Muse: Twombly's Lepanto Cycle

So I left off last time with the promise to introduce into the conversation a Muse of sorts that helps me sort through the old/new dissertation duality. Here it is:

Cy Twombly, Lepanto I-XII

The reaction I get to this display from visitors to my office (on the rare occasion they comment) is generally one of puzzlement. What...are they? Are those cave paintings? Did you child draw those?

"No," I respond, "this is the Lepanto Cycle, a masterpiece created by Cy Twombly--one of the greatest American artists of the last century--for the 2001 Venice Biennale. It depicts the historical Battle of Lepanto between the fleet of the Ottoman Empire and that of a league of states attempting to check its expansion."

"Oh...that's interesting" or somesuch usually follows.

They'd probably think I'm nuts were I to continue: "I also think it's a useful guide for studying international relations--an intellectual thesis for unpacking the complex historical and human baggage that burden and define our understanding of world affairs."

Crazy or sane, I find that pondering it stimulates my thought process about scholarship in general and IR in particular. Twombly's Lepanto is a constant source of inspiration--and of hope. Let me explain why.

One fundamental conceptual challenge I perceive when considering academic scholarship and especially when trying to figure out how to write a dissertation is the old/new problem: how do I combine the old (the existence research and ideas) with the new (my original thoughts) in an intellectually meaningful way? In essence, how do I say something that is worth saying light of all that has been said? Hasn't everything worth saying been said? Hasn't every historical case study been mined to exhaustion?

Observing Lepanto, I cannot help but be consistently, continuously shocked--scandalized, even--by the boldness of Twombly's solution to this particular problem. After all, the Battle of Lepanto, to put it mildly, has been done over and over and over and over again in the visual arts. But Twombly aggressively rejects the argument that the past is passe--that certain subject matter is unworthy of consideration or that contemporary man has intellectually evolved beyond the need to deal seriously with his forebears on their own terms.

Instead, his simultaneous, bold embrace of elements primitive or ancient (the rough and visceral brush work; narration via sequential static panels) alongside the assertively contemporary medium and context (the striking use of color; the self-referencing use of blank canvas; the institutional context of the 21st century Venetian art festival) situates the observer in a middle ground neither ancient nor modern. Here, held fixed in the limbo of the middle distance, the aggressively human themes of the painting--war, lust, pain, victory, defeat, and death--as well as the elemental ones of fire and water--speak to the audience on terms both innovative and static.

Thus Twombly situates us at the meeting of the old and the new: the radical intermixture of the two that precipitates a clarion statement on the spectacle that is the enduring human drama of international interaction. Here we have the ensigns of the modern--the technological marvel of the war galley, the arraying of disciplined lines, the clash of organized imperial forces on a massive scale--rendered in and on the terms of the ancient--the horror of fire and blood in his reds and oranges, the impenetrability and unconcerned placidity of the sea in blues and blacks, the cold purple voids of wreckage, destruction, and waste.

To reduce and intelligently comment on the contemporary in terms that speak and will speak to the ages. That was the famous aim of Thucydides, as well as many of the theorists of international affairs who came after him. I am fortunate to have Twombly's Lepanto as an exemplar of this ideal as I write.