Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

If you eavesdrop at modern art museums, you hear it all the time, upon seeing drawings so pure in shape and color or that mimic the intense scribblings of kindergarteners: “my kid could have drawn this.” What they jokingly diminish is a spirit of freedom in making. One that is typically unattainable, so conventional wisdom tells us, if one pays a mortgage, or has been tragically hardened into a cynicism, if one’s mindset does not leave room for whimsy, or play that vacillates between seriousness and joy. And yet, that very play undergirds a class of people many refer to, sometimes derisively, as “creatives.”

A person who makes such a remark wants to protect an ordered existence. He wants clear demarcated lines that define adulthood and juvenility. We cannot have adults making art like children, he implicitly states. Such art defies the notion of progress. Hasn’t this person grown up already? And yet, it is that childishness that is the laboratory of creation.

The artwork of Cy Twombly possesses this quality and yet, it inhabits the very adult world of war, death, love and human conflict as classical and serious subjects as any. I encountered Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam in the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the age of sixteen. I had not yet read Homer’s epic account of the Trojan War, but I felt the heat of the violence in the primal markings and desperate scrawlings. Viewing the piece, I took in Twombly’s “childlike” drawing of Achilles shield. By the time I stood before the canvas titled “The Fire that Consumes All Before It,” I matured into an understanding; the idea of war was more than an allegory but a felt fury. The world became deeply isolating.

Ekphrastic poetry sometimes pushes back against the idea of simple art made complicated in idea, born from an eccentric personality. Inspired by another famous Twombly painting, one that itself is inspired partly by a poem, today’s poem realizes the frenetic sense of the artist’s canvas is a conceptual product of a sophisticated and sometimes frustrating mind.

Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor)
by Javier O. Huerta

A child could not have drawn this.
Maybe something more like 67 children.
(Each with his or her own favorite ice cream.) And not just
Ordinary children. All 67 would have five arms each.
And each arm would have three hands and each hand
Would hold three brushes and two pencils.

And, in his or her own way, each child would love and hate Catullus.
Love him so much that they would crawl the streets of Rome in search of him.
Hate him so much that they would crawl the streets of Rome in search of him.

335 arms to embrace him. 1005 hands to maul him.

Catullus, give back all the beautiful words.

“Cy Twombly's Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor)” by Javier O. Huerta from SOME CLARIFICATIONS Y OTROS POEMAS © 2007 Javier O. Huerta. Used by permission of Arte Publico Press - University of Houston.