Cy was here; Cy's up - Cy Twombly

ArtForum, Sept, 1994 by Rosalind Krauss

THIS MONTH THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, OPENS THE SEASON WITH "CY TWOMBLY: A RETROSPECTIVE." AS THE PAINTINGS GO UP, TWO WRITERS SIZE UP THE ARTIST'S CONTRIBUTION.

Who's Right? So who's right, do you think? Roland Barthes, or all the others who've written about Cy Twombly--all those for whom the Latin is serious, to be taken at face value, consumed as erudition, as classical humanism somehow magically surviving amidst the barbarism of the late 20th century, a talismanic flower sprouting from a decaying Roman wall? Here that view is in its most sick-making, obsequious form, written by Twombly's assiduous art-historical amanuensis, the Heiner Bastian who is compiling the catalogue raisonne of the paintings, the drawings, the sculptures, the prints. Bastian asks,

Who speaks through Venus and Mars, Amor and Psyche, Leda and the Swan, Achilles and Patroklos, through Achilles' grief and vengeance, through Eros' punished desires, through Orion's blind fate, through Diana, Flora, Theseus, Galatea's triumph, through Keats' Adonais, through Sesostris' sun journey, through Aurelius Commodus' madness, through Catullus, through Caesar's Ides of March: mirrors of masks as in Twombly's identification of Apollo and Mars with the Apollonian and Dionysian principle, as indelible horizon. In The Veil of Orpheu the song of all that is changed, magic moment like the evening over Arcadia. Veil over the song awakening to tears the shades of the dead. Veil, time line and changing context in everything that can be captured as poetry in painting.(1)

For Barthes, it's clear that if the answer to that question is that it's Cy Twombly who speaks, it's just as clear that he can't be speaking straight. Barthes insists that Twombly's graphisms, more those of the schoolboy than of the erudite, only allude to writing, before going off somewhere else. "When TW writes," Barthes says, having decided to refer to Twombly via his own invented cipher for the artist's name, "and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also 'operates' a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, th gesture of a dandy. "(2)

Pictorial Nominalism. And what does the name "call up"? For all the other commentators the name signals analogy, the likeness of the thing thought to be found on the surface of the painting. It functions, that is, as the title of th traditional painting: it says, "Here is . . ." as in, Here is the rape of the Sabines, the flight into Egypt, Judith beheading Holophernes. They believe that if it is written Sunset (as on School of Fontainebleau, 1960), then "Here is a light-filled landscape," and they rush to fill in--in their imaginations, but also on the canvas onto which they project them--the places where they know Twombly has stayed: the Lake of Bolsena (although they always say the Lago di Bolsena, since that sounds so much sunnier, so much more Italian), the island o Ischia, the hills of Rome. They fill in whole narratives, as in the going mad o Aurelius Commodus, or the transformation of Narcissus. Representation, they think, is everywhere.

Barthes is clear that Twombly's art does not work by analogy. The name is pronounced, in fact, despite the fact that there is no vista, no Virgil, no Led and the Swan to be found except as scrawled words. "In Twombly's titles, we mus not look for any induction of analogy," he says. "If the canvas is called The Italians, do not look for the Italians anywhere except, precisely, in their name."(3)

Further, Barthes knows that if the inscription, the "pictorial nominalism," doe not operate the terms of analogy (mimesis, representation, likeness), it has another type of function, one he locates along the axis of the performative.(4) The performative is found in its purest form in those of Twombly's paintings that function as dedications: To Valery, To Tatlin. The performative is a modality of language where meaning is identified with the very performance of the statement--as in "I arrest you," "I pronounce you man and wife," "I promise," "I swear," "I toast." It is thus a linguistic operation in which reference is suspended in favor of action: not meaning something, but doing something. It is the nexus through which representation is transmuted into forc (the very one Michel Foucault invoked when he moved in 1968 to associate knowledge and power, arguing that sequestered within every seemingly neutral historical narrative was the discursive axis of the performative's relations of authority. Hence his decision to mark the field of power by calling it discursive, and its scholarly accounts, discourses). Even when Twombly is not actually "dedicating" a work, when he is instead only idly doodling a name on his canvas--Leda, Mars, Bolsena--he is operating within the field of the performative: I mark you, I name you, I call you "painting." This is the big difference, the difference amounting to an absolute rupture of discursive intent, between the notion of the performative and that of analogy.