Artist uncovers Whitworth trove

Two decades ago, artist Tom O’Day effectively threw away 30 works of art by burying them six feet deep on the Whitworth University campus.

Today, he’s going back for them.

The art dig coincides with the university’s shift to its new Ernst F. Lied Center for the Visual Arts, and is titled, “Exhume: A Twenty-Year Installation by Thomas O’Day, 1988-2008.”

But in the beginning, the dig wasn’t meant to be a big to-do for the university’s new digs. It was merely a conceptual means for the artist to clear out his studio.

The way he tells it, O’Day simply tired of looking at the drawings and mixed media cluttering his art space. So he decided to hold a funeral for 30 pieces.

“It felt so good to get rid of the stuff that I’d done,” he said about the experience. “I had more room in the studio, and I didn’t have to deal with it. … Technically, it’s like free storage.”

It was such a cathartic experience, the artist decided to perform similar sorts of destructive performances with his work, making a new art form out of the transformation that occurs when a person lets the elements go to work on a piece of art.

For his second victim, O’Day chose what he thought was his best piece from a show at Eastern Washington University.

“I flambéed it, basically,” he said. “With gin.”

Though he describes his method as “the world’s first art disposal service,” O’Day will be the first to admit that destroying one’s own art is nothing new. In fact, there’s a long tradition of art disposal.

“Artists forever have destroyed their own work,” O’Day said. “Rembrandt used to give paintings he didn’t like to his students and have them paint over them.”

Still, the 1988 art “funeral” kicked off O’Day’s long career of affecting change through destruction by varying methods, including explosions, hacking, burning and, in one case, throwing a piece of art off the Vashon Island pier.

It’s a long career that O’Day recently catalogued in a book, which he says will be titled “Actions, Disposals, Transitions, Transformations,” and will be released in coming months. The book features more than 35 different methods of disposal.

After tonight’s festivities – which start at 8 p.m. – O’Day plans to take his art, no matter how worm-eaten, and reassemble it into an art exhibit to be shown this spring in the university’s Bryan Oliver Gallery.

What that exhibit will look like, nobody knows. Not even the artist.

“You never know what’s gonna happen with these things,” he said. “I quit trying to predict how things are gonna turn out, and just let stuff happen.”