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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 121
good a track record. Art history is concerned almost entirely with
the suns and other things paint represents once it is sublimated,
and very little with the unpleasantness of the machinery that
creates the miracle. From the vantage point of heaven, or of
traditional art history, the studio is only the staging area, and
what is important happens from the moment the paint becomes a
sun. But from the point of view of earth, distillation is not that
easy. After the fact, it seems like effortless trans-substantiation,
where the spirit rises like breath from the body. But before the
fact, in the vessel itself, distillation feels like a churning cauldron.
As any artist knows, there is no such thing as effortless mimesis:
it takes work to make paint look like anything at all.
The alchemists tell the fable of King Duenech, who had a bad
case of constipation: he was “swollen by bile,” and “horrible in
his behavior.” His wise doctor Pharut sealed him in a glass steam
house. The heat freed him of his “black bile,” and he returned to
his people, wet with dew. 1 If this were a medical legend, there
would have been a toilet in the steam house, and perhaps Pharut
would have offered the King his best laxative and a good
diaphoretic to make him sweat. But this is alchemy, and things
are never that easy. The alchemist Michael Maier explains there
are three kinds of bodily discharge. One is the “thick” and “fat” bile
—that is, feces—that are discharged by purgatives. Second is the
“liquid, thin, bilious, and salt” secretion that appears as urine.
Third is “still finer,” and is carried off as sweat. The King
suffered from all three kinds of corporeal stoppage, and he had to
be relieved in a more radical manner. Another alchemist tells the
full story: Duenech sweated so strongly that his sheets were
stained, because the black bile had squeezed out of his intestines
and suffused his entire body. Pharut had to cure him three times:
once by letting him sweat, then by putting him in an airtight bed
and rubbing “evil-smelling oil” into his feet until the remaining
bile retreated to his head, and finally by rubbing him with a
mixture of water, oil, and sulfur. 2 And Duenech had it easy. Other
constipated kings had to be hacked in pieces and boiled into a
mush, or drowned.
As far as the gross substance is concerned, there is nothing
elegant or beautiful about distillation. Nor is it simple. 3 In
alchemy, distillation is sometimes the easy laboratory procedure
that makes wine into spirits, but more often it is an almost
mystical pursuit designed to capture ever-so-slightly different