Cultural Purgatory

Until recently, I had never really taken to Cy Twombly. A trip to MoMA over spring break spurred me to reconsider & now I'm fully under the spell. I'm trying to figure out why.



Codes are in our histories. One of my childhood fascinations was with cryptography, creating & breaking codes. Like my dad, Twombly had a short stint with Army intelligence, occasioning his famous self-appraisal: that he was 'too vague' to inflict the precise disorder of encryption. A convulsion of smears, scratches, & scribbles, his vagueness is at once pre-lingual & literate: pairing cave scrawl with Hellenistic namedropping. It is the vagueness of blurred borders, of ambiguity, of double lives. Perhaps I'm drawn to how Twombly inhabits a cultural purgatory, one foot in the lettered heavens & the other in the vulgar underworld. Sublimity tugs from both poles. His twin yearnings become nearly religious in their hope: for a dreamed paradise to be reified & a lost paradise to be recovered. He is too busy with the past & the future to confront the present.