Welcome to day two of a daily email rewrite experiment.
To quote from day 1 “Every day for the next week I will send out a daily email. Then the following week, every day I will send a rewrite of the email from 7 days ago. I am not sure how long I will do this… I’m going to try for a month.”
I am going to begin this newsletter with the concept of lines. Why lines? I see them everywhere, just like the rounded rect.
I will now take to heart LaMonte Young’s “Composition 1960 No. 10” to “Draw a Line and Follow It.” For years I misattributed this piece of conceptual art to Sol Lewitt, another follower of the line.
Cy TwomblyLeda and the Swan Rome 1962
Three Threads of Cy Twombly
The main artist I think of with regards to lines is Cy Twombly. I really do not know much about Cy Twombly, since I am writing about him today, I decided to do a little research. My knowledge until now was mainly that his style of paintings look to me like scribbles or automatic writing. Automatic writing, or automatic drawing is a method pioneered by the surrealists as way to access the unconscious and create art.
Automatic Drawing André Masson(French, 1896–1987)
Now back to Cy Twombly. There are a few things I want to note with regards to Cy Twombly, the first is that he worked, in the 1950s, as a cryptographer for the US Army. I am not quite sure what his qualifications for this are, since he does not appear to be a mathematician. Also I cannot seem to find out what exactly he did as a cryptographer. Connecting cryptography to automatic writing makes me speculate fantastically that perhaps he was part of a government “x-files” type operation to access the unconscious or something Ingo Swann related.
Cryptography is an interest of mine. There used to be a lively culture of people creating their own algorithms for encrypting their diaries, for example. I gave a series of presentations last year on cryptography as a personal practice in light of the hegemony of small number of cryptographic protocols like SHA-256, which is used for example, to encrypt transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. I’m think we should bring back the practice of personal cryptography.
The second thing I want to note in regards to Cy Twombly, is that he shares the same last name as the lead character in the film Her, as played by Joaquin Phoenix.
This is a still from the 2013 film, Her, directed by Spike Jonze. It is from the charactour website, where you can read more about the character Theodore Twombly.
This is a film I often teach in my class, Computers, Robots and Film, and I never really understood why the protagonist should be called Twombly. In the film, Twombly is a ghost writer for sentimental letters. We can make some parallels I suppose between faux emotional letters and scribbles. Twombly, in the film, falls in love with a disembodied computer, a sort of Alexa or Siri figure, and perhaps we could make an argument between the seen and the unseen or the effable and ineffable. Its sort of a stretch though and at the end of the day I’m still not quite sure how to connect the two Twomblys.
Finally Cy Twombly made a 9 panel painting Nine Discourses on Commodus.
Here is one of the panels, it is currently at the Guggenheim Bilbao. It looks a bit gruesome and bloody to me, which was apparently Twombly’s intent. Commodus was a particularly vicious and violent Roman Emperor who’s reign marked the end of the Pax Romana, a period of about 200 years of stability and relative peace within the Roman Empire. He is also the antagonist of the 2000 film blockbuster Gladiator.
In the film, Commodus was played by non other than Joaquin Phoenix, Her’s Theodore Twombly!
Lines, Nature or Nurture?
What is a line? The shortest path between two points, but only in a euclidean space.
This image is from this website which has some nice visuals about lines in non-euclidean spaces.
There is a book called Lines,A Brief History, by the Anthropologist Tim Ingold. Ingold investigates all sorts of cultural assumptions we have about lines, linear thinking, the relationship between writing and linear thinking and history, and representation.
When I recently binged on a month of free online drawing courses, I was taught that everything can be drawn from circles, rectangles/squares, and triangles. I was also taught that it is important to draw good and confident lines, often by using your bicep. However, these lines are really in support of the shapes and spaces you are representing.
Part of Ingold’s analysis focuses on cultural art forms where the line is the primary element of design not merely an outline or border or a way to distinguish shape. An example he uses is a Shipibo-Conibo fabric discussed on page 61 of the Rutledge 2007 edition of the book. This image is an example I found on pinterest.
End of the Line
There is a line that threads through this newsletter. This line will connect somehow to this newsletter rewrite in 7 days. We can draw a line between this newsletter and yesterday’s meditation on the archetype and the troubadour. After all, one of Tim Ingold’s analyses focuses on the line in music and musical notation… but that is where I am going to draw the line for now.
Thanks for following this thread with me.
xo
Meredith