July 23, 2009, 02:00 PM ET

I Spit on Your Art!

"You do what?" I asked, knowing full well what I'd just been told to do. My friend Lisa Rosen, who's an art conservator by profession, had just finished explaining to me, in some detail, that to clean the soot and grime off my old, damaged paintings, the best solvent was my own saliva. She had generously spent over an hour with me, painstakingly demonstrating how I was to do this, which explains why I'm spending a good part of this summer spitting on my own work.

I'm busily restoring the oldest paintings that will be included in my retrospective, in 2010, at the Williamson Art Gallery at Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif. The show opens a little more than a year from now, but Mary MacNaughton (the director of the museum and curator of my exhibition) and I have already been working on it. Now is the time for me to be putting in lots of hours spitting out saliva onto cotton swabs, and then delicately rubbing off the spots of grime that have accumulated on the surfaces of my pictures over the years.

Why are my old paintings in such bad condition? Simple answer: Because I never considered the possibility that I ought to store them properly. Who knew the day would come when I'd want to haul the old buggers out of storage and show them in public again?

While merrily spitting and rubbing away, I listen to Mozart, or John Prine, trying to avoid thinking about the obvious Freudian interpretation of this latest turn in my work. Mostly, I simply remind myself that painting is by nature a goopy, messy activity -- exactly what James Elkins explained it to be in What Painting Is (1999, Routledge), his fascinating book on the chemical and alchemical properties of paint. Painters have always been playing around with ways to generate different colors and suspend pigments in various mediums. Over the years, artists have boiled, stirred, ground up and buried such lovely substances as blood, urine, excrement and cow udders, with a particular fondness for storing stuff in pig bladders. And over the years restorers have tried to clean paintings with everything from ammonia to Palmolive soap and furniture polish. Who am I to object to working with a little of my own spit?

When all is said and done, to paraphrase the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell, the act of painting amounts to defacing a piece of cloth tacked to some boards with colored grease by means of some sticks with hairs on their ends.

Compared to actual painting, cleaning a painting is as neat and clean as knitting a tea cosy.

(Detail from a photo by Flickr user hbp_pix)

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Comments

1. sbaron33 - July 24, 2009 at 09:15 am

Ah, spitting - the ultimate form of that art school exhortation, "expressing yourself" - literally. Is there a better temporary adhesive to attach a patch of a test color to a painting?