Cy Twombly
Apollo and the Artist 1975
Image courtesy Works on Paper, Rome © Cy Twombly
Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil and collage on paper
142 x 128 cm

“[…] the graffiti mark shares with broken branches in the forest or clues left at the scene of a crime the trace of a foreign presence that has intruded into a previously unviolated space. It exists, that is, as residue. In this sense it breaks with a fundamental premise of the action painter’s credo: that the work function as a mirror reflecting the artist’s identity, producing a moment to measure one’s authenticity in an act of self-recognition. For if the mirror is a model of presence – the self-presence of the subject to his or her own reflection – the graffiti mark is the registration of absence, of the mark that rests in the aftermath of the event and which, as Jacques Derrida, in his Of Grammatology, explains of every graphic trace, has the formal character of wrenching self-presence (the present moment when the marker makes the mark) away from itself by dividing the event into a before and an after; it is a mark that forms itself in the very presence of its maker as residue, as remains.”

-Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloch. (2005)

“PURE FOLLY IS THE KEY TO INITIATION.”

-Crowley. (1944)