Today’s three posts are all taken from an essay Cy Twombly: Works on Paper in the book The Responsibility of Forms by Roland Barthes (1985). This is the second of the three posts. [TW = Cy Twombly]:
… The line — any line inscribed on the sheet of paper — denies the important body, the fleshly body, the humoral body; the line gives access neither to the skin nor to the mucous membranes; what it expresses is the body insofar as the line scratches, brushes over (one can go so far as to say: tickles); the line, art displaces itself; its center is no longer the object of desire (the splendid body frozen in marble), but the subject of this desire: the line, however supple, light, or uncertain it may be, always refers to a force, to a direction; it is an energon, a labor which reveals — which makes legible — the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure. The line is a visible action.
Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Autumno, 1993-94TW’s line is inimitable (try to imitate it: what you will make will be neither his nor yours: it will be: nothing). Now what is ultimately inimitable is the body; no discourse, whether verbal or plastic — if it is not that of anatomical science, exceedingly crude when all is said and done — can reduce one body to another body. TW’s work reveals this fatality: my body will never be yours. From this fatality, in which a certain human affliction can be epitomized, there is only one means of escape: seduction: that my body (or its sensuous substitutes, art, writing) seduce, overwhelm, or disturb the other body.
-Julie
Coloring 