Sigh...Not Cy :-(

Above is a recently completed drawing (2007) depicting the chemical process of silvering glass for use as a mirror. The idea for the work came out of the process I went through to create a mirrored surface for another project.

Sometimes making art involves the creation of a visual language that is not as completely readable as say, my current typing here in English. The understand-ability of an artist's visual language has something to do with knowing what an artist is thinking about when she is making marks on a surface, but more importantly the understanding has to do with the investment of time the art viewer is willing to make.

I remember a trip several years ago to MACBA in Barcelona where I spent a couple of hours looking at as many Cy Twombly paintings. There came a moment when if felt like curtains were being pulled back, revealing grammar and then cadence. A similar process happened while swirling a plastic bin containing a sheet of glass in an ammoniacal silver solution. Like art, chemistry took an investment of time to generate understanding.

So looking at art becomes a process of searching for the existence of meaning, then deciding if it's worth the effort to extract it.

Which brings me back to Cy and this blog.

One of the things the page counter tells me is how people came to a particular page. One popular page is a post made last year called Reading Art, Looking at Books which contrasted images of the Martha Rosler Library and a bookshop in Baghdad. What is somewhat interesting is that most of the people who come to that page have done a Google Image Search for Cy Twombly. Though easily picked up by a Google spider, the image they were looking for was actually hidden, linked through the title. I've done the same with this post: click on the title, and a Twombly magically appears!

Which makes me wonder if anybody searching for the Twombly actually invested the time to find it.

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