This piece was performed for a small audience with the purpose of workshopping a new idea. In this performance, I explored the ancient Ayurvedic practice of oil pulling as a tool for art-making. Oil pulling is used as a homeopathic method for detoxification. It is performed by swishing a spoonful of oil in one’s mouth for up to twenty minutes and then spitting out the oil. It is believed that fat-soluble toxins are pulled from the mouth and bind to the oil. Toxins enter your body purportedly as the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices (i.e. smoking, drinking alcohol or caffeine, eating processed foods, performing black magic, etc.).

At the start of this performance, I emerged dressed as my performance persona “Dead Art Star.” For the first action, I swished walnut oil in my mouth as I stretched on a yoga mat made of canvas. Meanwhile, Youtube tutorials on oil pulling and portrait painting, as well as an episode of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting, could be heard playing simultaneously in the background from a laptop, resulting in an audio collage of instructional words and phrases layered on top of each other. As the performance progressed, I collected my spit into a small cup. After stretching, I proceeded to use the toxin-filled oil as a medium for oil painting. Aided with a mirror that doubled as a palette, I painted a self-portrait of “Dead Art Star” on the canvas mat with oil paint and the walnut oil/spit solution. At the end of the performance, I hung the portrait on the wall for display and undressed, separating my own body from the painted portrait double.

The object produced with this material operates as a stand-in for the artist, made of the artist’s own DNA. The resulting piece documents a process where the artist’s body is cleansed and recreated. The artist’s alter ego is metaphorically exorcised from the artist’s body and given physical form. The artist has delivered himself from his own evil, honoring his body as a temple. As a literal “cleaning up one’s act,” this performance explores our culture’s push and pull relationship with immediate satisfaction (i.e. consuming fast food, alcohol, and drugs) and health and fitness, as well as the moralization that comes with these actions.