twombly and need

Untitled 1961, Cy Twombly, Oil, house paint, and pencil on canvas
8' 4 3/4" by 10' 7/8" (Private Collection)

A week ago, I posted this painting above and didn't know who the artist was... thought it was Eva Hesse because of erroneous internet research. Of course now I know it is by Cy Twombly. My goodness, I like his drawings/paintings. There is a wonderful website dedicated to Cy Twombly's work where one can go through his paintings and sculptures by decades. (I am looking through the galleries as I type this post).

Barthes wrote a lovely essay on Cy Twombly's paintings called "The Wisdom of Art" (I can't say whether this version on the internet is wholly accurate, having recently suffered web deception). I am still in the process of reading the essay. I like reading about art. It gives a language and an importance to that which is visible but may often be unsaid: the process. In an essay like Barthes wrote, Barthes is sort of a detective gathering evidence (he lists the types of marks--scratching, smudging, smearing-- the written inscriptions etc) in order to direct his visuality through the artist's process of making... To see clearly, the read about that process, gives me proof of the vital need to make art...

Barthes writes about materiality in the essay:

"Twombly's art consist in making us see things: not those which he represents (this is another problem), but those which he manipulates: a few pencil strokes, this squared paper, this touch of pink, this brown smudge. This is an art with a secret, which is in general not that of spreading the substance (charcoal, ink, oils) but of letting its trail behind. One might think that in order to express the character of pencil, one has to press it against the paper, to reinforce its appearance, to make it thick, intensely black.

Twombly thinks the opposite: it is in holding check the pressure of matter, it letting is alight almost nonchalantly on the paper so that its grain is a little dispersed, that matter will show its essence and make us certain of its correct name: this is pencil. If we wanted to philosophize a little, we would say that the essence of things is not in their weight but in their lightness; and we would thereby perhaps confirm one of Nietzsche's statements: "What is good is light": and indeed, nothing is less Wagnerian than Twombly."

Twombly writes out lines of poetry (from what I have learned so far by poets such as Rilke and Virgil) in his paintings. Amazing. As far as the actual writing goes: there seems to be an acknowledgment of the inevitability of language and the word, and also at the same time how the word is in fact a drawing, or is truer as a drawing (similar to what Barthes says in his essay). Using actual poetry means introducing spoken history and affect to a form that may otherwise settle into abstraction and materiality... so it stretches a tense line from material to language, each becoming the other by turn.

Untitled 1954

Pan II, 1980.

Leda and the Swan (Part III), 1980

Apollo and the Artist, 1975

celan and heidegger

Paul Celan

Martin Heidegger

Here is an essay--CELAN / HEIDEGGER: TRANSLATION AT THE MOUNTAIN OF DEATH--from 1988 that interprets Paul Celan's poem "Todtnauberg" (1966) which was written after an encounter between Celan and Martin Heidegger at Todtnauberg: they went for a walk after meeting at Heidegger's cottage. Heidegger was a philosopher influenced by phenomenology and, sadly, a supporter of the Nazi National Socialist party. Pierre Joris interprets the poem as Celan--a German Jew--seeking some sort of closure from Heidegger regarding the Nazi movement. Unfortunately, according to Joris, the conversation (of which no transcript was made) gave no such closure to Celan. Joris puts forth the nuanced meaning of each word very thoughtfully and clearly in the essay.

I like Joris's description of the poem. He says it is "a single sentence, divided into eight stanzas, five of which have but two lines, and is essentially composed of parataxically juxtaposed nouns and noun-clauses commenting on those nouns, seperated by commas until a single period brings the poem to a close. One gets the feeling of something cut-up, stretched-out, retracting, fore-shortening itself: nearly not a poem, the sentence feels like the remainder, the residue, of an aborted or impossible narration or relation; gnomic, "quickly scribbled notes, hopes for a poem, a private aide-mémoire understandable only to the one who took them." Lacoue-Labarthe calls it "un poème exténué, pour tout dire, déçu" - "an exhausted, even disappointed poem"."

These intersections or moments between historic figures ties together so much for me. Otherwise their thoughts and views or, more truthfully, just their names float around in my mind without a sense of temporality. Even their photographs help to pin them down. And then I can see the poem more clearly and I can see why it would be a "disappointed poem."


TODTNAUBERG

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
Hütte,

written in the book
- whose name did it record
before mine - ?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,

he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.