Twombly
Twombly
Twombly
Abigail Susik
Abstract
This paper theoretically explores the work of Cy Twombly by analyzing a web of
interrelated texts by authors such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille,
Stphane Mallarm, Rosalind Krauss, and others. By focusing on the reception
history of Twombly, as well as the larger critical discourse to which this reception
owes much of its tenor, Twomblys work is revealed as an unexpected locus for
contemporary theoretical debates concerning the nature of writing. Through an
analysis of paintings such as Olympia (1957) and Herodiade (1960), Twombly
articulates the act of scripting as one of indolence rather than violence.
Foreword
Perhaps it is appropriate that when I set out thinking about the paintings of Cy
Twombly some time ago, I was quickly routed into a labyrinth of literature that
kept me busy reading as opposed to actually looking at the paintings. The
fundamentally intertextual and poetic nature of Twomblys works resulted in a
domino-effect of prose-heavy reception from the start of his career in the postwar period. So it was nothing new that I was caught up in this series of
distractionsarrested at first, like nearly everyone else in the past few decades,
by the illuminating commentary of Roland Barthes in particular. Yet, the more I
followed the trail of texts to their various detours and destinations, the farther I
travelled away from the point where I had started: Twomblys enigmatic
paintingsto the extent that nothing quite conclusive had been gained in my
analysis of Twombly, it seemed.
reading and text-chasing became, in fact, rather fitting to Twomblys own elusive
processes?
Within the voluminous literature, which has expanded greatly over the last
decade, I found myself drawn primarily to Francophone strain of the dialogue on
Twombly. Barthess meta-reading of Twombly led me to consider his historical
allusions to Georges Bataille and Stphane Mallarm, which in turn invited a
review of Rosalind Krausss important art historical account of Twombly, and
finally a glimpse at Jacques Derridas related philosophical mediations on
Mallarm. These various types of textscritical, poetic, philosophicalrelevant
to Twombly both directly and indirectlyseemed to feed into one another in a
way that was circular and overwhelming, to the extent than any traditional
account of these simultaneous parallels appeared ungainly if not impossible. My
analysis, therefore, became peripatetic; purely associative, reception upon
reception. Twombly referenced Mallarm, which led Barthes to reference
Mallarm and Bataille, which led Krauss to a related set of references, and so on,
vectorially.
Moreover, the tidal drift that these texts inspired out and away from my initial
object of study in Twombly appeared to be inevitable and seismic. Eventually, I
conceded to this innately dispersed character of my analytical experience,
chalked it up to my inability (for whatever reason) to confront the paintings
directly,
as
well
as
(more
apologetically
to
myself)
the
intensely
One suspects from its pulsatory succession of ideas and raw language that
Roland Barthes wrote Cy Twombly: Works on Paper first, and then composed
the more philosophically constrained The Wisdom of Art as his polished,
professional response to the Whitney Museum's commission for a catalogue
essay.1 Indeed, Barthes confesses the nascent quality of his thoughts in Works
on Paperan effortless schema of observation which adeptly fits the casually
delinquent feel of Twomblys works themselves. His meandering exploration of a
Cy Twombly monograph produces sketchy contemplations, each turn of the page
offering another blurry optic through which to speculate about TWBarthes's
appropriately cryptic shorthand abbreviation for Twombly. 2
Yet, over the course of Barthes's desultory meditation, Works on Paper, two
names are conspicuously summoned and stand out from the casual string of
associations woven there: Georges Bataille, in allusion, and Stphane Mallarm,
in appellation. Rarely linked in critical literature before the past three decades,
these names appear in harmonious conjunction in Barthess 1979 essay via the
accompaniment of Twombly as mediator. There, Barthes constructs an intricate
web of theoretical innuendo that serves as a support structure for this transtemporal triumvirate.
The allusion to Bataille appears first in the essay, within the section labeled
Writing. Stating that Twombly's painterly gesture is the surplus of an action,
Barthes chooses to evoke the excessive rather than transgressive ethos of
Bataillian Materialism in relation to his thesis that Twombly merely alludes to the
act of writing in his paintings: writing no longer abides anywhere, it is
absolutely in excess. Is it not at this extreme limit that art really begins, or the
textall that man does for nothing, his perversion, his expenditure?3 Barthes
is evoking Bataille's crucial essay of 1933, The Notion of Expenditure, and its
later development into the three volume collection of essays, The Accursed
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Of course excess and loss are the two sides of the Janus-faced process of
Bataillian expenditure: the orgiastic, anti-cathartic, anti-utilitarian release is
necessarily followed by a state of total exhaustion. Such limitless loss5 can be
said to be the only aim, if any, of non-productive expenditure. However, what
Barthes is seemingly at pains to communicate in Works on Paper is that
Twombly's work does not indicate a drive toward the ejaculatory celebration of
destruction that is the excessive act itself, but rather, it avoids the present time of
the act altogether, inhabiting instead the timeless zone of the ruptured
afterward. This is why, for Barthes, Twombly only alludes to the physical act of
writing: his scriptural gestures result in displaced garble, careless, lazy,
indifferent as a pair of pants left on the floor after coitusa quintessentially used
remainder of language.6 Twombly can be said to engage in non-productive
expenditure, indeedbut it is a languishing expenditure, begun at the plane of
depletion and concluded at another, identical plain of depletion (resulting,
paradoxically, in a surplus of depletion). The excessive-transgressive act itself,
as an archetypal violence, is implied only in memory: hence the inherently
tautological structure of Twombly's line, the absentminded attenuation of a protoverbal glyph or the compulsive, knee-jerk repetition of a lolling curve. Barthes's
assessment, voiced several places in the essay: nowhere is violence apparent,
indolence is Twombly's mode.7
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Barthes more obligingly ascribes the formulation of the artistic act as violent to
the likes of the symbolist Stphane Mallarm, framing the poets late nineteenthcentury experiments on language as an attack which sought to deconstruct the
sentence.12 Mallarm appears in Barthes's essay following the overt allusion to
Bataillian excessagain, boldly suggesting a direct genealogical relationship
between the poet and Andr Breton's excrement philosopher.13 Barthes here
draws upon one of the several deeply entrenched theoretical tropes that
surround a century of scholarly discourse on Mallarm: the sullying of the white
page as the essential act of transgression. In his 1895 essay The Book: A
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Yet, the pertinent question for philosophers of the twentieth century was not so
much whether Mallarm reveled in the artist's transgression of a mythic,
sacrificial space of creation. Mallarm's writings readily indicate that he played
the part of both the celebrant and the mournful elegist of the metaphysical matrix
at different times. Rather, the question was whether Mallarm deplored the
inevitable depletion and dissolution of the mythic page and the poetic word into
the machinations of mass-produced journalistic language. Such overproduction
of the printed word resulted in the eradication of the myth of a transgress-able
poetic space. The whiteness of the page that threatens to swallow the poetic
word like a shipwreck is transformed into a bottomless palimpsest, an abyss of
excessive language, which absorbs and camouflages any new marks or
creations.
In other words, Barthes implies that Mallarm was not so much gleefully
destroying the integrity of the sentence, the page, or the mythic wordas he was
capitalizing uponand thereby further catalyzingthe already dilapidated
structure and evacuated signification of language, itself the inevitable result of
the impact of technological commerce upon linguistic communication.
Barthes does not attempt to align Twombly's economy of loss with a specific
reading of Mallarms politics of the poetic. Instead, he renders Twombly's
apparent recognition of the post-transgressive state neither as jubilatory nor as
nostalgic, . . . neither a violent art nor an icy one, but rather, to my taste, by
TW's, unclassifiable. . .21 Yet, Barthes seems to need to codify what he sees as
the inexplicable neutrality of Twombly's work. Toward the end of Works on
Paper, he proceeds to give some definition to Twombly's apparent lack of
conscious or unconscious desire for aggression in the aesthetic act by invoking
Zen Buddhism, pertinent for Barthes because of the playful way in which
Twombly approaches the painterly gesture, the elegance with which he
intersperses white space with his marks: his rarus. This insertion of the notion of
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the indifferent
dysgraphia
22
departure for Rome that year.26 In an essay that Twombly published in the Italian
journal, L'Esperienza in August-September 1957, Twombly meditates upon the
significance of the monochromatic white canvas and evokes the symbolic
whiteness of Mallarm.27 Ironically however, Twombly's first and only painting to
refer overtly and without question to Mallarm is the pivotal Herodiade (1960)
(fig.1), the earliest example of the artist's shift from the predominate use of white
house paint to the application of heavy-hued oil-paint onto the canvas with his
hands.
Fig 1: Cy Twombly, Herodiade, 1960 Oil paint, lead pencil, wax crayon, and oil based house paint
on canvas, 200 x 281.9 cm Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
28
Return from Parnassus (1961) are paintings that might be thought of as referring
to Mallarm's relationship with the poets involved in the journal Parnasse
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10
11
Fig 2: Cy Twombly, Farragosto IV, 1961, Oil paint, wax crayon and lead pencil on canvas,
165.5 x 200.4 cm, Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
12
shadows and nothingness that plagues her in her virginity. She stares into a
speculum in horror at the contrast between the unmanageable presence of her
physical beauty and the futile mystery of her being, which she narcissistically
wishes to keep for herself rather than divulge to future lovers.33 She is the
epitome of somatic excess, a putrid femininity that promulgates itself, fiercely
shunning the penetration/insemination paradigm of transgression: I love the
horror of being virgin and wish / To love amid the dread my hair makes me feel, /
So that, at night, withdrawn into my bed, reptile / Inviolate I feel in my useless
flesh. . .34 It is sexual touch that Herodiade both desperately craves and
feverishly abhors, a paradox that drives her at the close of the poem to
indeterminate convulsions of either self-induced orgasm or death.
The power that Twombly's handprints have over the written and drawn symbols
in Herodiade results from the proximity of the referent to the indexthe close
sensory relationship of the actual hand to the trace of that handas compared
with the mirage-like status of the referent with regard to the symbols and quasisymbols represented. However, even at the introductory stage of Twombly's
exploration of the bodily index in Herodiade, it is arguable that much more than
the simple fact of Twombly's physical engagement with the canvas, the trace of
his body, is suggested by his gestural practices. While the entrance of the body
and specifically the artist's body into the artwork is certainly a landmark in itself,
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13
14
15
by Pollock's flinging of paint with the hard end of the brush pale in comparison to
the smorgasbord of grotesqueries that Twombly so often proffers up in his work.
In this sense, it can be said that Twombly is tracing Pollock's trace, mimicking his
index repeatedly, in excess of transgression, in order to reform it as his own. This
is surrealist automatic writing rendered as a physiologically impulsive afterwritingthe repetitive muscular twitch of an alert but disengaged regurgitation of
both asemic and semantic textual driveswhat Benjamin Buchloh has called the
libidinal compulsion of the pictorial mark-making process.37 This is the essence
of the act of writing as a convulsive human habit, wherein the search for meaning
is placed in abeyance in the face of the somatic reflex.38 Thus, from the outset it
can be concluded that for Twombly the indexical mark is not a radical invasion of
his own subjectivity and its temporal disjunction into the mythic aesthetic space,
but represents instead the dross of previous subjectivities and bodies, the
digestion process of cultural production. Twombly's compulsive mark recalls a
whole history of indexical marks and transgressions against a conjectured mythic
space. In a word, the bodily index is for Twombly a residue, left not as a product
16
Thus even at the time the marker strikes, he strikes in a tense that is
over; entering the scene as a criminal, he understands that the mark
he makes can only take the form of the clue. He delivers his mark over
to a future that will be carried on without his presence, away from
himself, dividing it from within into a before and an after.39
Graffiti is therefore, if we follow Krausss lead, not a true index of the graffito.
Instead, graffiti can be equated with writing in general, as writing (and by
extension its counterparts drawing and painting) always suggests the indexical
impression of the entity that made the mark, but at the same time remains bound
in its secondary relationship to the phonetic sign and its signified. The written
sign is already a trace, and is therefore not an index of any one body. The
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17
18
19
Fig 3: Cy Twombly, Olympia, 1957, Oil-based house paint, wax crayon, colored pencil and lead
pencil on canvas, 200 x 264.5 cm, Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Interestingly, Bataille likened this piecemeal dissolution of the human body to the
organic decomposition of a corpsesuggesting not so much the fracturing of the
body's form as its gradual dissipation into other. This formulation aligns alteration
with the continual motion of the trace rather than the more aggressive canceling
out of language sous rature. Also significant for Bataille, the disappearance of the
material form signaled the appearance of the immaterial form: the ghost. Hence
the paradoxical nature of alteration that Krauss underlines in her essay, the
simultaneous reversal of form and its renewal as other in a chain of
supplementations and eradications.
20
21
Derrida draws widely from Mallarm's poetry and prose to make his point in The
Double Session, but nowhere is the process of textual dissemination more
delineated than in the random pile of Mallarm's discarded papers that Jacques
Sherer assembled together in 1957 and called Le Livre de Mallarm.50 Though
fascinating to ruminate upon and revolutionarily experimental in spatial format,
Scherer's Livre is the false fulfillment of Mallarm's failed lifelong promise to
produce a book of mythical proportions to serve as a counter-model to mass
media.51 Almost everything that Mallarm wrote was intended as a portion of this
virtual book, envisioned as encompassing poetry, theater, music and art in a
panoply of genres. In particular, Un coup de ds jamais n'abolira le hasard
(1895)with its spatialization of the page and system of interwoven, non-linear
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22
Fig 4: Detail of, Jacques Scherer, Le Livre de Mallarm: Premires recherches sur des
documents indits (Paris: Gallimard, 1957): 4(A). Gallimard
Perusing
Scherer's
Livre
results
in
both
numerous
eurekas
and
23
Fig 5 : Detail of, Jacques Scherer, Le Livre de Mallarm: Premires recherches sur des
documents indits (Paris: Gallimard, 1957): 5(A). Gallimard.
Roland Barthes, The Wisdom of Art, in Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977,
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979.
2
Roland Barthes, Cy Twombly: Works on Paper and The Wisdom of Art, in Richard Howard
(trans.), The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation (Berkeley:
California University Press, 1985): 157-194. These two essays have been featured in many
subsequent texts on Twombly, an extensive bibliographic record which I will refrain from detailing
here.
3
Roland Barthes, The Wisdom of Art, The Responsibility of Forms: 160-161.
4
The Notion of Expenditure was first published in La Critique Sociale (1933). Here, it is taken
from, Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl, ed., trans.
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985): 116-129. Also see, Georges Bataille, The
Accursed Share, Robert Hurley, trans., 2 vols, (New York: Zone Books, 1991-1993).
5
Georges Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure, Visions of Excess: 123.
6
Roland Barthes, Cy Twombly: Works on Paper, The Responsibility of Forms: 158.
7
Richard Leeman has also commented upon Barthess usage of indolence in relation to
Twombly in his excellent study, Cy Twombly: A Monograph (Paris: Flammarion, 2005): 88. Also
see pages 181-182 for further commentary on Barthess Twombly essays. Perhaps it is of
significance in relationship to Barthess term indolence that in a 2007 interview with Nicholas
Serota in Rome, Twombly admitted the indulgent nature of his work as well as his discomfort
with that indulgence. History Behind the Thought, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Nicholas
Serota, ed. (London: Tate Publishing, 2008): 51, 53.
8
Ibid: 162.
9
The question of Twomblys mark as that of the graffito is contested by Twombly himself in the
2007 interview with Serota. Ibid: 53.
10
Ibid: 167.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid: 161.
24
13
Andr Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) in Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
(trans.), Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1972): 185.
14
It might be useful here to suggest a parallel between Mallarm's mythic page and the
Modernist canvas as championed by Clement Greenberg in relation to the tradition of
Metaphysics. In both formulations, the space of creation is rendered as the fulfillment of the
promise of unitary being. However, in Mallarm's theorization, it is not the artist as a privileged
human who enables the existence of such a pure space (as it is in Greenberg's); rather the artist
is the unfortunate harbinger of Neitzschean-Dionysian forces that disrupt the Apollonian space.
15
Stphane Mallarm, The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Selected
Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions, 1982): 83.
16
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes such an observation in her discussion of Jacques Lacan's
formulation of the signifier as a conglomerate of presence and absence. See her Translator's
Preface in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976): lxv.
17
Georges Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure, Visions of Excess: 120.
18
Ibid., 120.
19
Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarm: La Lucidit et sa face d'ombre (1953), Ernest Sturm, trans.
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, La Double
sance in Dissmination, Barbara Johnson, trans. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981):
173-285; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984). For a condensed account of her interpretation of Mallarm,
see The Revolt of Mallarm in Mallarm in the Twentieth Century (Madison: Associated
University Presses, 1998): 31-52; Philippe Sollers, Literature and Totality in Writing and the
Experience of Limits (1968), Philip trans. Barnard and David Hayman, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983): 63-85; Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littraire (1952), Ann Smock, trans.
(Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1982) : 38-48, See also, Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre venir
(Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
20
Roland Barthes, Cy Twombly: Works on Paper, The Responsibility of Forms: 161.
21
Ibid: 166.
22
Ibid: 173.
23
Ibid: 173-174.
24
Ibid: 165.
25
Stphane Mallarm, Herodiade, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Selected Poetry and Prose (New
York: New Directions, 1982): 21-33.
26
Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: MoMA, 1994): 27. Leeman also
details Twomblys preoccupation with Mallarm throughout his text, Cy Twombly: A Monograph.
27
Quoted in Ibid: 27.
28
Stphane Mallarm, Another Fan, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Selected Poetry and Prose (New
York: New Directions, 1982): 43. Cy Twombly's painting School of Fontainbleu (1960) also
includes the phrase, how to hold a wing. Leeman also mentions several other references to
wings (and swans) in Twomblys oeuvre. Cy Twombly: A Monograph: 114.
29
Twombly's painting Study for Presence of a Myth (1959) also includes the inscription
Parnasse. Leeman has suggested that the references to Parnassus in Twomblys work might
also stem from the influences of Raphael and Baudelaire, variously. Cy Twombly: A Monograph:
91, 112.
30
Ibid: 112.
31
Heiner Bastian makes such an argument in his essay for Cy Twombly: Poems to the Sea (New
York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1990).
32
Herodiade in Selected Poetry and Prose: 21.
33
Ibid: 27.
34
Ibid: 31.
35
In the 2007 interview with Serota, Twombly mentions his revulsion for the viscousness of the
paint, and makes a reference to a child drawing on a wall with excrement. History Behind the
Thought, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 50.
25
36
Rosalind E. Krauss, Six, in The Optical Unconscious (London: MIT Press, 1996): 243-308.
Other essays by Krauss concerning Twombly include: Le Cours de latin, in Cahiers du Muse
National d'Art Moderne, no. 53 (Autumn 1995): 4-23; Qui a peur du Pollock de Greenberg?, in
Cahiers du Muse National d'Art Moderne, no. 45/46 (Autumn-Winter 1993): 159-172; and Cy's
Up, in Artforum, vol. 33, pt. 1 (September 1994) : 70-5. A recent article by John Bird assesses
Krausss contribution to the Twombly literature. Jon Bird, Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the
Work of Cy Twombly, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 3 (2007): 495-496. Her writing on Twombly
is also discussed in passim in, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons.
37
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Speros Other Traditions (1996), Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MIT Press,
2003): 436. If the surrealists introduced automatic writing into the realm of fine art and Freudian
theory from the popular spiritualism of the nineteenth century, Twombly brought that semiunconscious inscription into the future in the postwar period by rendering it almost totally, asemic,
or non-semantic thereby aligning it all the more closely with the increasingly automated
production of mass-reproduced language. Today, such a corpus takes on even further
significance given the current potential for a postliterate society as a result of the information age.
38
I agree with Richard Shiffs physiological reading of Twomblys writing at large. However, with
this particular point, my analysis stands in opposition Shiffs discussion of habit in Twomblys
hand as a way of returning to meaning. Shiff writes, This writing is distinctively personal and quite
irregular, as if the habit of Twomblys hand was to escape habit. Why does he write? My guess is
that handwriting concretizes and re-animates forces of intellect and emotionhence ideas and
feelings that might otherwise evade his grasp. Richard Shiff, Charm, Cy Twombly: Cycles and
Seasons: 26.
39
Rosalind E. Krauss, Six, in The Optical Unconscious: 260.
40
Ibid.
41
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1997).
42
Ibid: 66-67.
43
Ibid: 37. Derrida writes, Deconstructing this tradition will therefore not consist of reversing it, of
making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an
innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because language is first, in a sense I
shall gradually reveal, writing. Usurpation has already always begun. Also see p. 106.
44 Olympia by Rosalind E. Krauss, in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A
User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997): 147-152. Bataille's review can be found in, uvres
compltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
45
Georges Bataille, quoted in Briony Fer, Poussiere/Peinture: Bataille on Painting, in On
Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997): 79.
46
Rosalind Krauss, Olympia, Formless: A User's Guide: 149-50.
47
Jacques Derrida, The Battle of Proper Names, Of Grammatology: 107-118.
48
Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (eds), A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections
about the Book and Writing (New York: Granary Books, 2000): 134-5.
49
Jacques Derrida, The Double Session (1969), in Dissmination (Chicago: University Press,
1981): 173-285.
50
Jacques Scherer, Le Livre de Mallarm: Premires recherches sur des documents indits
(Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
51
Jean-Franois Chevrier, To whomever !, Art and Utopia: Limited Action (Barcelona:
MACBA, 2004): 16.
th
Abigail Susik received her doctorate in 20 Century Art History and Theory from Columbia
University in May of 2009. Her dissertation, The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the
Outmoded, analyzed the work of Louis Aragon, Andr Breton, and Max Ernst in relation to
Walter Benjamins criticism. She has presented material related to this project at the University of
Pennsylvania, the CAA Annual Conference 2008, the Tate Modern, and elsewhere. Portions of
her dissertation have appeared in Wreck (University of British Columbia), Thresholds (MIT), and
26
Inferno (University of St. Andrews). She is the 2009-2010 Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at
Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
27