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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 127
CIRCULATION
In circulation, the collection tube curves down and re-enters the
vessel itself, pouring its condensate back into the boiling mixture
(Figure 6). The vessel is filled with whatever substance needs to
be circulated, and then the glass is sealed so there is no way for
the pressure to vent. The airtight seal is very dangerous, and it is
the main reason explosions were so common in alchemical
laboratories. Even so, the alchemists often felt it was necessary
seal their vessels—perhaps they were thinking of the closed
womb, or the underground cavities where nature transmutes
metals. The act of sealing was done specially under the protection
of the god Hermes, who was the alchemists’ guiding deity—or as
we still say, the vessels were hermetically sealed.
The alchemists called such vessels pelicans, since that bird was
supposed to nourish its young by pecking at its own breast and
letting the blood spurt into the open mouths of its chicks. In the
alchemical treatises, birds fly up and down in arcs to
demonstrate the graceful, ritual violence of circulation. It is an
especially attractive variation on distillation and cohobation
(repeated distillation), since it conjures the cycles of birth and
death as the substance evaporates, condenses, and returns to
itself; and it is reminiscent of gestation, since it takes place out of
the reach of the alchemist’s intervention. (In an actual pelican, the
sides may become coated with opaque residue, so that the entire
process will be invisible, as if it were a real womb.) The boiling
substance dies, and gives up its spirit, and then receives it back,
and lives again. Or, in the pregnancy metaphor, it is slowly
nourished with the juices extracted from its own body, until—
often after a suitable period of time such as nine days, or nine
months—the pelican is broken and its contents poured out.
Circulation is all too familiar a feeling in painting: it creeps in
whenever the studio and the work seem to be hermetically sealed,
so that the only nourishment must come from the refuse of the
painting itself. Nothing new enters the studio, and nothing is
wasted: everything goes into the work, and comes back out again.
Usually that is a state of mind, a kind of stifling end-of-the-road
feeling, but it can also leave its marks in the painting. Francis
Bacon sometimes scraped up the layers of dried paint and dust
from the floor of his studio and mashed them into pigments. It is
possible to see the results in some of his paintings, in the form of