The Brooklyn Rail

Kronos, a Titan of the ancient Greek world, lingered in Jack Whitten’s development as a painter. In the slow passage of time, he found beauty. He described summers in Crete with guests, who visited Knossos. His painting and sculpture relates to the temporal and intersectional Mediterranean aesthetics of an interlinked Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Whitten’s carved wooden Odysseus at times is nearer to Nkisi: Benin nailed spiritual objects and Congolese power figures. Like Isamu Noguchi, as Thomas Hess noted, who was looking for a post-war wedding of Japanese stone sculpture and the anthropomorphic Greek archaic in pink limestone kouroi, Whitten’s timeless efforts in natural materials differentiate his carvings done in Greece from the neoclassical methodology of the acrylic mosaics and tesserae of the New York City studios. He said, “I’m dealing now with paint as a collage, paint as sculpture. Laminating acrylic on canvas, [to] ‘make’ not picture reality.” Roberta Smith noticed in a 1975 Artforum review of his paintings that they have “a structure no longer synonymous with and more conservative than, the structure of the surface itself.” Their surface texture approaches the terrestrial striations raked with sliver flecks of moon crater. Their materiality, he insisted, was a shift of psychic data between death and life. Prevalent iconography, such as the husk of a lynched body in Head IV Lynching (1964), seen in Noguchi’s protest sculpture Death (1934) and Melvin Edwards’s “Lynch Fragments” series, become more generalized, smaller, less nominally identified, and simple evocations of violent death. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, he saw life as possibly triumphant for the subaltern. He wanted to methodologically take the notion of spirit and fabricate it into process. His hand-wrought rectilinears—mats, carpets, squares, rectangles, oblongs—are obviously different from Minimalism and the repetitive machine-made prefabrications in Carl Andre’s metal carpets. These experimental forms cast in acrylic are quite expansive intellectually.  His process, his titles, are “rationally organized matter.” Speaking to him, he discussed his conversations about Hegelian philosophy with Michelle Kuo (as seen in Artforum). In our conversations, he believed he could encapsulate Hegelian phenomenology in the material cast of his artwork. 

The synthesis of irregular regularity operative as idée fixe engaged with the possibility of becoming in molds as an essence of humanity. A person, a pyramid, concentric circles, are again and again more unidentifiable as facsimile or portrait. The slab paintings, also darkly wrought like corpus on a deathbed or the slab of a lithographic stone, are nominally identified by location: Omalos, Agia Galini, Siberia, New York, Birmingham. The opacity and transparency poetics of Édouard Glissant notable in the title Atopolis from “ατος” (atos) meaning “without city place.” A reference to reaching Toni Morrison’s definition of “unhomed,” set off on a temporal and spatial drift. Thus, in response to the prompt, I find it hard to say what Jack Whitten’s time was… since the latter-half of the twentieth century is so long. His sagacious swagger became more noticeable under Barack Obama’s presidency. Going uptown September 13, 2016 to see Zoe Leonard’s In the Wake at Hauser & Wirth on 69th Street in New York City, he wore his National Medal of Arts on his lapel. At times his hope seemed less of a eulogia than Zoe Leonard’s I want a president (1992). Of Obama, he said, “he survived.” Apps for Obama (2011) was inspired by his iPhone screen saver in bitmap largess and an ongoing relationship to black politicians (such as Barbara Jordan) and freedom rider allies. He had a Norman Lewis painting in his kitchen that he said was his favorite work to live with for his political motivations and his innovations in abstraction. Roy Lichtenstein and Pop were present in his stroke, but so was the graphic poster art silhouette of Black Panther Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture Emory Douglas. As one sees in the Museum of Modern Art show, his work is playful and fun. Aware of iOS technology and the contemporaneous spark of the now, like the Xerox works he did in 1974, he would examine the materiality of digital screen dot matrices akin to the  distribution of toner. The visual harmony steeped in classicism offset by visual noise fleeing through a digital window is a shadowy look at post-structural modernity. 

While hanging my exhibition Vanishing Points, he told me he hated salon style hangings, though the spiral in his painting was derived from Robert Smithson’s drawings on the same wall as much as it was the large earthwork. Up close, his green painting shimmered like open air, like mica, like diamond mines. He found the front window juxtaposition of Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter to RJ Messineo a prominent achievement. He wanted a non-racist field, a non-divided light world, and for this—his personal history with a multiracial family—he felt at home in this millennium. He never thought he would see the day of queer formalism. He kept and savored organized bins of materials and tools. Rifling through he would say, “This being the twenty-first century” and then drift into a professorial lecture. He liked to hang out. He would say “hang out for a minute” when one first walked through the red door of the firehouse into the studio. He sometimes said with a laugh as I replied, sure I can, “hang ten.” His booming voice echoed through the firehouse in Queens as it did in the much photographed studio on Broome Street in Manhattan. Jovially aware that his accent was not New York, his deep Southern roots were evident in the places that dotted his conversation: Atlanta, Tuskegee, Bessemer, Mobile. The grain of his voice neither showed nor had detectable drawl. He liked to talk about—as Katy Siegel notes—drugs, in particular acid, and the 1960s. In 1968, a serious mental health episode led to what he referred to as a breakdown marked by depression, catatonia, and withdrawal; he sought psychiatric treatment and began practicing Hatha Yoga. His crack up, the electric alienation of the space crash, and his mental health hiatus, were precursors to his serious work as an artist and pedagogue. Whitten died on January 20 while I was Captiva, Florida; and an email came on January 21. I talked to his daughter Mirsini on the phone that day. It seemed like it was still late-November 2015 and we had just finished a marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick together at the Whitney. According to her, he was still working in the studio. Only a couple months later, she was moving through his studio while I sat in the bronzed chair made of clumped sand next to Rauschenberg’s bronze chair, in raffia woven shoes and banana leaf print clothes making sea grape poems that I hoped would reach New York harbor. (See Charlie Atlas’s sunset videos for loci reference.) She described the chaos of Whitten’s artwork being picked up and moved by Hauser and Wirth, which had started months earlier. Most of his large tesserae and developer paintings he stored for decades, some sold years earlier by Alexander Gray Associates, and many were seen in the big traveling Walker Art Center exhibition. Since New York became his home, and he had a solo show at the Whitney in 1974, his dream to bookend a journey around the world was to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.