The Brooklyn Rail

I imagine Jack Whitten (1939–2018) haunted by the ways he could see his own obliteration through witnessing the assassination of civil rights leaders and everyday Black Americans documented in print media and on television. In 1960, after organizing a protest in defense of Black lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he knew he had to leave the South, and said as much: “I would be killed or I would end up killing somebody.”

But there is no way out, no escape to New York. Whitten would have been old enough to remember the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till (who was a couple years younger than Whitten) and lived long enough to be moved to make a totem to commemorate the life of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant fatally shot by four New York police officers in 1999. See Totem 2000 IV: For Amadou Diallo. From Eric Garner’s murder on Staten Island in 2014, to the terror of a white gunman targeting Black folks shopping after church in Buffalo in 2022, de jure and de facto white gun violence in this state of our union is no reprieve from the nation’s foundational anti-Blackness.

Whitten’s life is exemplary of how to survive with the tools at hand while witnessing Black lives ended by violence, not unlike the video documentation recording the brutality of police murders that dominated our collective psyche only a few short years ago. I am so blindingly angry that lynching is such a fundamental part of life that it can now be “treated” by art historians as a mere topic in the discourse on the imagination of a great American artist. Erudite conversation seems as if it should be far from the word.

Recently, a TikTok debate on why white leftists prefer the guillotine to the machete (see Bush Woman [1974–75], The Saddle [1977], and Ogun’s Shield [1989]) may be answered in the multi-use attention to objects in Whitten’s practice. While the guillotine may offer the illusion of simplicity, proof of efficiency in the form of a machine application committed specifically to the idea of righteousness, or even fitting function-to-form in the rationalization necessary for barbarity; the representation of progress—as it may be signified in the heralded portrait of a Black leader—is a composite of messiness which might as well be confessed and proclaimed as Whitten does through the manipulation of tools in both paint and in his sculptures. Who sold whom to whom? Why did she not call for the unequivocal end of genocide? Where is the outcry of righteous justice for the Sudanese and Congolese people?

In the United States, the victims of state-sanctioned vigilante terror or lynching and organized police violence—all interrelated outgrowths of plantation slavery—informed Jack Whitten’s practice from the start of his life in the Jim and Jane Crow South to the end of his life in New York City. But Jack Whitten taught himself through painting how to let the light shine in between pieces of our obliterated bodies. In Birmingham 1964 (1964), a relatively small wall sculpture meets the pain of a seeing/not seeing and bracing to have a look at the lives which are no more. Whitten collages an archival photo of an everyday event which ought never have been (a police dog biting a man) with the significance of a phrase: “Birmingham,” which often marks another magnitude of violence beyond what we do see (the firebombing of the church killing four girls at Sunday School in 1963) but are asked to comprehend.

Can you understand the significance of the “Developer” if you do not know the feeling of picking out your own Afro while listening to Art Blakley & the Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’ (1958)? The Black abstraction of the “free blur” arises in the groove of pigmentation becoming texture (see Four Wheel Drive [1970]).

The handle of the everyday Afro pick and vinyl records are a result of the discovery of a faster and cheaper way to make and distribute consumer products. The tool Whitten called the “Developer” shuns the self-congratulations of mimicry while elevating the economizing allure of acrylic. Cheaper to manufacture and mass produce, plastics gifted painters the opportunity to experiment in their studios by alleviating the pressure not to waste expensive oil-based pigments. My conjecture is that Whitten learned from the technology of music quickly pressed on vinyl, which gave Black record companies a way to sell music directly to Black audiences without the intermediary of white companies, always and still lurking to capitalize off of Black spirituality.

Against the violent capture of photography, Whitten uses a technique that we may refer to as a “free blur” on view in the series of works made in 1964 titled Head I, Head IV, Christ, and Psychic Eclipse. These works work as rapprochement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century invention: paintings slid in as photographic mimicry for seeing the real, both before and beyond the moment of execution on which the development of photography prides itself. Against the self-congratulatory march of progress, Whitten subtends the mechanization of photography with the newness of plastic to reach around behind the back of the history of painting.

Similarly, once Whitten experienced the magic of the photocopy machine, he knew he could print with an alacrity that the hand-painted protest signs of his youth could not afford. How did his mother—a seamstress and informal educator who prepared neighbors for the literacy test administered to prevent Black voters from participating in our democracy—prepare the way for her son? The repetition of necessary domestic tasks such washing and mending his coal miner father’s uniforms become the repetition we see in the tesserae method. Glittering light reflects off black coal to shine in works that commemorate the lives of Black artistry recognized in Muhammad Ali and James Baldwin.