I was late to meet my friends outside the gallery! Speed-walking from the train, unraveling my scarf from my neck, I thought: This isn’t charming! Ten minutes is charming.
A different friend of mine likes to talk about how people we know would respond if she called them and told them she had a body to bury, who would want to help, who would help in spite of themselves. I’d say I’m on my way, sit on my couch for an hour, look out the window, type out some fragments, invite someone else, brush my hair, show up once the job was basically done, carefully scatter some dirt on the mound, feel the dirt on my fingers—a little wet, a paste—and, in spite of barely having been there for the main event, try to discuss the meaning of what had happened by comparing it to other things that have happened. This is what I was thinking as I jogged now from the train.
I was late even though it had been my idea; I’d decided this year to go to galleries again, and to do more things I like, and I like Cy Twombly, partly because of an essay Catherine Lacey wrote about him in which she describes his work as “ancient and alive,” and partly because his paintings look complete in spite of looking also unfinished, sketches that suggest a long before and after.
I was late because I had been sitting with Joshua, charging my phone; we were talking about ourselves, our story and the significance of narrative in general for sustaining love or anything, buying into something a little too neat, a frame, for some stretches of time, acknowledging—reveling in!—its artifice. I thought he looked really handsome, and he told me I looked like an architect in his shirt. I didn’t know what he meant, and it made me happy. It’s nice to move around whenever with somebody between explication and just looking.
I lost track of time and got on the train, where I started reading Brian Dillon’s Affinities, a series of essays he wrote during lockdown, considering what it means to feel an affinity for a work, as opposed to something limper—an appreciation—or more forceful—an influence. The difference according to Dillon is that affinities are dumber and more magical. Outside the gallery I explained to my friends why my lateness wasn’t charming. They all nicely disagreed and we went inside.
The first room of the exhibit was reds and blues and yellows, described on the press release as petals and peonies swept up in the spirit of Bacchanalia. A few works on paper reminded me of his other paintings I’d seen; like Catherine Lacey, I’ve made a couple trips to the Menil Collection in Houston; unlike her, my reaction to his work never changes or even cants; his large-scale crayon and crayon-like—figures? Settings? Scenes?—known as his “Blackboard” or “Gaeta” paintings always feel to me deliberately chaotic, huge loops designed to make your stomach turn, carnival architecture, whereas his smaller-scale works, versions of early Renaissance paintings and Greek myths, homages to Rilke and others, do feel lighter—lighter because they’re grounded in a source—a bright, flitting dailiness, a diary almost lost to time, “ancient and alive.”
On the far wall, there were three paintings that stood out to me. They were less interested in language (there were no loops or written allusions) and still gestural; as I walked toward them, I found my focus toggling between thick brushstrokes and bright flowers, which I might wander near if I saw them in the park and wasn’t running late for something.
I like still life paintings and landscapes because they’re often both physical and metaphysical; I can easily imagine touching the “real” version of what’s rendered—in the case of Cy Twombly’s small canvases, sturdy pedals, strong wind—and I also feel pleasantly outside of time, which marks itself with human dramas. I was wryly accused once in an MFA workshop of caring about trees more than people; this isn’t true; but I do care about how people have translated trees into something man-made, flattening or otherwise simplifying them, mapping onto them sites of meaning and also a version of whatever else they are, rough, tall; I’m interested more in what this suggests about a person than what it suggests about a tree; I’m interested in the tree, too, though, which was I guess what my professor meant.
In the mid-to-late 80s, Cy Twombly put down his crayons for a while—enough for then with looping scapes, self-aware attempts to screw up clock-time—while working on his Green Paintings, a series of canvases that feel primordial or—or and-or—apocalyptic. I’d seen some of these paintings in Houston; one of them is a canvas in the shape of a frame, a blunt comment on the distance, if small, between work and world or artist and viewer. It felt heavy-handed but I liked it anyway; it made me think of him as an artist interested however obliquely in ecology, in interconnectedness, and not only a painter who assumes authorship and tells stories from on high. The work itself is the frame; acknowledging this from the project’s outset, the acrylic flies around freely; there’s a stream of white, a reflection of clouds in clear water, or, a more ominous view, something imposed and spreading. I thought of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X, toxic, porous, and making porous whoever enters it, scintillating, shape-shifting, now concave, now convex.
There were six more of these works at the gallery, thick layers of green and white dripping from thin, white frames. A sendup of the very notion of frames, my friend joked; apparently she thought these were a little heavy-handed, too. Two middle-aged women with purses stood in front of the Green Paintings; one of them exclaimed: “Wonderful!” I thought her next words might be: “I’ll take them!”
The Green Paintings are wonderful. They make me want to pun: the artist isn’t present! It’s as if the obvious framing device, the clear acknowledgement that he’s not an authority, objective like a clock, allowed him to rely less on conveying this concept stroke by stroke, moment by moment, and to unselfconsciously render something true of the world, to him. Streaks of white flow naturally from the work, or are evaporated into the work, dew from cloud.
I stood in front of the paintings and for a second couldn’t say for sure that I wasn’t responsible for them, like a mess; there’d been a mix-up, and I was a little embarrassed. I felt, I mean, an affinity, dumb and magical.
This quality of untethered causality didn’t only exist on the horizontal plane between me and the paintings; I think I felt what I felt because of the works themselves; the white drips off the frame, but I could just as easily imagine the color gathering itself effortfully up, toward its source. What’s foregrounded and what’s backgrounded undulates the longer you look, suggesting an event could emerge at any moment from the pre-or-pro-biotic broth. When I rejoined the day I was living in, I noticed that the women with their purses had moved on, and my friends were also ready to go. We all had different favorites! We went to the diner next-door for lunch.