Between paint and ink: Cy Twombly, Steve McCaffery and textual illegibility in North American art and poetry 1950s–1970s

ABSTRACT

Beginning from the late 1950s, interest in intermedium experimentation prompted North American avant-garde artists and poets to explore the visuality of writing at an unprecedented level. Thanks to conceptualism and Fluxus, artists’ use of writing during this time challenged the notion of medium specificity. Concrete poets’ focus on writing’s non-phonic visuality posed a related critique: questioning the necessity of linking one artistic discipline with its sign system (i.e. image or writing). Some artists/poets went even further by breaking the letter as the smallest graphemic unit, thereby introducing textual illegibility. The essay argues that such illegibility carries import when: (1) treated as intersign illegibility, a clash of abstracted text and image that resists neat verbal and iconic interpretations and (2) understood as central to the 1960s/1970s intermedial questioning of disciplinary constraints. The above points are developed through further contextualization and selective interpretation of a drawing by the artist Cy Twombly and the hybrid book/panel work Carnival by the poet Steve McCaffery.

KEYWORDS:

• Word/image studies
• intermedia
• illegibility
• intersign
• twentieth-century avant-garde
• concrete poetry
• visual poetry
• Cy Twombly
• Steve McCaffery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mikey Rinaldo received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2013. He is currently a translator with interests in word/image studies, visual poetry and the cultural history of coffee.

Notes

1 In ‘Art After Philosophy’ ([1969] 1991), Kosuth argues that art is not based on its appearance as object rather than its conception as idea.

2 Echoing Kosuth’s position, for example, the art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that ‘[Anti-Art modern paintings’] verbal ingredients separates them from images and things merely seen and removes them to a realm founded on the intellectual interrelation among works of art' (1983, 58).

3 As Twombly states in an interview (Serota 2008, 50), ‘I like something to jumpstart me – usually a place or a literary reference or an event that took place, to start me off. To give me a clarity or energy.’

4 Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois consider Twombly’s citations as protest and graffiti (see, among others, Krauss and Bois 1996, 148-152; or Krauss 1993, 256–266). On the opposite side stands those who see Twombly’s citation as more open-ended, if not altogether admiring (Armand 2004; Leeman 2005; Serota 2008).

5 For another recent view of indeterminacy in Twombly’s mark-making through the lens of Greek mythology, see Staff (2011).

6 Unless noted otherwise, all translations into English are mine.

7 The online version of all of Carnival’s panels, including the unpublished and published outtakes is available at: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/carnival/index.html.

8 Available online at: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/kitasono/kks-p171.htm.

9 For a classic formulation of this view, see Gibson (1950, 228): ‘The visual superposition or overlapping of surfaces … is an important type of depth perception, not a cue for depth perception.’ (Cited in Schwartz 2006, 111)

10 Available online at: http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/carnival/2_10.html.

11 For an extensive discussion of the cultural connotations of Palmer method as business writing, see Thornton (1998).