The Intimate Language of Cy Twombly's Artistic Mind

I'll read that again One must desire the ultimate essence , even if it is contaminated . So there aren't a lot of quotes by Sy , Not a lot to choose from when it comes to things that he wrote or said , because there's just not a lot out there , right , that's on record man a few words .

So we're going to start with these and then talk about other things from the book , from the author , and kind of go from there . But the thing that I like about this , ty , is there's just a lot there right , and much like his work , it's very open to interpretation for the viewer .

But the part that really sticks out to me initially is just that whole idea of essence , and it's a word that you know when you hear it and when it appears in context it makes sense .

But I wanted to kind of go a little bit deeper on that and just start with a definition , a working definition of that word this is Oxford's , which is the one that I like the best , which I think applies most to this conversation which is essence is the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something , especially something abstract that determines its character .

And then you think it's funny that the word abstract appears in the broad you know English definition of the word as well . But I love that whole idea of just , you know , intrinsic nature of something , which kind of speaks , of course , to Tuambley's work you know as well .

But yeah anyway , your thoughts on the quote and maybe , if you wanted to provide some context for who I think is one of your , your main influences in that right .

And he had a scholarship in 1950 and 1951 to the Art Students League of New York , where this is kind of his early formation . So imagine meeting Robert Roschenberg at that time in your young life , who was sharing a studio at the time with Jasper Johns .

So imagine the magic of hey , I just got a scholarship to this school and here I am in the studio with Jasper Johns and Robert Roschenberg . So he and Roschenberg are very close . And Roschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina .

That if anybody is familiar with the Abstract Expressionist movement , black Mountain College the professors to the students that studied there had a massive impact on that . And while he was there he studied with Franz Klein and Robert Motherwell and Ben Sean and became friends with John Cage and all who had heavy influence on each other's work .

And then he ended up moving to Rome in 1957 , where he lived out the majority of the rest of his life in Rome and Italy and he's a heavy influence of younger artists at that time Anselm Kiefer's , francisco Clemente's , julian Schnobel's and even a major influence of John Michelle Basquiat and you've seen his work in films .

You've seen it a lot more in the last 20 years than you probably have in history as he started to make a huge impact on contemporary artists Generally really large scale pieces that I just love about him . They're freely scribbled graffiti-like words , mostly off-white in tans and grays and things , and he uses a lot of poets within his work .

There's a lot of romantic symbolism within his art and his scribbles and his marks . You'll hear the term mark making in the art world a lot . He's got a heavy influence on those that are mark makers .

One of my greatest influences is I go down to the Menel Collection in Houston where the Sy Tuombli Museum is on a regular basis and sit in front of his work , and at most large museums in the world you will find a Sy Tuombli piece , and so you know this quote today , nathan , so simple , as I is somebody who did not leave a lot of public persona behind for

art historians and people to truly create and tell his story beyond his work . He's a very quiet , introverted , private person . He wasn't somebody that would be out in the world constantly speaking and lecturing and doing videos and doing documentary films and these things . It just wasn't his thing at all .

And so you really have to decipher who this person is by looking at the work almost period . And I think Ravkin or Jonathan Rivkin did the best he could do to draw these things out within the story , chalk through secondhand information , archives , letters , all these types of things , to kind of draw together his opinion of how the artist created .

And so this quote just so fits twombly One must desire the ultimate essence , even if it is contaminated , and there's two kind of competing things in there as well Desire and essence , as well as just the word contaminated , because most people don't desire or find an essence in things that are contaminated .

There's a lot of depth and a lot of a lot of things to kind of unpack that desire , words pretty important to . I'm curious , what do you , what do you take from that ? Right , like it's , there's a , there's an element of pursuit , there's an element of , you know , longing .

When I think about , obviously , the , you know the word desire , but I'm curious , what do you take from that ? And how do you think , by extension , it applies to you know , his work ?

You know , you look at the Spanish and formalists , you look at the artists like Alberto Burry , who just have like cloth and dirt and things that most people would throw away , Things that most people would not collect or think were fine art , right or archival , and some key for is using dirt and earth and things that for the majority of the Academy , let's say ,

or the academic art world , right , those things aren't archival , they're not things that are going to last forever . You shouldn't use that in art , and we're talking more past Academy than current Academy mindset

. And so for me this quote really means a lot , because I have a lot of those things in my work as well , and so I find more essence and I desire more work that has those elements in them than work that is just really clean and shiny and fancy , and that's a personal preference for me .

And why do those things speak to me so heavily , I don't know , but they do right , and that's part of our own personal essence as an artist , certain things speak to us and call out to us in ways that are different than others , and why we're made up that way , I have no idea , but for me , I mean , man , when I'm in a museum and I've got an Anselm key

for a piece in front of me or an Antoni tapas piece in front of me , and then I have other work around , I'm drawn to those pieces and I can't leave them . And yet with other work I can just walk right by it sometimes .

I'm sure it's a lot , but yeah , I mean there's something about that , to your point , that anything that invites investigation and really considering why is this here , what does it represent ?

I mean there's something about finding beauty in everything , or taking something that would otherwise be considered contaminated and reframing it in a way that causes a viewer to reconsider its essence , right , or its origin .

To begin with , I think about there's a lot of descriptions of Tom Lee's work that compare it to things like scrawlings on a bathroom stall , or I mean he even worked on on rule paper but doodles in class , right , the things that would otherwise be discarded .

And there's something changes contextually when you see that at scale , like you're talking about , and the way that he found that essence and communicated it with his work . Yeah , there's another part of the . So this is the author speaking here , but some of the passage that follows really captured my interest as well .

So this is just a couple sentences and this is on page 27 , if anyone wants to see the precise reference of this book that we're reading from . But the author writes what's more contaminated than what has fallen to the floor . Cast aside and half consumed , the discarded is picked up and turned into art in the mosaic , as in Tom Lee's work .

Narrative in the mosaic of the unswept floor is implied by what's left over .

The word contaminator I have a few definitions here Having been made impure by exposure , addition to something that pollutes . Contamination as the precedence of an impurity or some other undesirable element that spoils , corrupts , makes unfit or inferior to the material .

And to me there's nothing I love better than making something work that shouldn't , making something fit within a work of art that shouldn't . And I think that's where the critics early on really hammered Tom Lee , you're not doing anything , you're not doing enough . What are these marks ? You're covering everything up that you're putting on .

You're hiding the things that should be beautiful and you're now making them ugly . These are the early critics of Tom Lee's work and these are the critics that don't like Tom Lee today , even that are saying those things .

So you look at what Rivkin said , like what's more contaminated than what falls on the floor and cast aside and discard it , right , and this narrative that Tom Lee's creating with this mosaic of things , right , the leftovers of things .

There's beauty in that , when that's really him finding this essence in things that maybe are forgotten , things that are not part of conversation anymore , uncovering things , and I love he goes on a little further there and he says Rivkin , when I look at the unsweep floor , this is what I see .

I see the remains of the meal that is normally hidden away or moved out of sight . Here is the highlighted , shadowed , made into something wondrous and strange .

And so he's talking about how Twombly his pieces are like that unswept floor in this gathered up of ideas and moments throughout history and mythology and poetry and these things , and yet he's hiding them , highlighting them , shadowing them and then bringing it all out to create this essence and this full piece .

But just that idea of this is a little bit further on . But reading from the book again , to think of the mosaic as part of these fugitive traces , is to find a whole world of correspondences to Twombly's art . His paintings , one writer observes , claim the rooms they inhabit . I'm going to pick up where I left off there , but that in of itself , I think , is .

I mean , that's a pretty lofty goal . But I mean , who doesn't want , as an artist , to create work that claim the room right that inhabits ? And I think it's fair to say that . You know , love it or hate , you know his work . It definitely does that . I've only had a chance to see his work in person once and again .

It's personal preference , it's personal bias as far as what one is drawn to , but that was absolutely the first piece that I went to and , if memory serves me correctly , that was in the same room in the Art Institute of Chicago , that there's a de Kooning piece right on the opposite wall and , I believe , a couple of Rothkos .

You know further on in the space and I spent plenty of time with those as well . But the first one that I'm going to is just , there's something almost magnetic about just the exploration right of trying to , like you know , chase down those fugitive traces . You know , of what's there and really where it might lead , but continuing from there .

So again , his paintings , as one writer observes , claim the rooms they inhabit . So to the mosaic . More striking than these connections is the way in which Twombly gathers debris into his work the debris of history , the debris of quoted poems , the debris of the body , the debris of the mind .

When I look at the unswept floor , this is what I see too the remains of the meal . And that's where you picked up your quote , right . Yeah , normally hidden away , discarded , moved out of sight here , highlighted , shadowed , made into something wondrous and strange . I just , I just love that . Yeah , I love it . And it's clear in his work , right .

just sit there and I've always loved poetry because of that .

I think , you know , at a young age my grandfather was always reading and talking to me about the poets and the great artists and these things , and so I've always read poetry and I've always been fascinated by the structure and the form that poets use in different poets , right , you have poets who speak more abstractly or more thought based poets , and you have

poets who write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite to find perfect fit , right ? And I think that's why poets and artists throughout history have always been good friends , because they understand the development , the experimentation , that they all work different but yet they're all trying to do the same thing , which is express , especially abstract artists , poets .

There's been a long history of them together as friends and I think you know that's what captures me also about Twombly's work is that it is poetic . It works the way a poet works . And I think there's a few lines below there where Revkin says is each one of these drawings a poem , as each mark Twombly makes a poem ?

Perhaps they are what the mind looks like in the process of making a poem , the pentamento of thought . Or are they the x-rays of the finished poems , the bones and the organs ? Below ordered lines and each stands as a poem miswritten , erased , revised .

Then again , maybe these are poems and the sense that a poem is as much about what's unsaid as what is said and the white space of eloquent , deliberate silence . And he talks about that white space of eloquent , deliberate silence because Twombly has a lot of negative space that exists within his work , right , so you think of a poet writing on paper .

You have the words , but then you also have all this extra space , even a poem and a book and I hadn't thought about this until now is the way my mind works . You look at a poem and a book and it's typed out on a page . You have this much words but this much white space .

Did that influence Twombly to create so much negative space within his work , that love of poetry ? I don't know , but I love this quote by the poet Octavia Paz it is very difficult to talk about the artist . Always we are talking about another way of trying to understand a secret .

It's difficult to talk about an artist because we're just trying to find another way of understanding a secret . Do we really really know what's being said and what's not being said ? Because at the end of the day , even for you and I , we may be telling a story in our work , but there's a whole lot that's left out , whole lot .

That's why we're really making it and I love that , because I think that does tie in to the ultimate essence in the work .

That is such a grand statement , but I think , a statement that all artists need to constantly think about , and this is something I don't know how many years ago I had this thought . Might have been six , six or seven years ago or longer , probably longer .

I was in my studio and I was working on some work and I was just thinking through how does my work stand out in a room when I'm not there ? Like , how does my work stand out and why do certain pieces in a room stand out more than others ? Is it just because the work is that much better than others ?

Is it because that work is doing something different that the other pieces are not doing ? Or is it because I know the story of specific artists more than others and so I'm more drawn to the work ? I started thinking through this and journaling on this . So fast forward a little bit .

I have a show , a solo exhibition , where I give a lecture , and it was a very moving audience , a lot of questions , a lot of interaction and very deep , because of this whole series of work that I had the show for was based on childhood memories and lifetime memories , and so there was a lot of back and forth of the importance of remembering these things and

the importance of these stories remaining with you and with your family and with your friends , et cetera . And so then I'm out in LA and for a part of a post-grad , post-grad cohort in Los Angeles , and I'm at the Broad Museum and I'm in the side to Wombly Room , which is fascinating , and I'm just being blown away .

And now these ideas start to get even bigger . Well , I know how much my work truly spoke to the audience at my exhibition because I was able to share about it . Now , what happens when I leave that room ? Is it the same For the next person that missed the lecture that walks into that room ? How is that work gonna speak ?

Are my paintings going to claim this room they now inhabit ? And so I'm here in the side to Wombly Wing in LA and I'm just going . Oh my gosh , they claim the room . I'm thinking to myself wow , they speak to me , but do they speak to me because of the power of the work or they speak to me because I am in love with side to Wombly myself .

So I go back home , I end up speaking on a panel at Nexus , which is a UN deal in New York , and I'm on a panel for story with a group of filmmakers documentary filmmakers and I had the urge to kind of share this story with filmmakers when they asked a specific question about our films and our documentaries being able to tell the story we want to tell

truly to the audience . And so I opened up and said you know , this is a thought that I had as an artist earlier in the year that I've been journaling on , and it's how does my work speak when I'm not in the room ?

How much time can I spend thinking through and processing how this work is gonna speak while I'm creating it , the more energy and the more I put into the story within the work , how does it speak in the room when I'm not there ?

But I think what it caused me to do is really start to truly think through what I'm doing and not just creating to create , but creating for a purpose , for it to speak and to claim a room , because I tell all the mentees in the program all the time ? What's gonna separate your work on the wall from everybody else's in the room ?

Are you thinking about that when it hangs on the wall and it's everybody else's ? What's gonna make somebody stop that doesn't know your work ? You know what makes me stop when I'm in a museum and I don't know an artist and I walk by and go , holy shit , wow , and I have to sit down for a minute and take it in . You know and thinking through those things .

But I just wanted to bring that up before we moved on .

The message may or may not be conveyed or received , you know fully , but there's an intent right , a specific intent and a specific outcome or whatever takeaway right .

And the equivalent to , you know , more abstract or non-representational work from a film standpoint might be whatever more independent film where there's more , you know , more gray area let's call it right , less , you know , not everything is not all . The dots are connected .

There's more responsibility on the audience or on the viewer to decide what certain clues or what certain elements mean . I don't know . I think that , in terms of Twamwe's work specifically , I mean there's just .

I just wonder if that was part of his intent in not talking about it was the belief that the worker that did speak for itself , which I know was something that you talked to your mentees about in the program as well .

As far as talking about it , this I feel like to me , if you agree , but Twamwe's work might be one of the best examples of not spoiling the experience of viewing the work , or not being spoiled by having all this information about what it's actually about .

So I do give context in a lot of my titles and sometimes the titles have no context or just sarcasm , as I play in humorous tones as well . But I do give more than a lot of artists do . I think it's up to the artist . I don't think there is a wrong way or a right way to do it .

But , man , there definitely is a mystery behind Psy and his work and I would say from what I've read , it's not that he wasn't not a people person , because he did have very deep relationships with friends and people , but he was very , very introverted , very shy and quiet person who would rather spend his time with a close few and working on his work rather

than being at the gallows and showing up for the Met dinners and doing all the things that other artists will just throw themselves at to be in the public's eye . And I think that's created a special place for his work too , because you have to spend time with it to try and figure it out and see what he's doing and what he's saying .

It's not given to you in the annals of history and books and books and books and videos of him doing things and you can figure it out right away .

Like it's created that archival , almost archaeology in some sense , where you're having to excavate these things yourself and in a form of discovery right the way archaeologists work , they're trying to discover history and the things we can't find or don't know , and so they're constantly trying to uncover these things to share them .

So with his work we have to do that as well , because we don't know as much about his life as we do Picasso , right , where there's book after book after book , and Picasso was his own PR .

You know he was his own PR team and he was like let me tell you about what I do and who I am and what I am , and sighs like stay away from me , let me do my thing , and someday I'll let you see my work .

This is something a quote from the book I'm going to share here . On the following page , the author talks about a letter that Twombie wrote . I've just returned from digging a Roman bath with the director of the museum here . North Africa is covered with wonderful Roman cities and in this part they are just beginning in the last year to excavate .

So he was , you know , literally on an archaeological digs , or at least you know for a day . So he goes on to write Twombie the amateur archaeologist , the hungry excavator , stripping away the top layers of the fugitive past . This , to me too , is one of the powers of his work . There's always a below some unreachable distance that calls us keep looking .

I mean that's a keep looking . I mean , I think . I mean I'll admit , you know , at first I don't remember , you know , when I first saw a Twombie piece , but I had a similar response to , I think a lot of people have , just like I didn't .

I definitely didn't get it , pretty sure I didn't love it right away , for sure A little bit like coffee Didn't love it right away . I mean , I don't know now , but you have to .

You know it requires that that excavation , that that that process of discovery it's not immediately accessible yet you kind of have to have to work for it and you know much like an archaeological dig . You know the things that you really have to work for you . Naturally , I think , value more .

It was one of his gestural circle paintings , right With a huge white circles , look like it's on chalkboard . And this painting I went oh my gosh , what the heck is , who is that ? And I think it was in the . It was in the film , maybe three different scenes .

I remember after seeing it , you know , I'd made mental notes of find out who that artist is in the film , did a search and found out Cy Twombly . And then that was my entry into Cy Twombly and I had to search , I had to find right , I couldn't . Just at that point in time it was like how do you find an artist you really want to find ?

You go to a museum and you hope that they're there . And so that became my hunt , so to speak . You know that I still do today as I'm at museums and things and I find an artist I love , I hunt for them and I find their work . But looking at a Twombly piece . You're excavating , you're digging , you're looking for things , you're finding things .

I mean , every time I'm in Houston at the Menuh Collection , I'm constantly doing that . I ran into an artist friend of mine last time I was there and we were both there at the same time when we're both side Twombly nerds we overtook the museum .

Forgive me if I talked about this in another episode I don't think I have yet , but that could happen at times and so he and I literally took over the rooms . It was almost as if we were two art historians or curators discussing materials to archival qualities , to things that are hidden or painted over .

And the more I read about Twombly , the more you know he's constantly covering things up and whitewashing and covering them up and going over , and we're up in the , in the work close and we're finding hey , there was something here .

And and even with the very large untitled say goodbye to Catalyst painting that is I don't know 50 feet , 60 feet in size and maybe 20 feet in height , by width , it's massive . But I know studying Twombly , this painting . This painting took him 22 years to complete and because it's so large , it would cover the entire room and windows when he put up .

It's in three panels and I think these panels have been trimmed because they're the way that they work together . There's other things hidden that aren't there , that maybe wrapped behind or he cut off , and I think they're probably rearranged from the original . But each panel has a different color , even though it's the same grayish tone .

The gray is a little darker , a little lighter . Maybe it was sunnier when he was painting one over the windows and so it adjusted to the color . Or so you're digging like an archeologist right when you're in that room , and why is this one a little darker ? This seems to be cut off .

What was written on that side as it wraps around and it's no longer exposed , and so you're constantly digging and trying to find these things in his work and pull them out

. There's so many meanings and so many responses and questions and answers within the work , but there's no true definition that exists today for the pieces . So you have to , as Rifkin did , bring your own loves and your own questions and arguments and things to the piece when you see it .

I mean I think about a random example , but I think about , like , after my dad passed away , I thought a lot about , you know , going through his things and spending time in the shop portion of the garage and you know these are the half used roll of duct tape that's not inherently valuable , it's contaminated , it was brittle as old , it wasn't even useful for

its intended purpose , but his hands were the last hands to rip a piece off , just as an example .

So just you know , thinking about about that and the less there is of something , and especially the knowledge that there's not going to be anymore , which of course applies to every , every artist you know and their work like this , is it , they're , they're gone , now there's , there's not going to be anymore , you know .

But there's something about the scarcity of information or the lack of volume of data points to reference that makes every little detail that much more important and meaningful .

Don't just go look once , go look 10 times . I constantly go back to the Twombly Collection in Houston constantly , even though it's the same collection , they're not work isn't changing out regularly , and so it's like but I see something different and new . I'm excavating new thoughts and new ideas every time I go .

But I'm also able to share those thoughts , whether here on this podcast , whether you and I are talking on the phone or I'm talking with my other artist peers or mentees . Like each time I look and learn and excavate , I'm able to share more with the world , with the audience .

I'm able to add another ripple in that pond to the story of art and to these things , and we may discover things that the artists never even thought when they were putting into their work . And that's the beauty of art , right ? We get to add to the legend , we get to add to the mystery us fans , us audience , us viewers .

And we may be wrong , it doesn't matter . That's the great thing about art . Doesn't matter if the viewer is wrong because the artist doesn't care . At the end of the day , you shouldn't care , he or she . The artist should be creating the work that they want to create , that they love . And if the audience's response is negative , okay , whatever .

Maybe they're not ready for your work yet or maybe take it as a sign , as I need to work harder , I need to change , I need to experiment a little more .

But you know , it's a great thing about art , and going to see it and looking at it is adding to the legend by what you see and I consider Saito Ambly an absolute legend Then I consider him an absolute mystery as well in the art world , because we don't know . We just have little bits and pieces of words . There is there is a documentary called Sigh Deer .

That was an independent documentary . That is an Italian film that came out a few years ago . It is not regularly available to the public . I search for it on a regular basis , hoping there's a way I can get it .

I know there's an Italian film site that has it , but I have not been able to sign up for it because I think it's basically for educators in Italy . So be on the lookout for Sigh Deer , and I hope there's a little bit more historical additions to that that I have not heard or known yet , and I know there is video of Sigh within that film as well .

There's always going to be more questions and answers and I think that's as an artist , I think that's , you know , a really healthy mindset and approach you know to have is to ask those questions and be okay with the fact that there may not be definitive answers , but the exploration and the pursuit , the excavation you know of attempting to find , you know , to

find something in itself is a worthy pursuit .

Have you not heard what this gal or this guy said ? I mean , this is just us literally talking to you . The way that we end up text messaging or hopping on the phone , facetiming you know each other randomly and going , oh , my gosh , did you see this ?

This is just us hanging out and having this conversation of things that we love , that we talk about regularly too . So we're going to be wrong in a lot of stuff and there's a lot of opinion here . These are things we love and we like and we discuss . So we absolutely want your debates , we want your addition to our conversation .

So send us what you think You're way off in your opinion . This is what I think you know . That's the beauty of art is we can bring to the table what we see and what we view and we can discuss it , and that's how it should be 100% .

There's always another layer right there that is , you know , may or may not lead us to the next thing . Yeah , we're not experts , just a couple of artists talking about art and the process of making it . So any closing thoughts ?

Was it around there , maybe 59 ? For an Italian journal , italian magazine , and we tried to find the essay and it is nowhere to be found . So I'm assuming right this is what we do as the audience .

We assume that Joshua Rivkin , probably while he was writing the book , had access to archives from Twombly friends , family , collectors and he probably snapshotted some things to add to the book . So Nathan and I are currently going to we're going to continue to try and find that essay .

If we do uncover it , we'll put a link up somewhere for you guys to be able to visit that and see it as well . But if you're in Houston , I definitely suggest going to the Menil Collection , the side Twombly galleries , across the street from the main museum . The museum is fantastic as well .

Plug to the Menil , which I love , one of my favorite places on the planet . But go see the museum and if you're going to look at art , you can go to a museum website A lot of people don't know this and you can search the collection so you can go to , let's say , the Tate . You can go to the Brand Horse Museum of Modern Art .

These are places that have a lot of Twomblys at the Broad . You can actually go and look at their collections . You can look at what's on view so that you can go find the artist that you really want to see in that work and you can go view it at the museum .

But I also like the hunt and discovering new people and walking into a room and going oh my gosh , joan's here and I walk into a Joan Mitchell . People in museums probably know me by now because I talk out loud . I'm an out loud talker and I talk to the artists and people think I'm weird and my wife probably will not like me to share that .