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From: Clem
Category: Art
Date: 23 June 2008
Time: 05:23 PM
Review:
Its extremely difficult to describe in words the total effect of Twombly's work, Roland Barthes once
tried it but from what I can remember he didnt manage to convey the works supreme quality, its
amazing sense of scale. It is both tied to the body and yet reaches for a sublime grandeur and
achieves this in an extraordinary range of ways.Overrall, and this is one of the most surprising things
about this show, is the work's incredible simplicity and clarity.
Somebody once described the purpose of artschool is to rid the artist of false ideas of self
expression. Twombly bears this out because although the work is most clearly and palpably him, he
achieves his signature by making his touch "other" to himself; there is an extraordinary self alienation
at work that allows him to see his scribbles as things in themselves, as objective, as real and as
breathing.His formal detachment is the perfect foil to the immersion involved in making it.
It is impossible to imagine work like this being made in the art world now, principally because the
artworld, for some reason,(perhaps it is commodity fetishism, perhaps it is capitalist rationalisation)
is largely anti-intuitive. Much is made of Twomblys intellectual references, such as to Classical
Mythology, and in the catalogue Tacita Dean does a good job in trying to to turn him into a conceptual
artist , albeit a romantic lilting one like herself. Twombly however was part of a group that for a brief
period in American Art in the mid twentieth century, made art from their intuition and this was the
basis of their assimilation of the world. For a brief period artists absorbed and directed reality in a
way more direct than ever before, Pollock and de Kooning principally, and then Twomblys peers,
Rauschenberg and Johns , and latterly Serra and maybe Brice Marden and perhaps the greatest of
the sculptors Eva Hesse..They did not do away with the "subject" as Greenberg claimed- if anything
they were all subject, their subject being their individual realities felt,transformed and remade
intuitively.
Unlike Pollock, who was the icebreaker, but uneven and inconsistent except when he was the
greatest artist,and like a great poet(he likes poetry), Twombly shows that its possible to be intuitive
and have an intellect! Why the culture now puts the intellect above everything , and despises the
intuitive is a question Twomblys work, with incredible force and clarity, asks when ,as his work bears
out ,the real is only present when the intuitive is present.Twomblys references are not the important
aspect of his work, they are the things that fill out his imagination, they are the means , not the end.
What is important about his work is how it demonstrates ways of acting and being and living intuitively
without becoming indulgent and mannered and with an engagement that in this show at least is
always utterly true and free of mediation. The direct culture, the real culture, the unmediated culture,
this is something we sorely need , like never before. This is what Twombly gives us , without a false
note, perfectly judged and balanced and sophisticated in a truly sublime way, and this is why Twombly
is the worlds greatest living artist.