Tag Archives: Cy Twombley

The Writing on the Wall: Tangled Alphabets and Words

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Leon Ferrari, left, and Mira Schendel, right

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture containing words has worth to the nth power. The special exhibition up at MoMA now, Tangled Alphabets, examines the works of two artists who explore words extensively in their works, and it got me thinking about how words have been used in art. Writing on an artwork exists traditionally as a signature or a date, or perhaps an inscription such as ‘Marcus me fecit.’

Tangled Alphabets focuses on the work of South American painters León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. The show says that the artists “produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.“

Franz Kline, left, and Cy Twombly, right.

Since the 1950s however, writing has come into prominence in the visual arts. Surrealism, and the automatic writing it inspired (where the author writes from his or her unconscious) combined with an interest in the East, led to the prominence of the written word in Abstract Expressionist works. And, at least according to the critic Harold Rosenberg, the action painting popular at the time allowed the psyche assert or express itself, similar to the process of automatic writing.

From Wikipedia we have it that “automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters Franz Kline in his black and white paintings, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the collective unconscious.” In the hands of artists like Kline or Twombly, writing becomes a lush visual element. (Kline denied that it was in fact calligraphy; Twombly’s graffiti-like scrawls are legible.)

Andy Warhol, left, and Roy Lichtenstein, right.

Of course, pop art took words in another direction, as they exploited comic books (Roy Lichtenstein) or packaging (Warhol) In these works, the words are an intrinsic part of the image being reappropriated. In the reuse of printed materials, like some of Robert Raucheneberg’s collages, words become part of the material itself.

For a contemporary approach to automatic writing, look no further than MoMA’s recent acquisition. This untitled work, above, by British artist Jack Strange features a lead ball pressing down the g key indefinitely. (I was born the same year as the artist, 1984, and feel like I desperately need to catch up with someone who already has 2 works at MoMA!)

Words are conceptual and tied to a specific meaning, while the visual arts are just that, visual, visceral and more fluid in meaning. The combination of words and images makes your mind work overtime. Having to read something uses a different part of the brain that looking at something, and sometimes words seem too explicit. On the other hand, they certainly pack a punch.

The Louvre Gets Wild

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As the raindrops hit the grey pavement of the city, let’s imagine ourselves in another, greyer city across the pond, one the has its fair share of black umbrellas out every spring: Paris. Say after a croissant and a cafe au lait you stare out the window and dread the thought of joining the dreary sea of umbrellas. Suddenly you shout “Eureka!”, startling the waitress.

You will go to the Louvre. What better museum to get lost in than the Louvre, with its enormous collection and long galleries? Imagine your surprise when you find that the staid old home of the Mona Lisa is having a face lift.

It recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of it’s first facelift, the infamous glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei. For the pyramid’s 20th birthday, the Louvre has created muse trek, a way of exploring the Louvre’s collection and creating your own guide to the works displayed. Muse treks are available as an interactive guide on the web and on your own iPhone or iPod Touch at the museum. The treks people create give a uniquely personal view of connections between the artworks. (Unfortunately, many works from the museum’s collection are not available…)

Interactive use of technoology is a good step forward into the 21st C. for the Louvre, but it gets wilder yet. The Louvre has commissioned Cy Twombly (who I promise I will quit writing about some day) to paint a ceiling for the Salle de Bronzes. As Grant Rosenberg points out in his article in The American Scholar, “for the first time since Georges Braque in 1953, a living artist’s work will adorn a ceiling of the iconic museum.” This is a huge project for the octogenarian Twombly, literally: the ceiling is 33 meters long!

Ooh la la!

Ravels in Review and GOODBYE

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Click “Se Flimklippet” to see another video I made, that you can make too! The ModernaMuseet, or Modern Museum, in Stockholm has a fun program that lets you create videos on your keyboard, and then they are posted at the museum during an upcoming exhibition.

I said another video earlier because, as you might have seen, this week was the premiere of another Ravels In Motion production, of a recent visit to Chelsea to see painter Anne Neely’s latest works. I think they’re well-worth seeing if you have the chance. (Both my videos and her works.

For more great art, check out Melissa Meyer’s dancing paintings and some intersting examples of what can be done in clay. If you feel a little tired of life during these dreary March days, see Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers film and read about how it was installed at MoMA.

In addition to the good times, we’ve also had some disappointing times here during our ravels, and this week proved to be full of them. Not only was favorite author Milan Kundera shown to be a communist sell out and Shakespeare unattractive, but Alessandro Twombly showed some works recently that are distrubingly similar to his father’s, painter Cy Twombly.

All these disaapointments in one week were too much for me! So goodbye, dear reader, and farewell!

I’m going to go drown my sorrows in the Costa Rican surf and chilly cervecas. (Because if you have to drown your sorrows, Costa Rica is the place to do it, no?) But fear not for I shall return to you in good time, specifically, April 6. Adios!