The Brooklyn Rail

Throughout his six-decade-long career, Jack Whitten brilliantly innovated the technical and conceptual possibilities of abstraction. Yet as he challenged the terms of painterly gesture, geometric grids and matrices, material and textural transmutations, his work was also haunted by the figure. The Black body, in particular—at once unrepresentable, misrepresented, and hypervisible in Western art and visual culture—hovers as an unseen specter, simultaneously summoned and obscured in so much of his art. For me, the non/presence of the figure is particularly salient in Whitten’s output of the early 1960s, when he grappled with what it means to be an artist in a time of extraordinary political volatility.

Among the earliest works in Jack Whitten: The Messenger, for instance, are a group of five small paintings executed in a reduced palette of black and white in the mid-1960s. To create these, Whitten scraped thick daubs of acrylic paint across the canvas, then pressed a mesh screen over the viscous pigment, squeezing out excess material before scraping it away. This process manifested evanescent veils of light that seem to float, like smoke, within deep black fields, their edges dissolving into airy wisps. There is a vaguely automatist invocation in these paintings: ghostly presences are revealed not through any pre-composition but through intuitive procedures of smearing, pressing, and wiping. In one such work, I don’t sense a body so much as a scream, or a gasping breath. In another, a cloud-like form is also the crown of a head; I see vacant eyes, a nose bridge, cheekbones. The “gray paintings,” as Whitten referred to them, bear titles like Head I, Head VII, and Head IV Lynching (all 1964), but they don’t quite show us what they name. Instead, they offer veiled glimpses into a consciousness that is haunted by difficult, uncanny visions of violence.

Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology to describe the ways in which the past lingers into the present. Hauntology enables us to fathom the nonlinear nature of sociopolitical experiences and the blurred intimacies of ideologies and collective memories that tether us across generations. I’m compelled by this term’s relevance to Whitten’s practice, not only in its aesthetic implications of spectral presences that are clearly perceptible across his work, but also in how it resonates with his impulse to variously exorcise, confront, mask, or suppress the traumas of racial terror that permeate American history. The current federal push to obfuscate these facts, of course, will merely reiterate the enduring power of Whitten’s art to haunt us into the present.

When Whitten produced the “gray paintings,” he had been in New York City for around five years. Born and raised in Alabama, Whitten briefly lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he helped to lead fellow Southern University students in a civil rights protest that was met with a degrading and dehumanizing racist backlash. He decided to leave the South for good in 1959. These early works give vision, perhaps, to memories that have overstayed their welcome in his consciousness. Indeed, he had written on the wall of his studio in 1964, “I must photograph my thoughts.”¹ What would it mean to think of these paintings, thusly, as exposures?

In The Blacks (1963), numerous visages are linearly marked-out in the painting’s negative space: Whitten implies the curving outlines of heads and eyes in vacant sections that cut through flat fields of black and white pigment, revealing an under-collage of newspaper. Within the interstices of one such face, I can just make out a tiny fragment of newsprint—the words “Baptist Church”—which refer to the white supremacist bombing that killed four young girls in Birmingham in 1963. And in a work titled Birmingham 1964, produced in the titular year, Whitten incorporated a torn fragment of an iconic news photograph that depicts a fifteen-year-old children’s crusade demonstrator being attacked by a police dog. The image is obscured by a stretched, nylon stocking and then draped with a sheet of painted aluminum foil, which Whitten punctures to reveal the wound—that which afflicts the boy’s body, as well as our collective conscience. As Michelle Kuo writes, “what makes Birmingham so viscerally affecting is, paradoxically, its obfuscation—its distance from the ‘original’ image.”² In works such as these, the artist forces us to lean in and try to focus on the forensic evidence of violence, while dangling it ever-further from visual clarity. Reality, Kuo explains, “begins to resemble a nightmare.”

“Beneath every surface lies an identity,” Whitten wrote in a studio note that year. “The amount of depth beneath this surface determines the value of its being. What is the depth of America in the year 1964? What is the depth of its people?”³ His work doesn’t answer this question directly, but leaves it for each of us to grapple with: what aspects of our personal and collective consciousness does his art expose in our own present age?