000 copies. And who the hell can think they'll issue more, etc. It bugs me, not that, say, the loot that is needed, but how christly little it all is, etc. I see, too, he pays 8%. I wonder why he damn well bothers.

Have you seen the damn book? Will he damn well give you something for that intro? Let me hear. Will get you a copy myself, if they damn well don't. Nothing in here yet; I don't figure it will be any damn pleasure, at that. Damn.

Well, fuck it. Let me put this by for ab it, and see whether there's one from you in the noon mail. Will try to get this off this afternoon. Can't damn well sit here, thinking of the damn story & how, how damn precisely, I can't do a damn thing with it. Ok.

All our dearest love to you all,

Bob

In this abridged letter, Olson describes a college scene where a promising young student almost drowns. The incident appears to have affected him deeply.

Black Mountain, N.C.

January 29th, 1952

robt:

just to sit here, & put you on — am worn, & chiefly from a business last night at 1 am which threw me:

i came into it as I had just opened the water cock of the radiator of the car, the night promised to be that cold, & snow had been falling for a couple of hours. to get my hand down to the cock, to see it, i had just borrowed a flashlight from the care of one Rauschenberg, by way of his friend Cy Twombly (the two of them are constantly together, and I had found Cy in the dining hall playing a little organ while Nick played a guitar, Oppenheimer the drum, & Solomon the piano. Cy's getting was, too bad you weren't here sooner, we were really beating it out, now, it's leveling off. And he told me where the flash was.

class picture at Black Mountain

two minutes more & i'd have put the flash back, and gone into the house (Con was up, feeding Kate, and I was anxious to be in, & talking with her, the whole day had been consumed with visitors, then two faculty meetings, & a four hour go of the class in the evening) but as i was turning away, there was a cry from the direction of the dining hall, and off toward the end of it where the path to the lake goes between the dining hall and the music cubicle, "Olson, the flash, hurry"

i started off slow, not catching the voice, but some stir there quickened, and i raced about the time i went under the pine tree in front of the stone house, and it was on me in that way that all such things happen — even before i passed the flash to Nick, an saw the beam pick up a head out in the lake, i had the picture: Twombly was twenty feet out, up to his hips, and saying, with as much tension as his southern voice can, that he couldn't go any further, that he couldn't catch his breath. And it was Rauschenberg farther out, out towards the middle, making these moans, & catchings of the voice — and obviously, at least mixed up, & probably stuck, in a trance, not the mud so much, though the mud came into my mind, and I already dreaded the thought of going in to that damned cold water, and the mud, and seemed afterward to have resolved to dive in, wrapping my topcoat around me, and going fast, to get the boy, damned reluctantly.

black mountain college, summer sessionThis excerpt from a longer letter predates an Olson essay. Olson's paranoia was inspired by a visit from the FBI doing a background check on him for a fellowship.

Black Mountain, N.C.

February 1, 1952

I have not lived in a fascist State. I was not born to be a citizen. I have taken the principles of these States as usable facts. I therefore shall behave so, admitting this existing & power, admitting — what I cannot fail to admit is the DIALECTICAL (that which ultimately is the cause of the FBI coming to this point, that my life (my fate) is herewith interfered with — even if nothing happens, it has been interfered with: I have had to feel that shadow. What a shadow, and I, as an American UNPREPARED. That is, as citizen, NOT as MYSELF.

(Yet these absent wings must be felt, to experience, citizenry: no tax-collector, or draft board, has this force; not even the police, — tho they are closer: this must be the old European thing anew, the SECRET police)

It has been a tremendous thing, this visit, that, I was called (on) (for) I WAS CALLED.

I have felt too long that component, that evil. CAUSATION, to duck out now, to take any of the postures: a man cannot escape the MORAL as the only excusable use of the INSTANT — no personal pose can manage the present, no theoretical one, no "movement": back to the farm, or whatever

This hugely argues, for me, the import of CONJECTURE. (You will have noted, how, again, in that Twombly piece, it came out.)

I still take it back to those two decades, 1830-1850. It was in those years that the MALE principle did itself in. From the studies of those two decades came those two LIES:

I that nature is a fate: EVOLUTION (what fooled em was, that, because it did not seem "fixed" fated was not a fate concept: witness the result, existentialism, the false management of despair, the inability to cross over, to get to the other side of, despair: the filthy attempt to fix despair on us, instead of, action, from the other wise

II that the state is a fate equal to nature: MARX is only the image of all that has come since, capitalism, communism, fascism and all the naive and saintly oppositions to all three — the thin boys, the palefaces, the untragic ones

Still it goes: MELVILLE (shaped in those same years, DIFFERENTLY)

RIMBAUD (the first man confronted with the results, and cutting through, but not knowing (it was that early any other action than running guns for Menelik: I had to pass thru this stage myself, and did, ten years ago,  those years, exactly, it had to be still known, done, then. Now (since the Spanish War, 1938) not necessary.

LAWRENCE, THE MAN WHO SAW: what he saw (and he's the only one who saw, up to the men who were born after 1910) was, that the MIND is a TEMPTATION which has to be defeated

and my own sense is that CONJECTURE is the defeat of DIALECTIC, is the ploughing back of that thing, the male mind, to the INSTANT (let me quickly toss in this premise, that there is a difference of the female mind ((these are not at all necessarily accompanied by corresponding sexual parts!)) (((by god, just checked Hegel's dates, and find he dies just where i date the birth of the 20th century: 1831 (from 1770. For it was he who put the name on the mal-usage which made them modern world, that thing raised on those TWO LIES: he gave these dialectical triumphs their language

(I have this horror, — oh to hell with it, only, THIS:

HEGEL TO LAWRENCE

and CONJECTURE takes all that energy (i dub it the MALE energy, and the proper one to the MALE act — without it men are dangerous - without the understanding that they are metaphysically creative, and thus organic, as the female is physically

(((don't scream, Ann:

this is exactly the opposite of an exclusion, simply, that it also restores that respect

takes all that energy and redisposes it ANTI-HISTORY, says, the INSTANT, (which a woman can know without need of any other component) is METAPHYSICAL:

a dogma: that a MALE can act MORALLY only as he enters INSTANT, and that his only gate to the experience is the metaphysical gate

what troubles me, is, that I find it necessary to be myself dialectical in order to expose the condition of same!

OK. Anyhow, as I say, I had to be without fear, those two hours, when exactly the two wings making the shadow were not at all the present but were, each wing, one the past (whom i knew 10 years ago) and the future (where I'd go, say next year — not to worry at all about: for the rest of my life, eh?).

and that is the WRONG — that anything should take away (a) my fate and (b) my engagement in life as a fate separate from myself but only useful to me the degree that its workings are left open by men:

it is this sort of OPENNESS that i say that men can only restore as they deny dialectic as a means adequate to keep nature & society so open — or open to the degree that they can never be, both of them being by their difference different from ourselves

what racks modern man is, that, due to those decades, both nature & society are fatal propositions, under whose spell he is downtrodden

and the only act worth a man's life today is to confront that, to give his fellow men freedom from these rigidities:

all present fear & trembling is NOT momentous, is not MORAL, simply, that it is neither (a) any one's in his or her self — his or her fate; or (b) is "life's," that is, the thing you, RC, have so carefully extricated from (a), without in any way disturbing the FIRST FACT, that they are inextricable

What has shocked me is, to have the MONSTER, to have the combination of these two lies, COME TO MY DOOR!

It had to come. And it did.

The thing is, that to have it happen, was, a sort of joy!

I have no fear left, of that sort: I am able now to see how otherwise I am defeated! Love to you both,

Charles

PS: the error of Kafka (which I always felt) I can now prove: he was "feminine" in his disposing of himself (his father took the balls out of him) — it is this side gives the poetic to his universe; and he was intellectually dialectical (the monster took the conjecture out of his mind, the male of his intellect). And so, there shld be no surprise, that i has been existentialists, socialists, homosexual and jews who had found him of use — His inaccuracy was a subtle one.

What also occurs to me, from this get go, is, how logical that we should live in a world in which — ultimately — it is a BABY who is the important human figure: for when both nature and the State have been allowed to loom as of such importance that man seems only important (nature-wise) because he is an instrument of the species, and he is only important state-wise as he is for or against it in war, then surely, it is logical that a baby is more important than any of us.

The following missive from Creeley's young son David was enclosed with a June 1952 letter. The boy begins by signing his name.

david creeley

olson pggy (this is verbatim...) mama is piggy david creeley. we live outdoors and just in the street and dada wrote that letter on the chimney. we have electricity and a sink and a tree for me to climb on. we live in a little village, so little-so little house this big. we got the garden too except it's all the time full of grass except the things that are growing in it aren't ours —. Mr. Marti who own the things in the garden. Corn and beans are ours. We don't have almost anything - piles of trees. WE went to a fete and it was a nice fete with lots of people dancing, piles of people watching the fete and & nice pretty girls dancing with pretty clothes. We don't have any windows or anything except we live on one porch. There's a tree all dead, doesn't have any leaves on it. We have a basin. We go swimming in it.

Four (i.e. he's four, etc) Thomas one.

f uhttttedd

dda

DAVID

You can read the autobiography of Robert Creeley here. You can read Charles Olson's "First Fact" here.

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Jerry Heiserman, Dan McCloud, Allen Ginsberg, Bobbie Louise Hawkins Creeley, Warren Tallman, Robert Creeley above Charles Olson.

In Which We Explore The Forms of Cy Twombly

Eight Sculptures

by AMANDA MCCLEOD

Cy Twombly's Eight Sculptures invites viewers into a network of confusion. Upon entering the Gagosian gallery, the viewer finds themselves displaced in a room filled with eight very unique and somewhat ominous sculptures. To pass around and through these works collectively is quite an experience, somber and almost meditative. However, just as one might begin to feel at ease, the inherent mystery of their forms impedes upon tranquility.

With white gesso concealing their origins and mass, these works seem informed by another time, if not another world. The viewer is disoriented, unaware of the origins of the forms, their supposed contemporary nature, and the dual nature informed by Twombly’s process of replicating previous works.

The bronze casts of assemblage sculptures created by Twombly in the past decade appear at first to be a collection of old relics. They look as if they have spent some time at the bottom of the ocean floor, much like recovered Greek sculptures pulled from the sea. Upon inspection recognizable forms reveal themselves, wood grain, a bit of twine, a paddle, or the edge of a piece of cardboard. The viewer is hard pressed to discern whether the label is correct, "are these really solid bronze?", as there is an unmistakeable lightness that appears prevalent all throughout Twombly’s career. In fact, upon encountering these works it might baffle unknowing patrons to find that Twombly is in fact a renowned painter.

These sculptures do not appear to have come out of the same vision that Twombly’s paintings do. The sculptures are solid and erect as opposed to the familiar soft and scrawly marks of Twombly’s canvases. Even when these marks are bold, there is not a usual feeling of linear form. Many artists have worked as both painters and sculptures, a few examples being; Michelangelo, Degas, Matisse, Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois and Tracy Emin. Most successfully, beyond Twombly, one would certainly consider Twombly’s peer and friend Robert Rauschenberg. Twombly’s sculptural works seem to investigate age, identity, history, and materiality in a way his paintings do not. "I really enjoy doing sculpture," Twombly expresses, "maybe it’s because of the construction thing."

Twombly, who had been sculpting seriously for as long as he had been painting seriously, first began making bronze casts of his earlier work in 1979. Twombly explains his interest in bronze by saying that "bronze unifies the thing. It abstracts the forms from the material. People want to know about what the material constituents are; it helps them to identify the work with something. But I want each sculpture to be seen as a whole, as a sculpture." Twombly began making his very first works in sculpture in 1946  and worked in the format until 1959. The artist then took a hiatus from sculpture in 1959, but began working again in 1976, and since has consistently produced three dimensional works.

Twombly’s sculpture has always involved the use of found objects, usually consisting of items which he may have procured from his own studio or garden. Twombly's friend David Sylvester defined the elements of his sculptures as such: "The works are usually made up of two antithetical elements: found objects which are complete forms; and clay and plaster objects which have not yet started to take form."

These found objects may at times be organic in origin, such as a branch or leaves, or at other times of industrial sources, such as crates or tools. The plaster and clay elements serve as unifiers, elements which solidify Twombly’s visions into a unique and oftentimes monumental whole. Through these common place materials and structuring motifs something new and whole is born, a work which incorporates origin, contemplates history, and flirts with antiquity. In paintings as recent as 2007 and as early as the mid 1950s Twombly has utilized collage in a minor way, sometimes incorporating leaves or other bits of cut out canvas.

Frank O’Hara, who had seen one of the first showings of Twombly’s sculptural work in 1955 described the early works as “Witty and Funeral." Twombly has inspired a great deal of authors and poets, even from the early stages of his artistic career, and he has been referred to as the more poetic of abstract expressionist artists. He often seeks literary phrases for his paintings and sculptures such as in the case of Poems to the Sea 1959, Untitled (“In Memory of Alvaro de Campos”) 2002, and Untitled (“To Sappho”) 1976, which utilizes a verse written by the ancient poet herself. Twombly scrawls it across a canvas that alludes to Olympian pleasures.

Kate Nesin, who authored the official text for the Eight Sculptures show catalogue, reveals that Twombly is “commonly described in irreconcilable pairs. Epic and intimate, transgressive and classical, aggressive and refined, literal and metaphorical." The dual nature of these bronze works does in fact require the viewer to acknowledge a critical conflict inherent in the bronze medium. Duality is not lost on Twombly himself either, who appears almost as two separate artists, one a incredibly poetic painter, and the other a sculptor born of another time. Nesin is quick to point out, however, that “these oppositions operate not in order to provide tension but in order to suspend it, without likewise suspending either term."

The sculptures, which retain drips and smears, appear as both fixed and unfixed. The notion of fixed and unfixed seems to evoke the very nature of existence, in which the present is impossibly static but ever informed by history. Twombly seems constantly aware of these conflicting elements, and it is his reconciliation through sculpture that makes these works so undeniably appealing.

robert rauschenbergThe earliest known decorative bronzes are said to be from ancient burial sites in Irans’s Zagros Mountains. Twombly would be well aware of this, as he has a tremendous love for sculpture and ancient artifacts. Upon his initial trip to Rome with Robert Rauschenberg, after studying together at Black Mountain in 1951, Twombly became enthralled with the sculpture artifacts he encountered in Italy. That Twombly decided to make copies in bronze should not come as a surprise, as this practice was utilized both by the Greeks and Romans, both cultures that Twombly reveres greatly. That Twombly began casting bronze in the same year of his retrospective is also a curious matter. Casting in bronze might be a way of making permanent works which previously appeared to be in flux in their assembled nature. Twombly, who is 82 years old at present, possibly began casting in bronze to explore the relationship between the permanent and impermanent, the soul and the physical self, in relationship to his own place towards the end of a long and brilliant career. 

Bronze cannot avoid the inherent connotations of being a material which takes the form of other materials. Untitled is a casting of a sculpture from 2004. The original sculpture itself involved casts done in plaster of boxes, to create a new form. Thus the bronze incarnation appears as a cast of a cast. The paddles used in the original are read as wood grain in their bronze incarnation, only revealing themselves to be metal upon intense inspection. To compare the casting to the original is an extraordinary experience, as one most discern where likenesses and differences confront one another and begin to fade away. The assembled work appears stark, almost harsh, in comparison to its gesso coated bronze realization. The original work began as something which utilized the cast mode, and was already coated in paint and bound together. The bronze casting serves to further unify the work through abstraction, which then appears reincarnated in a placid and ethereal copper tone. To coat this exact casting in paint and gesso further conceals it from its original form, and converts the cast into an almost created artifact of its original.   

Upon further investigating the sculptures, Untitled 2009 appears as a primordial stack of rocks. This sculpture barely suggests its bronze nature, and instead leaves the viewer curious how these forms was created. In fact the rock-like shapes began as globs of plaster which Twombly had then cast into sand. This revealed a very earthly and natural form, one which, in the bronze casting performs a sort of trompe l’oeil. It is astounding to consider the process of casting a form, assembling it, and casting it yet again. The materials are removed once and then once again, and yet the bronze does not deny the viewer any detail of the original work from which it was copied. Another work, Untitled 2009, was cast from a sculpture assembled in 2002. The original work is starkly white and towering, a form which almost recalls the shape a wedding cake. The original work appears ghostly, whereas the bronze interpretation feels as though it was previously buried deep in the earth. Edward Albee, a biographer of Twombly, explains that "Twombly’s sculpture looks as though it has always existed and is, at the same time, totally new."

This play between old and new, contemporary and ancient concepts, is important to note. The forms which populate Twombly’s sculpture are remarkably architectural, evoking old Egyptian and Mesopotamian design. These cultures surely would have informed Twombly’s understanding of monument, icon, linear form, and structure. Untitled 2009 evokes an ancient staircase or column form, solemn and reaching towards infinity or heaven. 

Twombly, heavily influenced by his time in Greece and Italy, has always involved the mythological in his work. He has recently completed a series of paintings devoted to topic of Bacchus, and in the past touched upon mythologies of Leda and the Swan, Nike, Apollo, Sappho, and Pan. "People make too much of the mythological titles," Twombly claims that "for me they are just a springboard. They're especially alive here in Italy and in Greece. But it’s simply about human beings. Human emotions haven’t changed much."

In these new works Twombly seems to claim that the work is about the material itself, and this discourages any notion of duplicates or copies which would imply the works themselves to be void of significance. Nesin explains, “Twombly would seem to encourage the attention to the materiality of these most recent bronze surfaces - to what is their own and what is taken or adheres from elsewhere - for he has long finished his sculptures, whether by shrouding his assemblages in white gesso or by casting some of those assemblages in bronze, as a way of unfinishing them, a way not of fixing, but of opening their surfaces (and the things of literal or imagined beneath those surfaces)...to take materiality as meaning is to allow for the careful differentiation of “as” from “is”.”

The solid nature of these new sculptures should be considered equally as with the materials the forms were originated in. These sculptures suggest that Twombly is on an exploratory path, something incredible to consider when you take into account the age and tremendously lengthy career. Through the recasting of old works, Twombly appears to be investigating forms he once spent time perfecting, as if to either celebrate their meaning personally or to reconsider them again in a new light.

Consider closely the unifying aspect of the bronze casting, which negates the original found object and assembled nature of the original eight sculptural works Twombly chose to cast. There is an inherent conflict present in the process of irrevocably unifying those works which, in their first incarnations, were crudely assembled in a manner which informed the viewer easily of the materials used. To disguise them further in gesso after the casting again appears to only offer confusion. As Nesin puts it, "Bronze's truth may lie in its potential for truth to other materials," explaining that perhaps this casting is not so problematic as much as a mode of reaching further into abstraction. This brings us back to the beginning of the identity conflict present in these works, for as they seem to be concealed and obscured, they do not for a moment deny their origins.

This creates an incredibly unique and circular dialogue between the sculptures, their inherent materiality, and their identities as works. They are as much copies as they are separate entities entirely. To confront the bronze sculptures in person is not to feel the same lightness and blinding white that was inherent to the original sculptures, and yet these bronze works are indebted to those forms. Both the original sculptures and the bronze retain a sense of illumination, as David Sylvester commented on Twombly’s sculptural prowess exclaiming that his “sculpture breathes light.”

These newer works appear then as higher tributes, as ethereal reincarnations which were realized in pursuit of abstraction through further reducing the sculptures into a whole form. Simon Schama asserts that "what Twombly draws from archaic mythology is its poetic emphasis on the consolations of metamorphosis," and this seems undeniable in light of his investigation of form through the casting process.

One should note that this sort of intense self-investigation into one's own repertoire of work would be impossible in painting. Though Twombly is know to have reinterpreted various themes throughout his career, each painting remains a unique moment in the artists working on flat surface in the vein of mark making.  Eight Sculptures present us with a challenge, perhaps one that brings Twombly himself some valuable lessons. To be an artist is to be in the supreme position of creation, and so the self exploratory practice of recasting one's own creation only to view it as a completely solid and weighted form must be enlightening. For the viewer it is an opportunity to confront the dual nature that always persists in Twombly's work. The contemporary alongside the ancient, the childlike paired with the informed, the coexistence between the solid and the fluid, impulsive and harmonious, the weighted and the weightless, the ephemeral and the infinite.  

Amanda McCleod is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here.

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