The Brooklyn Rail

Jack Whitten’s 1979 Self Portrait registers an ironic sensibility, declaring its transmission of the artist’s likeness while denying any real access to it. Radiating from beneath a thicketed grid of translucent black lines, the image of the figure with black circular eyes and late 1970s dress occupies a square picture plane. The square makes the likeness look nearly portable, like the kind that would occupy a small photograph to be used for government identification or stapled to an application—the format favored by administration, archive and institution to measure, record and store. It’s an image format that should offer knowledge but gives away little in the way of information beyond its titling as a self-portrait. Of course, the likeness is not photographic, but a minimally-rendered painting executed in acrylic. This acknowledgement doesn’t settle the questions that lead to it; the painting remains strange, both for the way the depicted person seems to arrive from a pictorial beyond and remain in perpetual arrival, and for the image’s playful uncertainty. What I find striking in Self Portrait, and in Whitten’s work more generally, is its apparent desire to invite such confusion as a condition for inquiry.

The painting is only one example of Whitten’s probing of the distinctions and indistinctions between media via abstraction, in which one kind of medium specificity is productively set adrift and made unspecific in its confrontation with another medium. His medial trespassing not only asked what else abstract painting might do in the moment that would mark its commodification, but it also meditated on the changing status of the image in the post-civil rights conjuncture. Reflecting on the obscured newsprint image that bursts through the canvas in Birmingham 1964 (1964), Whitten described a “confusion of imagery.”¹ While Whitten’s phrase referred to the mass proliferation of pictures depicting anti-Black violence against civil rights protestors, I also read it as refracting a feature of the media environment that was emergent at the time of his reflection—namely, the leveling of medial distinctions by means of transmission. As Friedrich Kittler would observe seven years after Whitten’s Self-Portrait, “The general digitalization of information and channels erases the difference between individual media. Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer.”² On Kittler’s account, what separates a still photograph from a moving news clip becomes indefinite when everything can be translated and transmitted as an electrical signal.

Re-read via Kittler, a “confusion of imagery” is problematic not only for the sheer quantity of pictures it portends—though the persistence of this problem for Black theorization of the visual, from Frederick Douglass to Whitten, should not go unremarked—but also for the way it flattens all pictures under the genus of “the image.” The image becomes a data point to be combined and recombined in manipulable flows of information, feeling, and capital. Such mediation remains a crucial ground for the critique of and opposition to racist violence in its various global instantiations, and thus plays an unavoidable role in our sense of political reality. Representation forms no refuge within the space of this problem, but abstraction cannot be said to be safer, since it constitutes the grammar of the hegemonic image to begin with. What could painting’s role be amidst this confusion of imagery and the illusory choice it tempts between false opposites?

To the extent that Whitten grappled with a version of this predicament in his time, he mobilized abstraction as a technical intervention that forwent the recovery of pure medium specificity while nevertheless declining to embrace the unremitting generalization of “the image.” His works that comb acrylic paint across broad canvases appear to mime the processes of inscription and storage that characterize recording technologies, suggesting that painting take on a different set of capacities than representation, self-conscious reflection on medium, or even the reference to lived experience that characterized other breaks from abstraction in Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, for example.³ He brings painting alongside these technologies without necessarily conflating them. It’s in painting’s resonance with, rather than the replication of, its mediated environment that Whitten seems to locate the possibility of what else the medium might become.