"Twombly reviewing his photographs at Schirmer/Mosel's office", Munich, 2010
Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
Ph. Nicola Del Roscio
Dean Rader, poet, professor at the University of San Francisco and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, and Carlos Peris, multidisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and teacher at the Universitat Politècnica San Carlos in Valencia, were invited to discuss their most recent publications on Cy Twombly, respectively Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (2023) and From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photographic Cosmos of Cy Twombly (2022).
Cy Twombly, Untitled (to Sappho), 1976
[Rome]
Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on paper
59 1/16 x 53 1/4 in.
© Cy Twombly Foundation
I want to be the singing glass that shivers as it rings,
be both the tracing and the trace –
I want to be the mark that marks our names.
Dean Rader, from In Advance of All Parting
Below is an excerpt from the conversation:
DR (Dean Rader) – […] I discovered him when I was a graduate student, actually through an essay by Roland Barthes and I immediately became transfixed by him. And I even made a cross-country road trip from New York, where I was in grad school, to Houston, when the Twombly Gallery opened at the Menil in 1995 or 1996. And he's sort of been in my brain living there for a long time. And this book; it's asking a lot of questions about life, mortality, the role of art, what it means to devote a life to an aesthetic project. But its two basic obsessions are what is the difference between writing and drawing? What does it mean when Twombly writes out a Rilke poem on a canvas? Is he writing there? Is or is he drawing? And then the other similar questions are what's the relationship between looking and reading?
We tend to think of ourselves as looking at art, but we read poetry. And one of the questions that I ask in the afterword is, what if in this book Twombly is the poet and my poems are the visual art? Like, what would that do to the project of Twombly? What if I'm the one drawing and he's the one writing? What does that do to our respective aesthetic projects? So one thing I try to do in the book is to try to capture on the page a kind of visual grammar or a visual cadence of the painting or the drawings. And sometimes I will try to take—if it's a piece that is about poetry includes lines of poetry in it—then I'll try to encode those lines into the poem. Here’s one example: a drawing that Twombly drew that is very more than a kind of purple stain and then lines from a Sappho fragment. And then I wound up trying to think about how could I make something that would incorporate Twombly, Sappho, and me. So I came up with this idea. I wrote this poem, and the last word of every line spells out, it replicates, the Sappho fragment. So there's three kind of traces in the poem Twombly, Sappho, and mine.
And I love that kind of three-part conversation, that multi-vocal work, because I think that's sort of an homage to much of his work which is almost always in conversation with some predecessor, someone who came before him, who sort of laid an esthetic agroundwork for a linguistic or poetic groundwork.
"Twombly reviewing his photographs at Schirmer/Mosel's office", Munich, 2010
Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
Ph. Nicola Del Roscio
CP (Carlos Peris) – […] there are some photographs from the archive that show Twombly with all the Polaroids arranged on a table. So he used to play games like memory games with them and staking them and reorganizing them, like for more focused to less focused on, from more specific content to a more abstract one. And all this kind of games played with this kind of card game or tarot card or something like that, so this kind of trying to recall or to go back, it's a kind of souvenir. Of course. Yeah. These photographs, what they did was to take these specific moments, so he could come back to them and think again about them and feel them again. And I think that happens all the time with his paintings. As you said before, you feel when Twombly is making that scribble, making that gesture of that paint or over the materials having there. So that motion, I think with photographs he was trying to reconnect with that moment, with that state of mind, with that specific moment.
Dean Rader & Carlos Peris in conversation, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome
Artworks: Devendra Banhart, Sphynx Interiors, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Mazzoli
Video Antonio Demma
The full transcript of the conversation can be downloaded here