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REVIEWS
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Martin Herbert on possibly the worst
show this year
Cy Twombly
Gagosian Gallery, London
27 May – 31 July
Why the worst? Because in no time at all upon
entering this, the kick-off show in Gagosian’s vast and much-trumpeted
new space, I found myself thinking about Slab.
That’s Slab as in one of the funnier characters
in the galactic sprawl of Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V, an
artist who ‘painted in sporadic bursts, referring to himself
as a Catatonic Expressionist and his work as ‘the ultimate
in non-communication’, and Slab whose name shouldn’t even
be on the same page as Cy Twombly’s. After all, the latter
in full flight can convince that he’s incapable of making an
inexpressive painting, and outpourings such as 2001’s luminous
and shattering ‘Lepanto’ series (from which this show’s
ten recent paintings could be disengaged enlargements of the runnier
sections; Cy-clones, if you will) are persuasive enough to focus
response to a point of exquisiteness wherein unsightly words like
‘slab’ are blackballed from the internal monologue. Such
also being the case for lengthy stretches of the Serpentine’s
half-century-spanning retrospective of Twombly’s works on paper,
which, with a synergy that backfired loudly for Gagosian, opened
some weeks before.
Yet here was Twombly on Gagosian’s big,
big walls, looking catatonic and non-communicative and like he belonged
back in 1963, rather than being one of precious few artists capable
of re-minting gestural painting and making it seem sincere, flexible,
necessary today. And the only positive things I could think of were
that, first, this show had been meant to be larger (a couple of
paintings were left out); and, second, perhaps if – as Twombly
had apparently wished for and complained about not getting –
the gallery floor had been shiny instead of matte, these inert dribbles
would have worked. Right. You want a straw to clutch? Here, take
one of mine.
What was present, according to a memory that’s
admittedly tried to blank this show: a cartoon of tragic grandeur
developed via a repeated motif of spindly drips of blood-coloured
paint slaked down huge white canvases as if down freshly painted
walls. Occasional felicity in the application, with the sluicing
swerving sideways as if windblown, setting up complex criss-crossing
patterns and webs which nevertheless, given the lifeless paint quality,
coagulated into miasmas redolent of a mishap with the poster paint
in a school art room. Thin, multicoloured dribbles poking through
underneath, gasping in the monoculture set up by the domineering
dirty red. Strips of newspaper scrolling across the base of one
painting (when you pounce on slivers of yellowed newsprint for visual
interest, you know you’re in trouble).
What was absent: virtually all the seemingly
effortless dialogues between trouble and beauty, accident and deliberation,
gesture and ground, epic history and the present moment, that activate
Twombly’s better works. The overall impression was, at worst,
of an artist with no momentum at all rehearsing the same grandiloquent
spasm, over and over, in order somehow to slap a snoozing muse awake;
and at best, of one who, for some unknown reason, has consciously
repressed everything he does best in the name of who knows what
exigency – anything from American foreign policy to a change
of studio, from the fact that he’s in his mid-seventies and
has nothing to prove, to a secret bet that not even Gagosian could
offload this stream of bat guano. (As I understand it, they sold
like shit off a shovel.)
Twombly’s been misunderstood before. Back
in the mid-’60s critics panned his then-new blackboard works,
a selection of which were among the highlights of that Serpentine
exhibition. I may be misunderstanding him now. None of this detracts
from the fact that while Gagosian’s was a thoroughly displeasing
show, it’s given me more pause than most others I’ve seen
this year. Everyone else I’ve spoken to about it hated it too,
so I’m not exactly going out on a limb. Still, what if we’re
all wrong? How many CDs/books/films do you own that you’re
almost sure are irredeemable stinkers, but, because you love the
artist(s), you keep perusing the thing, looking for what you’re
surely missing, feeling your opinion temporarily recalibrate and
then, typically, snap back? In my case some of those misfires get
more baffled attention than things I get on first or second encounter,
unequivocally enjoy, and then, satisfied, file away. The latter
are sweets, easily consumable. Meanwhile, the debatable-duds are
more like mouth ulcers: persistent irritants, but difficult to stop
worrying at. This show was a case in point. By asking that we try
and extricate the current object from the fog of goodwill built
up by previous production. Twombly’s apparent self-besmirching
fatuity encourages us to confront the vagaries of criticality and
consensus head-on, thereby offering an interregnum on the high wire
of paranoid self-questioning which fascinates in a way that even,
say, another show of Twomblys-that-look-and-operate-like-Twomblys
doesn’t; and feels intermittently valuable. So thanks for that,
Slab. But please, no more.
Martin Herbert is a critic based in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
He writes regularly for Artforum and Art Monthly.
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