The Brooklyn Rail

Tacita Dean’s beguiling new book, Why Cy, is actually two books. Or, put another way, tucked inside Why Cy is a surprise book, a sneaky book, a secret book. That one is called My night with Cy. Despite the title, it is not a steamy book, but it is an intimate one. And revealing. And, to some degree, even romantic.

The publication of both coincides with Dean’s show Blind Folly at the Menil, but the genesis of these projects began over a year ago. On February 7, 2024, Dean (not me) (though I wish it was me) spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston. As far as I know, she is the first person to do so. That night, after everyone left, she made a bed on a bench, took out her notebook, and began jotting down notes as she moved through the gallery. The rooms darkening, the light fading. My night with Cy is a typed transcript of those notes, accompanied by Dean’s attempts to replicate Twombly’s famous handwriting. On the left side of the lined pages might be her notes, and on the right page are Dean’s versions of Twombly’s writing, as if she is channeling, ouija-like, his very gestures. Dean’s rendering of Twombly’s shaky script is so good, at first I thought it was a facsimile. But, upon closer inspection, you can see she is using the notebook as a testing ground. She is trying to get it just right. The The The The is repeated four times on one page. A kind of life-drawing, a figure study not of Twombly’s body, but of his writing. In another, she imitates Twombly’s transcription of lines from a Richard Howard poem that appear in Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994), arguably Twombly’s greatest work. Her rendering is spot on. A tracing of a tracing of a trace.

Many of her musings about Twombly explore the metaphorics of following his trace, his spoor, his trail. “We’re all circling Cy,” she writes in one observation, “who is circling the ineffable.” Indeed.

My night with Cy is a mini catalogue of such insights: “His paintings are sonic / The paintings are silent here / I like Cy’s 9’s; they’re like snowdrops / Cy does angry A’s / These paintings are noise. They are not silent.” I admire Dean’s willingness to contradict herself. She lets Twombly’s calligraphic presence, his asemic signification, overwrite her own. “The point is so much is recognisable in what Cy does—recognisable to me as an artist—but it is nonetheless unattainable.” I wonder if her night in the presence of Twombly—her immersion in the powerful presence of those works, her deep submission to that aura in her sleeping dream state—is an attempt to touch that which she sees as untouchable, the way practicing to write more like Twombly is a means of getting closer to that which he keeps at arm’s length.

There is such tenderness in her prose, such intimacy, her journal feels like a love letter not just to his art, but to the way his art makes her feel as an artist. For Dean, Twombly is both inspiriting and catalyzing.

You see both of these impulses in the other bigger book, which is a little harder to characterize or explain. Why Cy is a gorgeous, color portfolio of ninety-six close-up photochemical images of Twombly’s paintings in the Menil taken by Dean. The book is entirely clothbound. There is no distinction between the “cover” and the rest of the book. Nor are there any borders around the images. They bleed all the way to the edge of the page. No borders. No captions. No titles. No text. Everything is saturated. And everything feels, for lack of a better term, in medias res. There is a sense of being dropped in the middle of a painting, or perhaps more precisely, that we have been zoomed in on something colorful and bold with no warning. We are immersed.

Those familiar with the specific Twombly works in the Menil will be able to decipher one or two of the sources, thanks to some Dean-esque Easter eggs—a bleary boat or a smeared word from the Catullus piece, some coils from the famous “blackboard” paintings. But the majority of the images cannot be pinned to any particular Twomblys.

The most captivating are Dean’s renderings of the blackboard series. My favorite is a blurry and somewhat stretched image of Twombly’s infamous cursive spirals. It resembles an x-ray of a Slinky in motion. Others are distorted in just the right way to make the paintings appear to be photographic negatives. The effect is both familiarizing and dislocating at the same time.

Ultimately, with its interplay of text and image, the book-within-a-book functions much like a Twombly painting. Why Cy is all visual; My night with Cy is primarily text but also text-as-image—just like Twombly. Together, they make for a reading/seeing experience that is confusing and mesmerizing and wholly engrossing.