I have seen books about artists come and go, but one figure stays constant: Cy Twombly. What hold does this scribbler have over him? Before my death, I remember one particular period of him flitting from white Twombly tome to off-white Twombly tome (whither this whiteness?), and in his frenzy even slipping beneath the cover jacket to make gouges and stains onto one book in particular. I presumed he was writing a review of some kind and this was the only way he knew how to mark the depth of his engagement with what he was reading – not with annotations across the pages within, but through showing the wear and tear of the book itself somehow in the spirit of Cy himself.
It was as if the cover became a mask for him. When he was finished, the cover was placed back and the book hasn’t moved from the shelf since, even when I died (and remember here I am a library’s ghost that haunts another library), and even though so much of what connected him to Twombly evaporated, there the huddle of Twombly books remained on the shelves.
Now I cam not going to attempt some kind of role model John Water’s style ventriloquism of the library I now haunt and its letters of resignation to the enduring presence of Cy. Only the librarian knows the how and why of this hold over him.
At the same time, more recently, I have noticed a separation and a distancing of sorts; a letting go I distinctly recognize because it has to do with the whole idea of what we libraries are and mean. As with his other enduring obsession – David Markson – with his ingenious bibliocide in passing his well-annotated books to the Strand bookstore in New York City; Twombly’s library was once a place of questioning and desire for my librarian scholar (what was Twombly reading while painting? Was it a handbook or anthology or the primary texts themselves?).
But gradually as he transformed, another artist’s library emerged, slowly in the form of a whispered breath, but maybe one day as a manifestation in the form of yet another book on these ever shifting shelves. For now – as a placeholder of sorts for this library to come – let me quote from Tahltan artist Peter Morin’s personal letter to Kwakwaka’wakw artist and hereditary chief Beau Dick, written several months after Dick’s passing and published in the book Beau Dick: Revolutionary Spirit (Audain Art Museum, 2018).
I remember feeling the mask breath. Holy. they are breathing. Holy. they are breathing. Holy. that breath is going back into the physical land.
