Sigh

I’d like to add Cy Twombly to my list of text-based artists. He’s who I want to be this week.

His markings, scrawls, and actual words – dating from the time of the Abstract Expressionism to our present - are a form of writing in itself. In the October issue of Flash Art, Manfred de la Motte is cited:

Does Twombly use a kind of writing? Certainly, but a kind of writing that has hardly anything in common with other genres, if not the name of writing. There is no preventive understanding of the 26 letters, no conventional calligraphy. No poème-objet, that almost imperfect permeation of painting and writing. There is no decorative element as in common abstract drawings. And yet it is a kind of writing, a transcription, or a mere psychogram that demands: Read! Yet there is no sense of meaning in his writing: it is the autopresentation of reading and a demand to read. Twombly’s theme is reading, not legibility.