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

72 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
superficial thinker. That cloudy object was called the First
Substance, materia prima.
Since everyone would expect the materia prima to be as esoteric
as the rest of alchemy, the trick was to fool the vulgar crowd and
look instead for the most ordinary object imaginable. Alchemists
wrote poems and told stories about the fabulous materia prima
that could be found anywhere in the world, if people only had
the eyes to see it. Travelers would trip over it, thinking it was a
stone dislodged on the roadway. Farmers would plow it up,
taking it to be a stubborn root. Fishermen would sit down next to
it and fish the whole day through, without even recognizing what
was inches from their feet. This materia prima could the
commonest lump of clay, or the most ordinary nondescript
pebble. What is more, it could be actually repulsive: it could be a
poor plant in a sump, reeking of swamp gas, or a turd in a
compost pile, slowly returning to the earth. The one object that
anyone in the world would overlook, the one that would attract
no one’s attention, the one that would be instantly cast away like
a mouldy orange: that alone would be the key to eternity,
spiritual consummation, riches, and everlasting health. The Secret
Figures of the Rosicrucians calls materia prima the “greasy fat dew
of the ground,” the “womb of the earth,” the “salt of nature,” and
finally “the one good thing God has created in this visible
world.” 5
The materia prima is exquisitely, brilliantly beautiful to the
person who can understand it for what it is. In the midst of its
rotting pile, it shines at the “true philosopher” with a secret light.
The idea that everything begins in squalor and refuse is an old
one. Yeats said it well when he wrote about giving up his fancy
mythological creatures and the airy inventions that had kept his
poetry alive, and beginning again from scratch, “in the foul ragand-bone
shop of the heart.” What makes the alchemical notion
stand out is that the materia prima is not only a metaphor for the
desperate impoverishment and loneliness of the first moments
before creation, but it is also a literal embodiment of them.
Alchemists actually dug in swamps, and tried to brew turds and
urine.
Visual art is the same, and that is one of its strengths. Artists
cannot begin in antiseptic abstraction, like philosophers with
their notepads, or theoretical physicists at their blackboards.
They have to begin in medias res, literally in the middle of things: