The Brooklyn Rail

Scale. Jack Whitten lived it—in time, in space—as pulse, as flux. With precision at once microscopic and telescopic, his art incorporated glints of light from acrylic fragments in the studio, which reflected energy from stars light-years back in prehistory.

From around 1990, Whitten composed most paintings additively, joining small units of acrylic tile in a mosaic-like manner. In some works, a variable spray or powder of white on a black ground differentiates the elements. Individually, such reflective units evoke galactic space as well as the time-travel that might be required to pass through the inky depths of one tile into the abyss of its digital neighbor. “I am a digital expressionist,” Whitten wrote in 1994. This was expressionism that lacked the usual analog continuity of gesture. He was “making” (not painting) collages of hardened acrylic set in very low relief.

With its evocation of spatial depth, the microcosmic order of each of Whitten’s units or “tesserae” opens to a macrocosmic view, infinitely grander than the individual element. Even in relation to the large size of a work in its entirety, this view seems fathomless, extending vision in height, width, depth, and even time, beyond the limitations of the physical object. Homecoming: For Miles (1992), exemplifies this type of collage construction; its title probably refers to the fictional Star Trek, but the dedication is to Miles Davis who died in 1991. The work measures approximately 7 by 9 feet. Here Whitten added traces of a super-galactic order by arranging the grid of acrylic tiles to create the image of an encompassing circle intersected by transversal lines and arcs—in toto, the vague effect of a constellation. In the night sky, such cases of phantom figuration are both ancient and modern; present for all recorded history, they constitute a mix of celestial, sensory fact and terrestrial, interpretive fiction. The fiction makes the fact all the more evident.

Whether microcosmically or macrocosmically, the material instantiation of Whitten’s pictorial fiction in Homecoming causes a human mind to expand its scope, its capacity for vision-as-thought. The sensory and intellectual provocation boosts a viewer’s pictorial aptitude. Perhaps Whitten mapped the circle in Homecoming onto his canvas in advance of laying in the surface of black-and-white acrylic tiles. Yet the resulting impression is that the constellation, like a composition of sounds in jazz improvisation, had no fixed guide to its production; its form appears found. “Found” because each viewer becomes a discoverer in perceiving the faint, flickering order. Each experiences Whitten’s microcosmic and macrocosmic exploration. But if you imagine tracing with your hand the phantom constellation of lines and circle in Homecoming, you will not be retracing the artist’s touch. Whitten never delineated the circle itself, nor the lines; he worked only with the tiles from which this phantom constellation emerged as if a product of cosmic evolution. By selecting tesserae with a suitable configuration of white and black, Whitten could construct a circle—or rather the image, effect, or illusion of a circle—without the appearance of having drawn it.

Whitten was a consummate handworker who, for the most part, removed the signs of his hand from his work. His process of making rather than painting facilitated a “digital expressionism” that aligned the inherent organicism of handwork with the potential to mechanize aspects of the aesthetic process. Why did Whitten push his art in this direction? Because he recognized that the technologies dominating his society operated not with the finesse of a hand but with the quantum motion of a particle pulsing as both wave and point. He devoted the skills of his hand to the hand’s ultimate obsolescence. Yet, in the production of imagery, his hand-oriented studio practice competed inventively with technologies that had long before sidelined their dependence on manual skill. Though Whitten considered himself part of a long history of modernist innovation, his immediate inspiration came from the use of light-sensitive chemicals in copiers, along with the electronics of oscilloscopes, cloud chambers, cathode-ray tubes, and radar tracking systems. These photoelectronic devices generated images of what would otherwise lie beyond visualization. They operated in real time, as if instantaneously, that is, at the speed of light.

Whitten always remained conscious of the initial insight that sparked his quest for a comprehensive aesthetic practice suited to the environment created by contemporary technologies. In 2006, he wrote in his studio log: “The image is photographic; therefore, I must photograph my thoughts. This statement was the beginning of my journey dating to 1964.” Whitten understood photography as representing visual sensation at its actual occurrence. Could painting do the same—or better? His note continued: “The photograph is the only graphic representation that illustrate[s] my thinking but I am not talking about mechanics. This stuff is totally mental! Mind as matter is my mantra + paint is my matter.”

It took Whitten a few years to devise a way of painting with the speed and objective anonymity of the photographic process (expressionism minus the narcissistic self). During the 1970s, he created squeegeed and raked surfaces that brought an image up from underneath a slab-like layering or a raster of horizontal or vertical lines—all as if the materialized image had never been touched. He called his various methods “Third Phase Modernism” (following representation as first, abstraction as second). The third phase captured “the MICRO/MACRO of my [temporal] Being,” Whitten’s speculative contact with a distant past and a distant future. He was the only one, however, to enter this phase. “I am lonely,” he wrote: “There is no one to talk to.”

Alone, Whitten broke through the hand-brain barrier, bringing the hand’s tacit knowledge to consciousness, and making the rest of us smarter by osmosis. To the mind’s intellectual understanding, he incorporated the hand’s physicality, its grasp of timeless matter. Matter is the other side of the imprinted memory-surface we acknowledge as mind. Whitten’s paint caused the binary to unify, “mind as matter.” His art was smart—even smarter—as smart as art can be.