The Brooklyn Rail

How does one derive and then develop and sustain a transcendent identity in abstraction? This is the overarching narrative in Richard Shiff’s monograph on one of the most inventive American abstractionists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul, published by the artist’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in 2022. Born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, Jack Whitten moved to New York City to study at The Cooper Union and then vigorously immersed himself in the pluralist painterly milieu in downtown New York so well-referenced in High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975 held at the National Academy Museum, NY in 2007. This exhibition, which was curated by a former student of Shiff’s from the University of Texas in Austin, Katy Siegel, (with crucial assistance by painter David Reed) included the artist’s fellow Black abstractionists such as Al Loving and Joe Overstreet as well as other important avatars of painting out of formalist bounds, among them Alan Shields, Joan Snyder and Lynda Benglis. This period of broad experimentation was significantly nurturing of Whitten’s own inclination to treat his painterly progress with a mix of a scientist’s empirical projection and an animist’s faith in the transubstantiation of spirit into matter (and vice versa). Shiff repeats this ostensibly paradoxical formation of the painter’s abstract identity in different registers throughout the book, crucially circling the reader back to the morphological idiosyncrasies and physicality of Whitten’s inventive painterly processes. The author emphatically demonstrates that, however critical reception might attempt to dissect any artist’s oeuvre (and/or their social identity), the primary area of discussion must remain inside the work itself.

During the later phase of Whitten’s career, Shiff was fortunate to get to know his subject well, and, as he recounts in the book’s introduction, to really “get” the complex abstract identity of the artist’s work:

On a sequence of studio visits, as I observed Jack’s art in progress, it seemed to demonstrate that the terms spirit and soul required no foundation in religion … Jack was giving soul a visual presence as well as, somewhat paradoxically, a reality beyond vision … He was not depicting something that possessed soul; rather he established soul itself, this invisible, dematerialized entity, by manipulating the visuality and materiality of his painting.

Shiff’s declaration from the start is that Whitten’s abstract soul is inherently an intimate act of self-identification with the processes of making and manifesting each painting in itself. This clarification usefully avoids a facile reading of “soul” as a conceptual spirit/body bifurcation often attendant in traditional religious orthodoxy, one that typically relegates physical manifestation to a lesser status than spirit. If the title of the book might suggest a simple notion of a transcendent soul haunting a universal order, the author disabuses the reader of such a facile reading via his deep analysis of Whitten’s life work as both/and spirit-body rather than either/or body spirit, often deploying the artist’s paradoxical writings and statements as backup, as when he quotes Whitten in the book’s first section: “We are familiar with things being either/or, abstract or representational, but there’s a third order out there that’s not abstract, nor is it representational. You have to go beyond just bringing them together.” As a Black man growing up in the American south of Jim Crow and Segregation, Whitten’s acute social statements are also quoted as him observing, “When people ask me about the notion of being a Black artist and what I am doing in terms of the social politics of my age I tell them: it’s all compressed in [the work],” and “The organic substance of seeing … happens when opposites cancel out … I think that my growing up Black in America gives me an advantage in dealing with the unique psychology of vision. I am the product of the cancellation of opposing races…” The latter statement has to be one of the most succinct and revolutionary statements on racist reductionism one will ever encounter. It’s extraordinary how clearly Whitten took this point-no-point squeeze, this counteractive social abstraction, for granted in order to better position himself as a “quantum thinker” (Shiff’s characterization) to evolve a consciousness for an entirely other order of creative being.

Cosmic Soul is superbly illustrated and composed in four chapters entitled respectively, “Image That Comes Out of Matter,” “Off the Wire,” “I Am the Object,” and “Soul Space.” The first three chapters are developed from catalogue essays Shiff wrote, the first being on the occasion of Whitten’s first one-person show at Hauser and Wirth’s London location in 2017, the second for an exhibition organized by Siegel at The Baltimore Museum of Art and the third a catalogue essay for Whitten’s posthumous exhibition at Hauser and Wirth’s New York space in 2020. Shiff acknowledges in his introduction the indispensable resource of Whitten’s posthumously published collection of statements and studio observations (spearheaded by Siegel as well) in Notes From The Woodshed as crucial documentary support of his brief, yet profound, contact with the artist in his studio. Within each chapter Shiff thoroughly acquaints the reader with discrete developmental periods in Whitten’s long career, exemplified in the first by a work such as Psychic Eclipse (1964), an amorphous “cloud” of white and black paint produced by straining through a fine gauze and Second Testing (Slab) (1972) in which the artist experimented with yet another method of what Shiff terms “analog photography” by deploying hand-made tools, such as a large squeegee, to “develop” (Whitten’s term) an image via intermediary devices. Shiff stresses in this chapter that for the artist such devices became analogous to alternate systems of vision and even quantum logic, and this propensity of Whitten’s to invent alternative systems of making and conceptualizing painting would lead to his late mosaic paintings: complex compositions of multicolored acrylic tesserae comprising what could be considered his “classic” period. There was much experimentation in between. Consider for instance the recently exhibited “Greek Alphabet” series of paintings shown for the first time together since they were produced in the 1970s at Dia Beacon (November 2022–July 2023). While not covered specifically in this text, having taken in the exhibition myself, I found it elucidating to read Shiff’s observations on the conceptual and physical genesis of a formally similar and chronologically proximate period of his work in the second chapter, specifically in the author’s analysis of Whitten’s “DNA Paintings.” In a characteristically cogent connecting of Whitten’s concepts with his methods of making, Shiff goes in depth in describing how the artist’s process of “applying a chromatically neutral slip of thin acrylic over a ground previously articulated by forms lacking evident reference” is then raked with a custom-made device both horizontally and vertically to create a “raster” effect he likens to “competing signals” on a “projection screen.” Since science and advances in technology were central concerns to Whitten’s conceptual processes, Shiff finds the appropriate language to translate his own perceptions of the final images, effectively extruding the reader through a sieve of the artist’s intentions, as in this passage, “Whitten inverted the established cultural order of visuality, raising the substrate, or means, to the surface of coded information … we receive the coding as the message and the image as an inseparable aspect of the raster.” This observation has a McLuhanesque ring to it, which undergirds Shiff’s argument throughout the book that a focus on Whitten’s medium will most accurately elucidate any message contained therein.

The second chapter also contains a survey of Whitten’s sculptural oeuvre, which was, for the most part created in his yearly summer residence in Crete. In these works, one sees the artist make a more direct morphological connection with his African ancestry than in his painting. Following up on the artist’s interest in universal codes, he’s quoted here as saying about this work, “I have discovered a universal code embedded in the geometry of African art … I call this pattern the DNA of visual perception, containing a cosmic worldview that has evolved throughout millennia.” Shiff makes an art historical connection between the accumulated embedment of found objects in Whitten’s The Afro American Thunderbolt (1983–84) for instance, and traditional ritual minkisi figures of the Kongo. He stresses that the animistic beliefs of the latter imbue the former with universal meaning, summarizing, “Whitten’s art, as either sculpture or painting, transformed particularity into universality.” The position taken here seems that no matter where the cultural identity of belief is sourced, it all flows into an ultimately universal consciousness, and that’s where Whitten’s cosmic soul resides.

The artist’s residency in Crete undoubtedly had a significant influence on Whitten’s development of his mosaic-like tesserae painting process. The phenomenal aspects of Greek stonework and tilework in his everyday local encounters in that rustic and rural environment, not to mention the art historical influence of grand Byzantine mosaics, impart a formal, if not strictly cultural ancestry, to Whitten’s later paintings. Shiff offers a critical survey of different manifestations of the artist’s mosaic works in the third chapter, including conceptual comparisons with Paul Cézanne and Donald Judd. Whitten saw the process of cutting acrylic rectangles from already painted surfaces to recombine them in newer compositions as a way to circumvent the formalist convention of reliance on a predetermined grid, whether actual or stamped representationally into the minds of the so culturally confined. In this way he hoped to escape what he termed “non-relational painting” a term he most likely adopted from Frank Stella’s comparison of a more symmetrically oriented American painting of the 1960’s with European painting that tended toward “relational” balance.¹ Shiff recounts here how Judd, in a 1993 speech, explains his desire to leap from painting to a sculpture that modulates color in three dimensional space, (thereby sidestepping a kind of relational argument to painting altogether) and connects such intent to Whitten’s goal toward constructing the visual rather than merely depicting it. Shiff focuses in on how the uneven surfaces of the artist’s tesserae compositions deny a smooth planarity and reflect light in an ever-changing play of color and form. Each of Whitten’s highly active topologies, the author argues, manifest “an image in space, or rather, an image of matter and light and spirit, all contained within the object (paint , tesserae) and yet not “contained” but liberated—being the object.”

In the final chapter, “Soul Space,” Shiff synthesizes a virtual over-soul concept out of his extensive exploration, in the preceding chapters, of Whitten’s making of concepts into concepts of making, stating, “Thoughts of materiality and of thinking itself combined in Whitten’s allied notion of dematerialization … his scope, as so often, was cosmic.” It takes a pause to not immediately conclude that such a cosmic notion dovetails too readily into a superficial transcendentalism, a sentimental melting pot of universal oneness. Shiff tends to parry such presumptions, aspiring to triangulate a vision of the cosmos that includes, like Whitten, an acknowledgement of scientific reason concomitant with genealogies of dedifferentiated (the author’s application) artistic exploration. He comments that Whitten’s 1991 work Einstein’s Violin (for Martha Graham) may have been so dedicated “in recognition of the parallel between creative innovation in the sciences and the same in the arts.” On the imprecise domain that any concept of “soul” might occupy, Shiff echoes the artist’s striving toward a dedifferentiated consciousness by authoritatively declaring, in the text’s penultimate page, “Soul space is not subject to subdivision.”

1. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/what-you-see-is-what-you-see-donald-judd-and-frank-stella-on-the-end-of-painting-in-1966-4497/