Extending Abstraction

Jack Whitten’s Work in the Gap between Form and Meaning by Sven Beckstette

“I work in the gap. With everything I do, I work in the gap. The gap is what excites me the most. In , it’s the gap that exists between form and meaning. That’s where I work.”i

“I grew up in the South with the fundamentalist religion. Certain people existed as a spirit and energy – people I knew – Miles Davis, Norman Lewis, , James Baldwin.”ii

Jack Whitten

The work of Jack Whitten is characterized by a continual extension of the means of painterly abstraction.iii This is most evident when it comes to technical aspects of execution including choice of materials, but is also applicable to the facture and composition of his . In the 1960s, Whitten’s work was heavily influenced by the late Surrealism of Arshile Gorky and by the gestural and spontaneous abstraction of . While in the series Heads (1964), Whitten explored the possible analogy between painting and photography, the works that followed addressed autobiographical questions about his own identity. At the time, Whitten referred to himself as an abstract-figurative Expressionist. Works such as Garden in Bessemer – a reference to Gorky’s Garden in Sochi (1941) – seem like a psychedelic tangle of flowers and vegetation from which, upon closer inspection, human faces emerge. This development reached an end point in Satori (1969): With this work, Whitten not only embraced the formal language of geometric abstraction for the first time – something he had considered while studying African sculpture – but he also began to understand painting as a conceptual medium. That same year, in his second exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, Whitten presented a series that demonstrated a more process-oriented approach to painting that renegotiated the possibilities of the medium. Consisting of large-format unstretched canvases that were installed flat against the wall, Whitten called the group of works Light Sheets, a title that derives from an encounter with the saxophone player John Coltrane, who told the artist that his playing technique, sheets of sound, could be described as a wave.iv For these Light Sheets, Whitten developed his own printing technique, which combined elements of the silkscreen process with the principles of the monotype. 1 Building on this basis, Whitten’s paintings from 1970 onward continually foreground experiments and processes. In his studio, which assumed the character of a laboratory, he constructed a workspace on the floor. Instead of a brush, Whitten used a self-constructed painting tool of his own, the “developer” – an enormous rake-like instrument with a rubber or metal blade – to spread large quantities of thick acrylic paint onto a canvas lying flat on the floor; he then allowed the paint to dry before continuing to build up the work through the applications of further layers of acrylic. The resulting abstract constructions were formed in one sweeping motion, meaning that individual brush strokes were no longer put in a relation to each other, but rather the complete painterly surface was created through a single gesture. This approach was an attempt to overcome the spontaneity of De Kooning’s practice: With just one movement of the developer, Whitten could create an entire image, circumventing the rapid brushwork of his role model. In a further step, Whitten made notches in the edge of the blade so that the tool could penetrate the picture surface, revealing the layers of paint beneath.v

Whitten also realized that these dried slabs of paint could be cut into pieces and used as an element of collage. These technical innovations increasingly underscored the object-like character of Whitten’s works, allowing their material properties to come to the fore. The artist often described this process by citing the maxim: “I make a painting, I do not paint a painting.”

In 1980, another shift took place in Whitten’s work. He returned to working with the support in a vertical position, now using the upright surface to continue the experiments he had developed on the floor. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, he intensified his use of paint as a collage material with the body of works titled Sites. Whitten created casts of found objects and patterns from the urban environment of in acrylic paint; he then assembled these elements into an illusionistic collage on the canvas. Around 1990 Whitten began to avoid reproducing recognizable structures, concentrating instead on geometrical shapes, which he cut from dried acrylic paint. Using these elements, or tesserae, which at first consisted of thin films but became increasingly sculptural, Whitten now composed his paintings as mosaics in a style that became characteristic of his late work.

Whitten’s continuous efforts to extend the technical craft of painting go hand in hand with a profound conceptual reflection on the essence of the medium, its art-historical development and its relationship to contemporary questions. Numerous interviews with the artist as well as his studio notesvi attest to his many years of investigating the works of philosophers –

2 particularly German philosophers – such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,vii as well as his exploration of the psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, and subjects such as geometry, mathematics, physics and emerging digital technologies. Beyond this, Whitten’s artistic development was profoundly influenced by jazz musicviii as well as a fundamental interest in African sculpture. His engagement with these two areas ultimately prompted what is perhaps the most radical development within his practice, allowing his thinking and painting to transcend the visible. By abandoning all illustrative or symbolic depiction, Whitten sought to inscribe the essence of events or persons into the material of the paint itself.

From the beginning, Whitten dedicated his works to friends and family members, to current figures in politics, culture and sports, as well as to historical events. The earliest examples from this body of work make clear that their central precept encompasses the act of commemoration and the expression of grief. Looking back, Whitten said that he completed his first “memorial painting” after the death of his brother.ix This early work sparked further paintings that honored Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy: “Then I started that series of Martin Luther King and then quite a few. There was one with JFK behind that assassination that later was destroyed in a fire, believe it or not.”x Yet Whitten dedicated the most paintings to Martin Luther King, going as far as to call these works a series. According to Whitten, at least seven paintings were created in honor of the pastor and civil rights activist.xi This close tie is likely a consequence of the fact that the artist met King in person and was deeply impressed by him: “I met Dr. Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, when I was a student at Tuskegee Institute in 1957 during the bus boycott. I was present in Washington, DC, for the March on Washington and heard firsthand his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. As a young man, I was so inspired by him and wholeheartedly believed in ‘We Shall Overcome.’ He remains one of the most inspirational figures I’ve ever met.”xii

A further key figure from the found that found his way into Whitten’s work was Malcolm X. His Homage to Malcolm is composed on a shaped canvas, a large triangle into which two further triangles are inscribed. Dating from 1970, the work was created five years after the assassination of the activist.xiii Its predominant color is black, with the middle triangle bearing uniform grooved structures resulting from Whitten’s use of an afro-comb to apply the paint to this area of the canvas. Indeed, this use of the comb as a painting tool is indicative of the new direction that Whitten’s painting would take. In a film on the work, Whitten describes this painting method as “symbolic abstraction”: “The most fitting way is symbolic; was to go back to the classical symbol of the triangle, to offer that sense of 3 strength. That painting had to be dark. It had to be moody. It had to be deep. It had to give you that feeling of going back deep down into something and in doing that I was able to capture the essence of what Malcolm was about.”xiv

It also appears that another political figure was highly significant for Whitten: At least three works in his oeuvre are dedicated to . Whitten had met him in person as well, at the latest on September 22, 2016, when the forty-fourth president of the United States awarded him the . In 2008, when Obama was elected head of government, Whitten sensed a fundamental change in American society. That same year, he completed Lateral Shift, in which black and white lines made of mosaic stones, reminiscent of bar codes, can be seen against a gray patterned surface. Whitten: “Lateral Shift is a political painting, by the way. [President] Obama’s being elected, the whole thing about his presidency, what this is, what does the man stand for, right? [...] I’m thinking, oh yeah, revolutionary, and of course for me, black. You know what it means for me and I’m thinking, yeah, but this is still American politics. No, this is not vertical. This shit’s lateral. That’s where Lateral Shift comes from.” He also renamed a significantly earlier work after Obama, the 1985 tondo Soweto Disk II which originally referred to the South Western Township in South Africa and thus to the racist apartheid politics of the time. Later Whitten added AKA Big O for Obama to the title. The work Apps for Obama (2011), however, was created specifically for Obama. Here Whitten uses his mosaic technique to create a pixelated digital aesthetic, with the blue ground recalling the background of a smartphone or tablet screen, on which different elements are arranged as icons that can be used to activate various apps: “When I did this painting Obama was running into trouble. [...] I thought maybe if I make some apps for the brother and, if he learns to use them... I am convinced that that painting helped him to get elected. [...] It’s a referential painting. He is in there, Michelle is in there, the kids are in there, the advisors are in there [...].”xv

Whitten, however, not only dedicated his works to politicians but also to athletes like Joe DiMaggio, to the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, to his parentsxvi as well as to countless musicians and artists, both luminaries from past generations and cherished colleagues. As in the case of his brother, Whitten completed most of these works after the death of the person. A central position in the artist’s oeuvre is allotted to the series Black Monoliths. Eleven monumental paintings, created between 1988 and 2018, honor significant figures from African American history: James Baldwin, , , , Amiri Baraka, Terry Adkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Maya Angelou, Ornette Coleman, Muhammad Ali and Chuck Berry.xvii 4 While Whitten’s expressive paintings of the 1960s still contain figurative elements and narrative references to those named in the title, the works that follow during his process- oriented phase almost completely avoid deliberate use of symbolic references. They prefer oblique allusions, as in the painting for Malcolm X in which the shape of the triangle acts as a symbol of strength, or in the paintings of the Black Monoliths series, in which one can discern possible head-shapes of the individual subjects.xviii

Throughout his artistic development Whitten increasingly pursued the question of how he could expel illustrative and narrative elements from paintings but nevertheless maintain a link to the subject matter of each work. An important first step was his exploration of West African sculpture. On the one hand, Whitten began to create sculpture himself in the early 1960s, transferring his understanding of the objects’ formal characteristics, such as their geometric and physical appearance, to his paintings.xix On the other hand, he also explored the ritualistic and spiritual context of West African sculpture. This practice led Whitten to reflect about spirituality and the ability of an object or material to function as a spiritual vessel. Throughout his extensive reading on the topic, three thinkers in particular influenced Whitten’s conception of sculpture: André Malraux, Joseph Campbellxx and Robert Farris Thompson.xxi On May 30, 1975, Whitten noted in his studio journal: “Malraux in Metamorphosis of the Gods speaks of African sculpture as being motivated by ‘spirits.’ I am aware of the fact that this is the tradition in Art which I must connect with – not the Western concept of the divine or sublime, or romantic or classical but a work of art with a function motivated by the tradition of African Sculpture – MY WAY – not Picasso’s European interruption.”xxii Making reference to André Malraux’s book La Métamorphose des dieux (1957), whose first part was published in English translation in London in 1960,xxiii Whitten here lays claim to the fact that he is interested in the function of African sculpture and that he would like to understand his own image-objects, like these sculptural works, as moved by “spirits.” By dissociating himself from Picasso, Whitten affirms that he possesses a different sensibility when it comes to these questions on account of his African American heritage.xxiv On February 15, 1976, he noted: “I am emphasizing my being Black, with the expectation of offering another sensibility, possibly another insight into African Art other than that offered by Western Europe.”xxv More and more, he began to understand his works as objects that are spiritual. On March 2, 1978 he wrote: “My involvement with all of these geometrical objects is the transformation of them into spiritual objects, their purpose being one of pure esthetic value used [...] in the ritual of survival within a technological society.” A decade later, Whitten’s thoughts continued to revolve around the relationship of object, material and 5 spirit.xxvi On April 21, 1990, he took this further: “The painting became object, the object became spirit. My previous thought was that the spirit lives in the object, I.E., the object is container for the spirit...The object must become spirit. The object is the spirit. A memorial painting serves as a repository for the spirit of the deceased.” The more he came to understand his works to be containers for the spirit of the deceased, the more he understood that paint itself could be the carrier of spirit. On March 21, 1998, he commented: “My paintings are animist structures, they incorporate spirit in matter. The matter, which is the paint is a carrier for spirit. Spirit embodies information. Information is of any specific quality dictated by subject-matter chosen by me. It’s strictly a manner of choice, e.g. abstraction as subject- matter the sublime as subject matter, etc. It’s literally anything I want to be.” Here Whitten draws parallels between animist spiritual ideas and ideas from digital technology on the basis that all information is inscribed in matter.

During this time, Whitten took part in an interview with the art historian Jeanne Siegel in which he dealt in detail with the problematic relationship of subject and material: “I’m beginning to see that there’s a relation here when I speak of spirit and matter. That it is possible to direct something into matter. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is my next subject. You see that bucket over there? She’s in that bucket! I have to put her in there through the spirit. [...] I don’t see this as anything corny, I just see a work procedure. I’m not going to do a portrait or any form of illustration of her. But I want what that woman is about in her spirit to be in that paint. Now what’s difficult is how do I put her in that paint?”xxvii A decade later Whitten appears to have developed a better sense of how to capture the spirit or the essence of a person in physical matter. On October 23, 2015 he wrote that material stimuli can become elements that seduce and attract the invisible spirit: “When the spirit enters the painting: I stop working on it. The painting is a resting place for the spirit. The spirit is distinct from science + technology. It has always been here therefore the spirit is Ancient. The spirit has been present in all phases of human development. Spirit is attracted by matter, in truth, matter is a magnet for spirit. It has no smell NO ONE CAN SEE SPIRIT. Again, we can only feel its presence. COLOR – SOUND – MOVEMENT – SMELL – TASTE – SIGHT – TOUCH ARE ELEMENTS OF MATTER THAT CAN BE USED TO SEDUCE THE SPIRIT. I LIKE THE NOTION OF PAINTING AS OBJECT USED TO SEDUCE SPIRIT! xxviii

Not only material qualities appear to attract spiritual essence; ritual actions also play a role. Even the process of making a painting was, for Whitten, a ritual that connected him to the spirit. As he noted on March 7, 1993: “I communicate to the spirit through the ritual of work.” Whitten would also perform a daily ritual before he began to work in his studio: In one corner 6 of the room, the artist had created a shrine with a wooden sculpture, The Black Christ (1967), around which memorial objects for deceased family members were placed: “[T]he studio day, the first thing I do, I go to my family shrine. I light a candle to my family, place oil on the sculpture. [...] It’s olive oil, my olive oil, oil that I produce from my trees. I have a three- dimensional sculpture, which is my – I call it my black Christ. Oil is placed on the head of that. Incense is lit and I ring the bell to let them know of my presence and that I’m honoring them. That’s how I start the day off, ritual.”xxix

Drawing on very different traditions and cultural practices, Whitten set idiosyncratic ideas in relation to one another through personal ritual. His in-depth study of such thinkers as Malraux, Campbell and Farris Thompson, meant that Whitten was acquainted with timeless myths and religious concepts from an ethnological and anthropological perspective, recognizing in them universal human experiences.xxx As the quotation above makes clear, Whitten saw the spirit as something timeless that is to be reconciled with a contemporary worldview informed by science and technology.xxxi This particular stance on spirituality – and thus his approach to painting as a memorial act – has its deepest roots in the artist’s childhood experiences in an African American church in the South: “[A] funeral in the South is very rich, the rituals involved. That was probably my first attraction, to speak about the person that has passed, his life. [...] But when I started reading more about different cultures I realized that this was something that was basic to all culture. [...] I’ve always had, always from kid on, always had a rich sense of compassion and empathy and remember meeting Hans Hofmann, and Hofmann even wrote about this, Hofmann always emphasized empathy as a [necessary] ingredient in art. [...] [W]hat else can we do when someone that you care about or somebody passes? That’s one thing we do have available to us.”xxxii

Jack Whitten once called his works “gifts” for the subjects named in their titles.xxxiii Yet his memorial works are also an emphatic testimony to the fact that these individuals lived and that he had a connection to them: “When I dedicate paintings it is my way of acknowledging that certain people existed as a spirit and energy. I take material and present it in a way to say that these spirits are here. These people existed. I spoke to them, I knew them.”xxxiv Viewed in this light, memorializing also served as process of self-affirmation for Whitten, connecting him to the past, to those who lived before him and to their experiences and deeds. Not least of all, it allowed him once more to reconceive the material possibilities of abstract painting: “[…] to take a subject, and build it into the paint medium, that extends the meaning of abstraction. It’s an extension.”xxxv

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i Jack Whitten, as quoted in “Oral history interview with Jack Whitten,” Dec 1–3, 2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 93. ii Jack Whitten, as quoted in Jeanne Siegel, Painting after Pollock. Structures of Influence (Amsterdam, 1999), p. 141. iii For a thorough introduction to the work of Jack Whitten see Richard Shiff, “Image That Comes Out Of Matter,” idem, More Dimensions Than You Know, exh. cat. Hauser & Wirth (London, 2017), p. 7–31. iv Whitten often talked about his encounter with John Coltrane, for example in the extensive interview with the Smithsonian Institution in 2009: “And I was speaking with John and the thing I remember the most was his waving his hands. He wasn’t that enthused, you know, I’m a young guy talking about art. I don’t think he had much of an interest in art, but my interest in his music – and he said something to me. He waved his hand and he used the word ‘wave’. He says, ‘Well, you know it’s like a wave.’ This is what I remember the most, ‘it’s like a wave’, and something went off in my head. It identified with what I was feeling in painting. It came directly out of his music, that way of playing that he had. Some people later called it training [sheets of sound] or a way of stretching out the notes but I acquainted that with something that I was working with, which I call ‘sheets of light’. In Coltrane’s terminology it was ‘sheets of sound’. This is very important and I was working with these in terms of sheets of light.” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 53. The term “sheets of sound” in connection with Coltrane’s particular improvisational technique appeared for the first time in jazz critic Ira Gitler’s contribution to the liner notes of Coltrane’s album Soultrane (1958). v Whitten’s development in painting is best described in an interview that Beryl J. Wright conducted with Whitten in 1990, published in Jack Whitten, exh. cat. The Newark Museum (New Jersey, 1990), p. 7–13. vi Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, ed. Katy Siegel (Zurich, 2018). vii “Right from the beginning I was attracted more to the German writers.” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 41. viii On the significance of jazz in Whitten’s painting, see the essay by Guthrie P. Ramsey in this publication, p. XXX. ix “Probably the first one I did, the first memorial painting, would be for my brother Tom, the jazz musician, who died in his apartment, caught fire on the Lower East Side on Grand Street, like

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1966. Tom died in an apartment fire. That’s probably the first one.” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 43. x Ibid, p. 43. xi “Martin Luther King and that’s a series of those. There’s more than one, exact number I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head. But it’s got to be at least seven or eight of them.” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 44. xii Jack Whitten, as quoted in idem and Stacie Lindner, “About the Subjects,” Jack Whitten. Memorial Paintings, exh. cat. Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, 2008), p. 59. xiii Commemorating the anniversary of Malcolm X’s death, Whitten completed the sculpture Homage to Malcolm, cf. ed. Katy Siegel, Jack Whitten. Odyssey. Sculpture 1963–2017, exh. cat. The , (Baltimore, 2018) and further locations, p. 58f. xiv Jack Whitten, as quoted in the film Jack Whitten. “The Political is the Work” from the series TateShots, Oct. 06, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzxhXbXGeTc (accessed Feb. 18, 2019). xv Jack Whitten, as quoted in the audio document available at www.mcasd.org/artworks/apps-obama (accessed Feb. 18, 2019). xvi Fifth Gestalt (The Coal Miner) and Sixth Gestalt (The Seamstress) (both 1992). xvii Cf. Siegel 2018 (see note 13), p. 112–137. xviii Whitten related the composition of the first work of the series Black Monolith (A Tribute to James Baldwin) (1987) to the shape of the author’s head: “It’s always a presence of a form though, sort of an architectural presence. And in the James Baldwin case that black monolith – you ever meet James Baldwin? The man had an enormous head on a small body. So when I was planning that black monolith to James Baldwin I’m going back to his head and the memory of his head. I met him more than once, talked to him quite a few times, big enormous massive head on a little body. So the Black Monolith [series], in terms of the form, comes out of the head, the presence of the head.” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 99f. xix On the sculptural work cf. Siegel 2018 (see note 13). xx Whitten had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. The artist dedicated the works Mask of God I & II (For Joseph Campbell) (both 1987) to Campbell. The title refers to the four-volume work by Campbell. xxi Robert Farris Thompson’s book Flash of the Spirit (New York, 1983), was especially important to Whitten. It was also on the reading list that the artist gave his students, cf. e-mail by Mary Whitten to the author, Jan. 21, 2019. xxii Jack Whitten, as quoted in Siegel 2018 (see note 6), p. 94. 9 xxiii André Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, (London, 1960). xxiv For a general account of the complex image of Africa suspended between projection and identification in the history of African Americans cf. James T. Campbell, Middle Passages, African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005, (New York, 2016). See also Christian Kravagna, „Begegnungen mit Masken: Gegen-Primitivismus in der Schwarzen Moderne,“ in: idem, Transmoderne, Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts, (Berlin 2017), p. 149-172. xxv Jack Whitten, as quoted in Siegel (see note 6), p. 104. xxvi In the 1980s especially, Whitten began to draw a connection between his artistic approach and the concept of jazz. In this context he used the term “soul” synonymously with “spirit,” cf. Siegel 2018 (see note 6), p. 166, 176, and, in the discussion of jazz, p. 287f. Cf. also Whitten’s text “Soul Map” in this catalogue, p. XXX–XXX. xxvii Jack Whitten, as quoted in ibid., p. 139f. xxviii Jack Whitten, as quoted in ibid., p. 487. xxix Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 90. xxx “Humans have found out that ritual plays a role in who we are and our culture,” Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 91. xxxi On Whitten’s understanding of technology as a shaping influence in the present situation cf. for example the entries in Siegel 2018 (see note 6), p. 104, 161 as well as his statement of September 25, 2006 on the relation of art, science and technology: “I read about what the scientists are doing in technology of all disciplines both physical sciences and biological sciences. These people explore by specializing: I want to do the same in painting.” xxxii Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 44. In another place the artist also referred to this shaping influence: “Immediately, instinctually, coming from the South, we are taught from the beginning this reverence for the elders. It’s just automatic.” Jack Whitten, as quoted in “Robert Storr in Conversation with Jack Whitten,” Jack Whitten. Five Decades of Painting, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego, 2014/15) and further locations, p. 45. xxxiii “ALL OF MY MEMORIAL PAINTINGS ARE GIFTS TO THE PEOPLE THAT INSPIRED THEM... THEY ARE NOT MERE DEDICATIONS... THEY ARE GIFTS.” Jack Whitten, as quoted in Siegel 2018 (see note 6), p. 418. xxxiv Jack Whitten, as quoted in Stuart Horodner, “Jack Whitten: Memory and Method,” Memorial Paintings 2008 (see note 12), p. 18. xxxv Whitten, Oral history interview, 2009 (see note 1), p. 102.

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