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

WHAT PAINTING IS 71
repression: they pretend that a high enough chroma takes paint
out of the sewer and puts it in the fresh open air. Painters who
work in browner and more traditional styles cannot acknowledge
those facts, except as jokes: but their reluctance, or blindness,
about what they do is better than the obliviousness of most
painters, who think they are saved by bright colors and hardly
give their excremental medium a second thought.
The alchemists’ interest in putrefactio is shared by
contemporary artists, many of whom see something beautiful in
natural decay. The rotting fruit, blooming at the back of the
refrigerator, is also outlandishly beautiful with its crown of
bluish hair spreading over a glowing orange skull. So is the throat
ravaged with bronchitis, blossoming in smooth white flowers.
And the bloated deer half-swamped in the lakeshore is also
beautiful, with its gorgeous smooth hide stretched into a lucent
bubble. There are hundreds of examples in fine art, each more
nauseating and compelling than the last. The installation artist
Ann Hamilton soaked a hundred thousand pennies in honey, and
then let them gather a film of dust; Andres Serrano made
stagnant infusions of piss, semen, and milk; Frances Whitehead
works with fabrics soaked in water, mud, oils, resins, and
perfumes. In the time I have been teaching artists—a little less
than a decade—I have seen rows of moulding slices of bread,
desiccating open jars of baby food, bottles half-filled with fetid
tomatoes, rotting fish dampened with a sprinkler system, and
condoms stuffed with swollen putrescent tapioca. 3 Beginning in
the early 1970s, there have also been artworks made of old turds,
dried blood, and sanitary napkins. If anything, contemporary
artists are more inventive than their alchemical forbears in the
search for the conjunction of the repulsive and the compelling. 4
But it was alchemy that made that compulsion into a principle.
For alchemists, one of the great puzzles was how to begin the
work. Their purpose was nothing less than to make perfection
itself—and what artist imagines anything different?—and so they
needed to think carefully about their raw ingredients. Some
chose to begin with sulfur, mercury, and salt, but to others that
seemed too simpleminded, and doomed to failure. How could
the perfect Stone be made with such universally known
substances? And so they set out in search of the proper object
from which to begin—something not as obvious as sulfur or
mercury, something that would never occur to a literal mind, or a