Recently I’ve moved to Houston, which, in case you aren’t aware, is a city with a serious commitment to the arts. Let’s take the serious firepower of the Inprint reading series: Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and others. Of course, it is also the city of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and its literary journal Gulf Coast. In addition, there’s the new Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, recently endowed with the project of creating opportunities for interdisciplinary arts collaboration, such as the upcoming project Tanks Under Trees to be created by poet Anne Waldman and choreographer Douglas Dunn. But I digress. Cy Twombly is my real subject.
Cy Twombly may conjure for some of you another set of references to baseball. Who knew this slugger and pitcher would have such a homerun of an artist for a son? Cy (the younger) Twombly immersed himself in the arts at Black Mountain College where he not only met the likes of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage but where he might have encoutnered Olsen, Williams, and a host of important poets. (Speaking of poets, poet and curator Frank O’Hara loved Twombly).
I had occasion this weekend to visit the Cy Twombly Gallery, which is part of the Menil Collection here in Houston, both housed in extraordinary buildings designed by Renzo Piano. (Check out the cantlilevered Menil.) I can’t say I knew Twombly’s works very well at all–some of the odd sculptures, perhaps. The museum, which a poet friend of mine described as the building most perfectly designed for the works it houses, draws one in entirely. The works–some drawings, some paintings–are wholly unfamiliar and dazzlingly immediate: walls of chalkboard mimicking canvases (complete with scrawl), ponds at once eerily over-romanticized and cagily ironic (as in The Wilder Shores of Love), primal markings elusive, childlike, and somehow compelling.
Twombly didn’t work in text, as did artists like Jenny Holzer or Barbara Krueger. Rather, Twombly absorbs and digests aspects of the literary tradition, from Archilochus to Spenser to Rilke. Imagine that: poets don’t really read Spenser anymore. The references range from scrawled names to an odd but oddly moving portrait (if we can call it that) of Catullus. Twombly incorporates fragments from Rilke into his striking Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (the intelligence of the title alone is admirable).
All of this admiration is a way of saying that so many of the great artists, whatever their medium of choice, worked in synaesthetically charged modes of what we now call interdisciplinarity. In the history of poetics, poetry and painting (to take only two forms) were defined frequently either as mutually constitutive or as opposing forces, which leaves them capable of enhancing, deflecting, frustrating, and inviting the often seemingly counter impulses of verbal and visual expression. In an age of the increasing isolation of the arts from one another, we should all take a page from Cy Twombly and scribble with luxurious and intelligent abandon.