Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
of these artists was the American born Italian painter, Cy Twombly. His Olympia is strange
graffiti on a giant canvas stretching the length of a hall. I saw it in Houston in the Menil
Collection. The painting does not depict a person. The fleshy colored spots appear like stains,
bloodstains mixed with urine and cum. He writes in charcoal or anything nearby, an available
pencil, graphite, or perhaps a sharpened stick dabbed in dust. He writes in an almost illegible
script, "Fuck Olympia."
He wrote it and people understood.
"Fuck Olympia."
Smear the blood from a derelict woman’s body, like a dismembered peach. Or worse, from our
own self-inflicted knife wounds, expressions of somber disillusionment. Death, Morir. Olympia
will crumble, shatter. Something of hers is bursting in a quake of somber violence, unperturbed.
Destroy a canvas, destroy a canvas, life is a canvas, morir. Scatological graffiti lingers like traces
of abominations, shit on the floor, shit danced upon with violent feet, slipped on, stumbled upon,
crashing to the ground from high, high above. Death is a canvas too, a fallen canvas pulled off
the erect wall. There is a stage full of mythological ghosts who are scribbled away, painted over,
erased. These are the departed gods of classicism, ripped from the canvas and set free like a
flock of pigeons who provide a harangue of birdcalls, licking our ears along with sirens and
screeching utility. Mechanical ghost cries tear the sound from the canvas, clipping the canvas
into an evening gown to house defecation.
Under the vast canopy of a canvas there is room to smear the traces of these excretions. Pull
them over the fibers to create a big memory of the walls' utility, a place to wipe your hands clean
in public. The perceived walls of a city become new walls of a cave, enclosing our memory of
bison, and there we spill our own blood for the forgotten creatures and yank them out of our
veins, sharing blood on the surface of an art-work. Death, Morir.
Olympia lunges into the valley looming like a plague, a million faces in one face, a goddess, a
foul goddess to be fucked. This face, this sour face erased, scribbled out, blotted out, forgotten
under the trace, the lingering memory was just the ludicrous violent mess-making in feigned lust,
a destructive lust to spoil a peach the defecation on a peach, the mistaken peach, rotten. Red as a
fresh corpse, Olympia's face is a million fresh corpses, lying in the sunlight where they will dry
into a vast artwork, pulled from the precipice to lie flat on the ground, soaking into the soil,
sinking into the mud.
Fuck a dialectic of high and low or life and death and with each exhale, let a cursing utterance
climb up the canvassed walls to infuse them with structural weakness. Whispered 'Fucks',
breathy 'shit-heads', yawning 'cunts' aimed at Olympia, the soft fortunate beauty that blinded us
into retaliation.
Like I said, I saw Twombly’s painting in Houston. This was where my dad received treatment
for cancer last Christmas. They had to cut into his skull to reach his sinuses, where the cancer
had manifested. It is a matastasizing cancer that will likely spread, but his Radiologist hoped
that with this procedure, it would not spread to his brain.
I saw Rothko's non-denominational church in Houston, too. It’s a church that is painted all
black. When I got back to San Francisco from Houston, I dreamt that everything in my house
was painted black, like the Rothko chapel. I was in a room full of people, but I was the only one
standing. Everyone else floated waist-high, horizontally, like floating logs, bumping into one
another. People's arms and legs rolled towards me, bumping my body, each shaded to the utmost
degree. I stood at the center of the room, looking around for someone. I saw my father off in the
corner and waded through people to get to him. When I reached him, I tried to lift him into
Vol. II. Issue. III 271 September 2011