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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 129
dirty clots of fur and grit mixed with oil. COLOR PLATE 9 is a
detail from one of his triptychs. Bacon was dabbing and blotting
the paint with a rag, and some of the lint tore off and got mixed
in with the colors. At the same time the paint was drying, so that
each time he came back to it, the rag lost more fibers and the paint
became hairier and harder to manage. After a week or so, his rag
was uprooting paint skins and dragging them along, until they
built into this massive violet grey clot. It’s like a wave moving
across the canvas from left to right, trailing a mouldy froth of
fibers, each tinted in its own color—white, grey, red, and dark
purple. The wave crests toward the right, and throws off
streamers of spume: at the top is a cone of lint wrapped around a
single human hair; and at the bottom (at the lower center of this
detail) a winding rope of dried hair hangs out in space like a
waxed and twirled moustache. On the right, the steep face of the
wave is a barber-pole of wet colors alternating with drier ones: a
bright magenta that was already half-hardened, a runny white,
and red. The whole surrealist object could just as well have been
scraped off the floor and glued to the canvas, and in its place—at
the center of a bloodied figure, surrounded by fragments of torn
meat—it is nodule of pain, torn from a painted body, just as it
was torn from the studio.
As the materia prima reminds us, paint is very much like waste.
That is so in both senses of the word “waste”: some paint is like
the refuse of the studio, and some is like human waste. In the
studio it can feel as if paint is not just reminiscent of shit, but it is
shit. The alchemists realized that excrement cannot be denied,
that it has to be used. It is hopeless to pretend that oil painting
does not continuously recall the worst miscarriages of digestion.
Circulation is the esoteric discipline of recycling substances,
especially the body’s products, but also whatever is despised and
overlooked, including the dusty waste material of the studio.
Circulation is a metaphor, as well, for recycling the waste
products of the mind, and somehow going on when nothing new
can be found. Old discarded thoughts become new ones, and the
work starts again. The sludge that has sunk to the bottom of the
pelican is boiled to the surface, forced upward, and purified, and
when it comes back into the work it is somehow—perhaps
incrementally, perhaps infinitesimally—stronger. Circulation is
also a good name for one of Samuel Beckett’s unnamable ideas:
what it means to inhabit a life lived in absolute stasis and