The Brooklyn Rail

I write this reflection in a period of grief, and it is grief that necessitates the urgency of my words. I have maintained that abstraction is an essential tool of Black expression. The abstraction of language offers us truer ways to speak our lives as we live them. The abstraction of sound has led to innovative music forms… ragtime, blues, jazz. The abstraction of movement allows us the opportunity to stomp out our anger, contort into new forms, and gyrate until we feel free. For Whitten, the experimental artist, the process of painting and the plasticity of the paint itself is the site of abstraction, so much more than a figureless composition. For Whitten, abstraction is not an attempt to break away from the physical body, but to instead engage it and its sensual power to offer viewers something they can feel. The material limits of paint had to expand, contort, and defy in order for Whitten to imbue it with his own experiences of this world, offering us new and expansive ways to experience and understand color, form, material, and the medium of painting itself, on and beyond the canvas.

Where it is easy to historicize Whitten’s works, as he was often concerned with history himself, I think it is more constructive in this particular moment to understand Whitten as an inventor. Whitten’s works move beyond the rectangular window to take more irregular, and at times, organic shapes. He developed new ways of applying paint to canvas, capturing movement in grand sweeping gestures. He invented all sorts of devices to manipulate the tactility and luster of his surfaces, creating and controlling the conditions in which gestures of rupture and utterance can occur, rather than constructing his own. I found myself walking slowly through the galleries of MoMA, bending and contorting my own body to try to figure just how some works were made, questioning why he might place one tessera over another. I had to shift the ways in which I had been conditioned to see. This is the work of a mechanic, a scientist, an alchemist. Sometimes it is insufficient to collapse the immense skill and labor of an artistic practice into a singular term.

There is a painting in the MoMA exhibition titled Dead Reckoning I (1980), a term he learned during his training in the Air Force ROTC at Tuskegee. He defined it as “a point of navigation when it is no longer profitable for you to turn around and go back.” He also offered another meaning: “the one where you throw your compass away and you deal … totally with what’s out there in nature.” This second definition triggers my grief. Where do we go without our guiding tools? How do we move forward now on our own? There is no turning back. With the creation of this painting he made the pivotal decision to stand and paint again, lifting the canvas off the floor to, once again, offer us something new. For me, the canonical concern is not what Whitten has quantifiably contributed to our culture—Black culture, Southern culture, human culture—but what he has made way for us to do. Perhaps we should label him a teacher or a preacher? “Art is our compass to the cosmos,” he wrote in the last entry featured in Notes from the Woodshed, a powerful proclamation that speaks to our journey forward, not toward a singular work of art, but toward a state of being. Where will painting go? How far can it go? How far can we push the material, on canvas and in our minds? The possibilities are endless with just a simple manipulation of the variable conditions, an abstraction of what we know to move us closer to the unknown.