What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

92 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
to efface the signs of figural elements in his earlier work, and the
artist Frank Stella has said that he still senses draped figures
“underneath” Pollock’s canvases. 34 It’s certainly true that
Pollock’s actions can be explained in that way, but since this is a
book about paint, and not representation, I do not want to say
more about it. What matters is what happens in this one tiny
extract from Lavender Mist: even here, in these four or five square
inches, there is an astonishing amount of work, a tremendous
labor devoted to making a chaos. The allover paintings are like
battles fought against whatever might unexpectedly produce a
continuous, figural outline. The struggle is clear enough on the
whole canvas, but it is waged just as strongly in marks that are
not much larger than the weave of the canvas (which is also
visible in this detail). This is what Pollock spent his time doing,
working to create a convincing and utter disarray.
Yet no chaos is complete. There is no such thing as absolute
absence of structure, or pure randomness: if there were, we
would be unable to perceive it at all, because it would have no
form or color to understand. 35 Everyday randomness usually
harbors some secret order. The random-dot stereograms that are
popular in books and calendars are actually strongly ordered,
and computers that produce lists of random numbers sometimes
do so by following instructions designed to produce the effect of
randomness. Even here, where the destruction is nearly complete,
there are a few marks that still preserve the sense of gesture.
There’s the graceful curve of black at the center, and especially a
tiny white loop that’s nearly lost, just right of the black vertical
that comes up the left third of the painting, a fingerbreadth below
the dark green smudge at its top. It’s tiny, but it is clearly a loop,
and the white strands that fall from either side are clear signs of
the hand that made them: you can picture Pollock’s hand,
making curlicues in the air. It is the beginning of form, the first
step out of chaos.
These stories about the materia prima are only a few out of
many. The place where painting begins, and the moment before
it begins, is almost unreachable by poetry or prose. Alchemy’s
benefit is that it is full of stories—almost too full, almost
neurotically overstuffed with competing accounts and endless
synonyms. I compared the lists to the devil’s many names, but
they are also like a neurotic’s compulsive counting and naming.
In an obvious sense, alchemists were concerned that they begin