Visiting Artist: Jack Whitten

Monday, October 17, 6:30p Sleeper Auditorium About Jack Whitten

For over fifty years, Jack Whitten has been a pioneer of abstract painting in America, constantly pushing the boundaries of the medium with highly innovative materials, methods, and processes. Throughout his career, the 76-year-old, New York-based artist has displayed a rare virtuosity and inventiveness, working in a breadth of styles that consistently anticipate some of the most significant developments within painting in the twentieth- century. From the dragged and smeared abstractions of the 1970s to his present use of collaged tiles made from built-up acrylic, Whitten is constantly seeking new and unfolding means of producing abstract paintings, all while maintaining a sharp connection to the politics of representation and self-creation in American culture. At once drawing from the history of the medium while fixing on the urgency of the present, responsive to the cultural climate and yet completely of his own mind, Whitten is a giant within American painting, and a significant forerunner to the burgeoning tendency of “social abstraction” in American art, which fuses social issues with personal expression.

Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Whitten was active in the civil rights movement before moving to New York City in the early 1960s, where he enrolled at The Cooper Union to study painting. Whitten’s experiments with the materiality of paint first gained attention with a number of exhibitions at Alan Stone Gallery in the late ‘60s, and he has steadily gained footing ever since. In many ways a painter’s painter, a broader recognition of Whitten’s work has only recently been reignited, with a solo retrospective at the Walker Art Center, and an upcoming solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York.

Whitten is perhaps best known for his massive all-over abstractions created by dragging a squeegee-like tool that he refers to as “the developer” across the canvas—a method similar to Gerhard Richter’s famous technique, but employed over a decade before his European counterpart. This stylistic innovation is but one of many milestones in a career that has been marked by a restless ingenuity. Whitten’s constantly evolving approach to painting today encompasses interests as diverse as cartography, mosaic, collage, acrylic mold-making, and gestural abstraction.

One element that unites Whitten’s many stylistic periods is a receptiveness to the world outside the studio. Whitten’s conceptual influences range from the natural sciences to literature and the social history of the United States. His titles are filled with dedications and homages to a pantheon of figures—fellow artists, literary figures, political activists and African American cultural pioneers of virtually every stripe. Whitten’s vast constellation of influences and references come together to form a rich and distinctly American tapestry of cultural activity. Together, his work is the story of the twentieth-century, told through abstract painting. Biography

1939 Born in Bessemer, Alabama.

1960 Moves to New York City to study painting at The Cooper Union.

1965 First group exhibition, Four Voices—One Theme, at Allan Stone Gallery, New York.

1968 First solo exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery, New York.

1970 Solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1983 Jack Whitten—Ten Years: 1970–1980 at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

1990 Work installed in the permanent collection galleries of The Museum of Modern Art.

2007 First major career retrospective at MoMA PS1.

2013 Light Years: Jack Whitten 1971–73 at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. The Museum acquires one of his major works from the period.

2014 Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting, a major retrospective travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Walker Art Center.

2016 Joins the artist roster of Hauser & Wirth.

2017 Major upcoming solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s NYC gallery. Works

Clockwise from top left:Apps for Obama, 2011, acrylic on hollow core door; Pink Psyche Queen, 1979, acrylic on canvas; 9-11-01, 2006, acrylic on canvas. Black Monolith, II: Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994, acrylic on canvas.

Loop #42, 2003, acrylic on canvas. Press

An Old School Painter Adapts to a New World Order: Jack Whitten’s 50-Year Evolution ArtNews, January 2016

Expressive Abstraction: An Interview with Jack Whitten Art in America, October 2013

Unfurling and Saluting a Legacy at Rose Art Museum Boston Globe, September 2013

Interview: Jack Whitten with Robert Storr Brooklyn Rail, September 2007

Interview: Jack Whitten with Kenneth Goldsmith Bomb Magazine, June 1994 Artnews, 19 January 2016, New York NY Thirty-one years later, in 2015, the Whitney’s curators, realizing they had a gap in their collection, acquired Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and showed it in “America Is Hard to See,” the inaugural show of the museum’s permanent collection in its new building in the Meatpacking District. The Whitney now joins MoMA, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and others who have acquired work by Whitten over the past few years, concluding that Whitten is an important, if under-appreciated, piece of American art history after all. The painter’s work has never been more visible than it is right now, thanks to a traveling retrospective now on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Whitten, at age 76, is more famous than he has ever been in his half-century career.

“I maintain that painting is organic, and it continues to evolve,” Whitten said when I visited him in his Queens studio one morning last fall. Behind where he sat was a wall covered with an unruly mess of images that the artist had personally gathered together, ranging from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square to busty pinup models to photographs of Crete, where he and his wife take vacations. Nearby were silver, spray-painted Nike shoes and several works in progress that, with their subtle arrangements of acrylic, projected an effortless dignity.

Whitten has a salt-and-pepper mustache and bushy hair to match, and he speaks with a passion that can be both intimidating and thrilling. When he’s not painting, he reads constantly, absorbing ideas from cutting-edge physics, technology, and current events into his work. He would hate not to keep adjusting to the times. As a result, his work from 1974, as compared with his more recent style, looks like the efforts of a different artist.

Kathryn Kanjo, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which hosted the Whitten retrospective in 2014, said of the artist’s output, “To honestly realize, Oh, this is all the same person… It’s sublime. We have to catch up to him.”

Jack Whitten, Chinese Sincerity, 1974, acrylic on canvas. PABLO MASON/©JACK WHITTEN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COLLECTION MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO, MUSEUM PURCHASE, INTERNATIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY COLLECTORS FUNDS

Jack Whitten’s Queens studio photographed on October 26, 2015 ©KATHERINE MCMAHON

s Whitten served me tea, we spoke about his practice, which he terms “conceptual painting.” “All it means, really, is the ability to design, to lay things out, to literally have something that you can plan ahead and you can follow the steps,” he said. “It’s all A programmed, so when it comes time for the improvisation to take place, the conceptual is thrown out the window.”

Born in 1939, in Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten witnessed the effects of longstanding American racism firsthand. He recalled being a part of a black community that revolved around the church, family, and schools—but it was also segregated. “Being black in America, you’re always black,” he said. “I’m a product of American apartheid. There’s no other way to put it. You’re talking to someone who grew up in straight segregation.”

Whitten became an avid participant in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. In 1957, the same year Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, Whitten met Martin Luther King Jr. in Tuskegee. “I believed in what he preached,” Whitten said, “but, when I had the opportunity to test what he was saying, which occurred in Baton Rouge, it changed my life.” He was referring to an incident in 1960, when Whitten was studying at Southern University in Louisiana. With 15 other students, Whitten staged a sit-in to protest segregation on campus. What began with his class peacefully closing down the school became a national event: once local clergy got involved, Whitten and the other students marched to the state capitol building in Baton Rouge, where they were attacked. “I didn’t fight, I didn’t resist,” Whitten said. “But I realized that I couldn’t do that. That’s what drove me out of the South.”

That same year, Whitten got on a Greyhound bus to New York and never lived in Alabama again. He applied to Cooper Union and was accepted the following year. By the time he graduated, in 1964, he had come up with a way of describing his artistic vision: “The image is photographic, therefore I must photograph my thoughts.” By this, he meant, “I can see it in my brain, and it’s reproduced. I’m using the word ‘reproduce’ in the same sense that you would use a Xerox copy machine or a computer—any form of a reproduction device.”

Following this impulse, Whitten’s first mature series was a group of black-and- white paintings that look like wisps of smoke, but, according to their titles, represent people and objects. Whitten maintains that he even sees the head of Jesus Christ in one. Using a mesh-like fabric, Whitten was able to mix layers of black and white paint on the canvas, creating what resembles ghosts moving in front of a camera. “They’re strange, man,” Whitten told me. Allan Stone, Jack Whitten, Psychic Eclipse, 1964, nylon fabric and acrylic on canvas. Whitten’s gallerist at the time, thought so, too—he refused to show the “Head” ©JACK WHITTEN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY THE ARTIST; ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK; AND ZENO X works, thinking they wouldn’t sell. GALLERY, ANTWERP

What Whitten did show were paintings like Martin Luther King’s Garden (1968), a swirling mix of freeform strokes that seems to refer to the chaos and triumph of the late ’60s. Whitten had met and become friendly with artists like Franz Kline, and the work hints at the influence of Arshile Gorky and Joan Miró. But, in its politics, it also demands comparisons to paintings by Norman Lewis, who Whitten knew as well, and who likewise represented the Civil Rights Movement in abstract terms.

By the mid-’70s, Whitten had leapt into total, process-based abstraction, and had even switched mediums—he stopped working with oil paint altogether and took up acrylic because it dried faster. His “Slab” paintings, the works shown at the Whitney in 1974, were very much of their era, which is to say: messy, and positively overwhelming. This is also a fine way of describing the radical shift that happened over the course of the first decade and a half of Whitten’s career. He’s still trying to find ways of doing this in his newest work, which has referred to the Newtown school shooting and Barack Obama on purely geometric terms. Whitten said, “I want a work, which has referred to the Newtown school shooting and Barack Obama on purely geometric terms. Whitten said, “I want a worldview that will teach me how to conduct myself in this new world order. That’s what I’m working on.”

n what would become one of the shaping trips of his life, Whitten went to services for Greek Christmas in Sinai, Egypt, at Saint O Catherine’s Monastery. Built into the pink-granite foothills of Mount Sinai, the monastery has huge, tiered chandeliers that, over the course of the service, were gradually lit, illuminating the mosaics surrounding them. Whitten described the experience as being transcendent—he realized that the masteri, or the artists behind the mosaics, didn’t lay the glass tiles evenly, which allowed them to glow unnaturally when light hit them.

Whitten has since made entire series of paintings that look like mosaics, but are actually composed of dried-acrylic paint chips unevenly set in wet paint. “Hence today,” he explained, “I say three-dimensional light. In the early ’70s, it was planar light, because that was all I had. It was more of a Euclidean base. Now, the fractile dimension of light has become multi-dimensional.”

The idea had lingered with Whitten since 1965, when he met jazz musician John Coltrane and realized, through his music, that “I was looking for light—light in Jack Whitten, Mask of God I (For Joseph Campbell), 1987, painting.” For a while, however, it lay dormant in his practice. During the late ’70s acrylic on canvas. ©JACK WHITTEN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY and early ’80s, Whitten experimented with minimalist forms, using the teeth of a THE ARTIST; ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK; AND ZENO X saw-like tool to create even lines in wet paint. Then he began to move grids GALLERY, ANTWERP toward paintings that looked like circuit boards. But something shifted after a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in 1983. He started using frottage-like pieces of acrylic and insetting them in paint. The result is a fractured surface, anticipating the mosaic-like paintings of the ’90s.

The works leading up to the ’90s are visually stunning—they make you wonder, “How did he do that?” It’s no surprise that Alexander Gray, whose New York gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, has represented Whitten since 2007, calls the effect of Whitten’s work “the wow, how, wow,” or “getting that visual-energy punch and trying to figure out how the stuff is stuck to the canvas.”

Gray described being seduced by Whitten’s ongoing “Black Monoliths” series—mosaic-like paintings that memorialize figures like Ralph Ellison and Jacob Lawrence, begun in the ’90s. When I visited Whitten’s studio, he was working on one dedicated to the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who died last year. Light bounced off the acrylic pieces meant to resemble Coleman’s head, creating what really did feel like a glowing presence. Kanjo, the MCASD curator, put the tiled paintings’ effect best: “He transforms the materials from what we expect them to do, so we look at paint differently.”

For Whitten, his chipped-paint technique refers to abstract physics. “We know now that light occurs in extremely small particles,” he said. “That’s what allows us to see—those little fucking photons bouncing around your retina, and blam-o, I can see!”

Whitten cites Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered that all organic matter is fundamentally made of geometric shapes, as one of his influences. This, surprisingly, makes a lot of sense. Since the ’90s, Whitten’s paint chips have continued to mutate into strange, new forms. He’s done series based on postage-stamp codes, in which the tiles are laid out in grid-like forms. (A crimson- and-white one is dedicated to the curator Marcia Tucker.) He’s also made paintings like Apps for Obama (2011), which features a number of candy-like blobs arranged like app icons on an iPad. The technique Whitten is using is millennia old; the way he’s using it and the content are ultra-new. “I’m talking about a geometry of the information age,” Whitten explained. Jack Whitten, NY Battle Ground, 1967, oil on canvas. ©JACK WHITTEN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY THE ARTIST; ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK; AND ZENO X GALLERY, ANTWERP

s she was preparing the 2006 show “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975,” curator Katy Siegel visited Whitten’s storage facilities, which, at the time, were in TriBeCa. The exhibition arose from a conversation Siegel had with A the painter David Reed, who proposed the idea of doing a painting survey focused on the show’s titular eight-year stretch, a time when the medium was believed by many critics and curators to have hit a dead end. This meant having to do some research—and also making some major rediscoveries. Whitten showed Siegel a number of early works, each one better than the last. “I could tell from the first second that I walked into storage that this was a major historical figure,” Siegel told me. “I just thought, ‘Well, he may be known, but he’s not well-enough known.’”

“High Times Hard Times” has been credited with reintroducing Whitten in the last decade, but nobody has shaped his career arc more than Whitten himself.

Siegel told me that, during the ’70s and ’80s, when writers weren’t there for painters and black artists, Whitten became his own critic. The traveling retrospective may be what has brought Whitten’s work back to the attention of museums, but “he should’ve been there all along,” Siegel said. “In the decades that he wasn’t famous, he was making work that was incredibly important. When the world was ready, there he was, not an iota diminished by those years of inattention.”

For his part, Whitten is mostly unfazed by his recent success. At the moment, his plans are to keep painting. “The beat goes on,” he said with a smile. “My old dealer, Allan Stone, loved the phrase, ‘There’s no destination, it’s only the journey.’ I haven’t seen a destination yet, but that’s good. I’m still finding new stuff out there.”

Copyright 2016, ARTnews Ltd, 40 W 25th Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. All rights reserved. Though painter Jack Whitten dabbled in representation in the 1960s, abstraction has dominated his practice since then. His current show at New York's Alexander Gray Associates (through Oct. 12) offers a suite of richly textured paintings that find the artist manipulating acrylic in surprising ways: Whitten doesn't just pour or even rake, he also molds pigment into small-scale sculptural objects that he tiles or drops onto his complex surfaces.

Whitten's work often memorializes deceased friends and family members, or addresses social issues. The artist maintains that identity—Whitten, born in Bessemer, Ala., is black—is present in the work despite its non-objective nature.

The artist talked with A.i.A. by phone recently about abstraction's capacity to hold meaning and the role of African-American artists today.

JESSICA DAWSON You've got a painting in this show called Sandbox: For The Children Of Sandy Hook Elementary School [2013]. It has a sweet, candy-store palette, and the acrylic molds embedded in its surface have a confectionary quality. Without reading the title, one wouldn't know its inspiration. How do you see abstraction conveying meaning?

JACK WHITTEN I maintain that abstraction is a symbol. It's very much like holding a camera. I can direct it toward any symbol that I choose. As a painter, I have to locate that symbol in the paint, as opposed to giving an illustrated narrative. The narrative content and the figure are still in there-they're built into the paint. DAWSON I recently spoke with the painter Kerry James Marshall, who believes that black artists should assert the black figure in their work because of their history of exclusion. What do you think?

WHITTEN I go along with that—up to a certain point. I agreed with him 100 percent in regard to work from the 1960s. But I do believe we've gone beyond that now. I sincerely believe that in the black community of artists, especially those of us dealing with abstraction, art has to go beyond the general notions of race, gender, nationalism. Things have evolved to the degree where there is a possibility of a new sensibility out there. We're into a global aesthetic here and anyone that doesn't see that has a real old-fashioned way of thinking.

DAWSON But this country has still has racial issues.

WHITTEN We know that. But we also know that those of us who build something that lies beyond the notion of race have to take advantage of possibilities. We have to grab the opportunity when we have it.

I met Jacob Lawrence. He did narrative work. Romare Bearden. Norman Lewis. All of those artists taught me that a lot of ground has been covered, and you do not have to limit your degree of expressive freedom. Black artists before me laid a pretty good foundation that allows me to do what I do today. My ass is not floating out there alone.

DAWSON So you've got a utopian vision of abstraction?

WHITTEN I see art as the only hope we have left. I don't see it in religion or politics. If we as artists can't take advantage of it, who can? The Boston Globe, 19 September 2013, Boston MA

Like a young Augie March switching from one great man to the next, Whitten found himself once again in thrall — this time to de Kooning. In an interview earlier this year with the Wall Street Journal, he admitted to “following [de Kooning] around like a puppy.”

“He was useful in a lot of ways. I came in one night after a horrific critique when one of my professors put me down for concentrating too much on process. That was not a word used much then, in 1961. He said I accepted too many accidents. I spoke to de Kooning, and he said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as accidents in painting!’ That was very helpful to me.”

“Process” — or the notion that how you make a work of art can be as charged and significant as how it ends up looking — became key in Whitten’s subsequent efforts to find a voice of his own. Like many of his contemporaries, he was trying both to be true to the politics of the day and to get out from under the shadow of abstract expressionism.

By the late ’60s, Whitten was tired of that movement’s romantic rhetoric of heroic self­expression. He was ready, too, to abandon the psychedelic experiments he’d been lustily conducting. “I thought I was going off the deep end,” he said.

In his painting, his brush strokes, the very movements of his wrist, had become habitual, complacent. He needed to find a way of working that was cooler, steadier, more objective.

Along with three other artists, he received a grant from, of all places, the Xerox Corporation. Whitten and his fellow artists were invited by the company to experiment with its instruments and work with its engineers. (A small aside: Andy Warhol and his poker­faced Xerox aesthetic hovers over the careers of both Whitten and Richter like a devious, half­smiling angel. His silk screens, made by pushing paint over a woven mesh with a squeegee, were precedents for both artists. Perfect, then, that he’s the subject of a simultaneous show at the Rose.)

“My solution,” Whitten told Storr, “was to expand the gesture while taking my hand out of it. I figured if Bill de Kooning had a house­painting brush, if I made a brush 20 times that size, I might be able to overcome his influence, and perhaps the work will lead me somewhere else.” It’s not that the resulting paintings (retrieved from a corner of Whitten’s studio, stretched, and beautifully hung at the Rose) look particularly like Richter’s — although there are obvious similarities.

Rather, what’s interesting is that, from his perch in Dusseldorf, Richter was wrestling with comparable problems: how to escape the intensified subjectivity of abstract expressionism yet still retain sensual surfaces; and, just as importantly, how to get one’s artistic tuning fork and one’s political tuning fork humming on the same frequency. Remarkably, he found a similar solution: abstract paintings made by pushing paint across the canvas with a mechanical tool.

Whitten’s works were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. Writing in The New York Times, John Russell registered the element of chance in Whitten’s raked paint technique (at times he used an Afro comb), and applauded their immediacy. Roberta Smith, writing in Artforum the following year, noted the sense of velocity in Whitten’s surfaces — a key insight, which holds also for Richter’s squeegee abstracts.

The two largest paintings at the Rose, “Asa’s Palace” and “The Pariah Way,” have velocity in spades. Their impact is tremendous.

Incredibly, until the Rose show was installed, Whitten hadn’t seen either of them since he painted them. They had remained rolled up in his studio for 40 years.

“The Pariah Way” has a mottled, purplish surface. It’s full of random glimpses of earlier layers of different colors — rust­colored in the top half, green below. What’s striking is how taut the entire surface appears, as if the whole complex symphony of layered paint had been fired in a kiln, its surface unified that way.

“Asa’s Palace” punctuates an all­over field of horizontal pink and gray striations with elongated blobs of bright or metallic color. Some of these marks have a flat, bubbled texture, like pumice stone; they seem to emerge from layers below. Others seem to sit on top of that field. The longer you look, however, the more spatially ambiguous and technically mysterious they become.

A nearby set of six small collages on brown linen offers clues to Whitten’s process. Thin slices of colored acrylic have evidently been removed from the blobs in “Asa’s Palace” and pasted to the brown linen to make new works, resembling miniature cutouts by Matisse.

Other, primarily black­and­white works on paper — the “Cut Acrylic” and “Dispersal” series — stress Whitten’s interest in arbitrary effects of splatter, spray, resist, and removal. All suggest not only industrial processes but the chemical, dark­into­light hocus­pocus of photography (another link with Richter, for whom the photographic image is central).

Even if the mechanical­looking works of Whitten, from the ’70s, and Richter, from the ’80s and beyond, suggest a reaction against the rhetoric of abstract expressionism, they should also be seen as complications of, and hence salutes to, that legacy.

Abstract expressionism’s most celebrated figure, Jackson Pollock, died not long after reintroducing figurative elements into his paintings. Whitten’s belief is that Pollock “had discovered something that he didn’t understand fully” — something “he was just desperately trying to make sense of. . . . My friend David Budd,” he continued, “used to tell me repeatedly, ‘You know, after Pollock, something was swept under the rug,’ and I never knew what he was talking about.”

The statement sets off bells in one’s head; after all, it might just as easily be applied to Whitten. A restless, inventive spirit, he has gone on to make brilliant, commanding work in a variety of styles. But this small show has enough in it to make you wonder whether, around the mid­1970s, he wasn’t desperately trying to make sense of what he had discovered, and whether that discovery wasn’t subsequently swept under the rug.

It’s a discovery that he, and we, are still trying to make sense of.

© 2013 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY The Brooklyn Rail, September 2007, New York NY Whitten: Well, you’re talking about the whole decade of the ’60s. On the one hand I was struggling with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, and on the other, I was, like most other people at the time, living precariously through my own experience with the psychedelic.

Rail: (laughs) Now Jack, how dedicated of a researcher were you?

Whitten: That’s what was in the air; that’s what people were feeling, so all of the inter-mingling or one thing melting into another was considered natural at the time. (laughs)

Rail: Let’s focus on the political condition and how it affected you. First of all, there’s about half of the paintings that in some ways, by their titles at least, make references to Dr. Martin Luther King. For example, “MLK’s Garden,” “King’s Wish,” “For MLK,” and “U.S.A. Oracle,” which is the most complex one, in that it has a lot of sub-themes. Maybe you can tell us just a little bit about what Dr. King meant to you at that time, and how you went about making pictures in a context where there was breaking news about the war and then his subsequent assassination in April of 1968? Jack Whitten, 9.11.01 (2005). Mixed media and acrylic on canvas, 120”x240”. Photo by John Berens. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates. Whitten: I met Dr. King when I went to hear him talk at a local church in Montgomery, Alabama, which is not far from where I was going to school at Tuskegee Institute in 1957. It was my freshman year, and right in the middle of the bus boycott. So I had a chance to speak to him about our political struggle.

Rail: What was he like to deal with one on one?

Whitten: You know, having been brought up in the Christian Fundamentalist Church in Bessemer, Alabama; I was already accustomed to witnessing such a preacher man. The only thing different was that he was a great one—charismatic beyond belief of course, but what was important to me is that I was able to connect with a type of spirituality that the man had.

Rail: He was still a very young man at that time.

Whitten: Absolutely. And this was his first introduction to the national stage. At that time, as you know, all of our buses were segregated; we had white sections and colored sections. I remember the sign on the bus in Bessemer—the front said ‘white’ and the back said ‘colored.’ I knew a young man, he was actually one of my older sister’s best friends who came back from the Army with his Army uniform on, got on the bus and sat down one day, and the bus driver asked him to move, and he told him he was tired and wanted to sit down. So the guy pulled out a pistol and killed him. So what King did within that context was an extremely brave thing to do. Rail: Did you ever come across him again in person or did you mostly follow what he did in the news the way other people did?

Whitten: I was present in Washington, D.C. for his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, but I never met him again. What I did on my own when I was down in Southern University in Baton Rouge in 1959 was try out his theories of non-violence by participating in numerous sit-down demonstrations. In fact, I was one of the organizers.

Rail: Was it part of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) or was it a spontaneously organized demonstration by you and your colleagues?

Whitten: It started as a campus protest among students, and then it spread out, involving all the local clergies, and was nationally televised. In fact, that march convinced me that I couldn’t participate any longer. That’s why I left and came to New York to further my study at Cooper Union in 1959.

Rail: Because the violence was directed at you?

Whitten: I just couldn’t go on. I believed in Dr. King’s philosophies; but in reality I found out that I didn’t have it in me to continue in this direction. I found it too difficult to turn the other cheek.

Rail: So when you came to Cooper Union, what kind of work were you making before those paintings that are now on view at P.S.1?

Whitten: The best way to describe my experience at Cooper Union in 1960-1964 is that it was influenced by both German Bauhaus and Abstract Expressionism. But as soon as I graduated I met Bill de Kooning and Franz Kline, my work became more Abstract Expressionistic, with some surrealist overtones. I was influenced by Gorky as well as Pollock.

Rail: So the notion of “Hide and Seek” had an impact on you.

Whitten: I remember once visiting a friend, and how I kept seeing faces on the windowsill. At first I found them very disturbing, because I didn’t know what was happening.

Rail: Were you being, perhaps, anxious about a certain thing, or was it a vision of some sort?

Whitten: I think it was more like a vision, because I started seeing these faces in everything that I looked at. In addition, it was my friend Jeff Waite, a carpenter and a philosopher (he was Welsh and had earned his PhD from McGill University) who one day saw me pick up one of these found objects which I collected and grabbed my hand and asked me, “Why did you pick up this one and not that one?” And I said, “I never thought there was any difference between them. I just pick whichever one attracted me.” At any rate, it was Jeff who interested me into reading philosophy and aesthetics. And then, as we say today, connect the dots. One thing led to another. The structuring of personal aesthetics is what those paintings are about.

Rail: In spite of the fact that there’s a lot of references to the social conflicts in the ’60s and so on, it’s hard to tell in some of the paintings whether these images are emerging from the ground, or are in a sense being sublimated into the painting.

Whitten: At that time, I was doing the best I could to contain the kind of imagery I was seeing. It wasn’t an intellectual situation, but rather, it was an emotional necessity. As a matter of fact, they’re my autobiographical paintings. I mean, I was going through a serious crisis in my life. But then everybody was. The whole race issue forced me to pick myself apart subconsciously until I met people like Leroi Jones, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence who had found other solutions for their creative lives.

Rail: That was a very interesting chapter in the history of African-American artists altogether. For example, Norman Lewis was shifting towards abstraction in the ’50s, which was considered at that time very radical, but his work by far has not been well represented in art history, nor has it been well shown in museums. And I guess one of the things that’s exciting about your show is that it brings up all of those issues.

Whitten: That’s one part of the problem, the other is the tension that exists between abstraction and figuration, which has to do with pictorial or formal problems rather than political ones.

Rail: You’re right—there is quite a lot of range in what you see. I mean, they’re gestural paintings from a distance, but when you look closer you see faces and other references to the figure. At the same time, the spatial organization varies enormously.

Whitten: It’d be difficult to tell you what sort of mental state I was going through by late ’68. For the first time in my life I had to see a shrink simply because I thought I was going off the deep end. I would occasionally go and talk to Jacob Lawrence. And he would tell me, “Well, you got to keep your mind on the plastic.” It’s like the Van Gogh syndrome. Van Gogh was obviously emotionally intense, but if he hadn’t maintained some sort or a structural integrity, he would not have been able to make those paintings. That’s what made his paintings so great.

Rail: Yeah. Form is a way of absorbing and dealing with tension, so that it doesn’t run into chaos!

Whitten: It’s a way of trying to make sense of things. You’re a painter yourself, you know what I’m speaking of.

Rail: I do, actually. Emotionally as well as formally. All of us want to be in charge of it. Now, one of the things that’s also striking, is that in “Look Mom,” you get these opaque surfaces, certainly less atmospheric than others ones, and you begin to see a clarification of the physical parts of the painting other than gesture. Does that work, in some ways, have greater connection to your abstractions in the ’70s? Whitten: That painting coincided at the time when I started using paint right out of the tube. I discovered what I call “the spatial overlay,” which gave me a different way to deal with space. It was my own way to get away from that psychedelic influence. Anybody with any sense from my generation who was serious about painting by the late ’60s had to realize that the psychedelic was a perpetual dog chasing its tail. And in our own way, we had to invent our way of making paintings.

Rail: Your painting, “Siberian Salt Grinder” in the show “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967 – 1975,” curated by Katy Siegel at the National Academy of Design, was so uncanny because it looks so much like Gerhard Richter’s work, but it was made before Richter made paintings of that kind. Again it was a question of suddenly discovering a chapter in your personal history, but it’s also problematic, if you want to call it that; in that nobody was aware of it unless they happened to be real lucky to have seen them.

Whitten: That painting was first shown at the Whitney Museum, in a show curated by Marcia Tucker. It was painted in ’74, a good ten years before Richter. By the time I did the last show at Alan’s in 1969, I realized that I had to do something drastically radical from the relative gesture of my wrist, which was becoming too habitual. In the middle of all this, I got a grant from Xerox Corporation along with three other artists, Steve Antonakos, Bob Whitman, and Agnes Denis, and all of us were invited to Rochester to experiment with their instruments and work with their engineers. And my solution was to expand the gesture while taking my hand out of it. I figured if Bill de Kooning had a house-painting brush, if I made a brush 20 times that size, I might be able to overcome his influence, and perhaps the work will lead me somewhere else. Ultimately, they were critical for me because they allowed me to make new leaps in other directions. The total picture plane was conceived of as a single line.

Rail: You certainly did that. Not only did they give you a new direction, but they were also critical of the kinds of assumptions that went with what gesture was, and the idea of direct painting. Here you’ve got something where the kind of sensual and physical quality, with such gorgeous effect, could co-exist with a removed and formal conceit.

Whitten: I think in his last paintings, Pollock was dealing with those issues between Abstract Expressionism, gesture, and figuration, all at once. While many others tend to put him down because they thought that he was going back to figuration, I’m one of those who believe that he had discovered something that he didn’t understand fully. He was just desperately trying to make sense of what he had discovered, that’s all.

Rail: And he didn’t assume that it was a one-directional situation anyway. Whitten: Well, my friend David Budd used to tell me repeatedly, “You know, after Pollock, something was swept under the rug,” and I never knew what he was talking about. At that time, when older painters talked to you, they did it in some sort double-talk or riddled way, and if you didn’t have a feeling for the painter’s language, you didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Bill de Kooning used to talk that way. Rail: Yeah. With his wonderful Dutch accent. In any case, when you started making these paintings, did you care for the fact that you were going against the grain of geometric abstraction? In other words, were you navigating, in a sense, off of that, or were you perfectly happy to be seen in respect to that?

Whitten: By 1970 I was seeing a lot of Henry Geldzahler, who was a great supporter of my work at that time. He would come to the studio and we would talk a lot about the grid; the grid being a kind of, as he put in a little essay he wrote for me once, “aspect of civilization.” In my own way, I was introduced to it by my afro-comb. That’s where it started.

Rail: So that’s when you began to use your comb as a painting tool?

Whitten: Yes. First I used the afro-comb with a couple of paintings, and then I began to recognize a pattern. That’s when I wanted more control, so I started making the device myself. The afro-comb became a big carpenter saw. In fact, MoMA has one from 1978.

Rail: That’s the one I included in my first show at MoMA.

Whitten: Exactly. I remember one of the critics said “There’s a Jack Whitten painting that looks like it just wants to jump off the wall and start dancing.” But for the most part, no one knew what to do with those paintings. It took a long time to bring those paintings back into the public view with the proper understanding which they deserve.

Rail: That’s why Katy’s show was so important, because what happened during that period cannot be reduced to just a couple of names.

Whitten: Even the period we were talking about earlier, from the black perspective in the ’60s; no one has attempted to make sense of that.

Rail: The Whitney or other museums should do or should have done something on that period. Anyway, let’s shift a little bit to the 9/11 painting. What was your sense of that day, and how did you get to the point of thinking that one day you could make a picture after such an event?

Whitten: I was on Lispenard Street, where I had lived since 1962, with some firemen that morning because of a gas leak on our block. Do you remember the voice of somebody saying, “Holy shit!” from the first video clip that was available on TV? That’s my voice. Anyway, all of a sudden, there was this horrible sound coming our way, and we all look up and see this enormous plane flying right over our heads, and it went directly into the North tower. And when it hit, the first thing you saw was this big crystal burst; before you saw any smoke, before you saw any flame, the sky was just filled with crystal glass, which was hard to see on the video. It was like this huge chandelier, that’s what you saw. One of the firemen said, “Oh, it’s a horrible accident,” and so did my tenant and a few others among my neighbors. But my gut feeling was, “Hey man, that was no goddamn accident.” I had two years of pilot training down at Tuskegee, so I know that you can muscle a plane’s steering and take it off course. Believe me, that plane was like an arrow shooting at a target. The firemen stopped what they were doing, got into their trucks and they took off immediately toward the Trade building, and while some of us were still arguing about whether or not it was an accident, the second plane hit the South tower.

Rail: Because we live in Brooklyn, we could only see the whole thing from afar. We didn’t experience the impact. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have actually seen the impact up close as you did.

Whitten: Watching those poor people jumping out of the buildings was the most terrifying and horrible experience. To think that close to 3,000 people were murdered in my neighborhood—nobody gets over that, you really don’t. So I made a vow to do something about it. I made the decision before that happened to sell my building, and got a new studio in Woodside, Queens. I remember Ms. Gund came to visit me at the studio in the middle of renovation, and I said to her, “The first painting I’m going to do when I get this studio together is going to be the 9/11 painting.” When I finished the painting four years later, I called her up and invited her to come and see it, and she did.

Rail: She has got more time for people, more energy to really try and make things happen than anybody I know. So in some ways, the 9/11 painting is part of your memorial painting series that grew out of the ’60s?

Whitten: Absolutely.

Rail: But what was the first one?

Whitten: The first one probably was for my older brother Tommy, who was a jazz musician, and was killed in a fire in 1965. I did two Kennedy paintings, a painting of children who were killed in Birmingham, and one of Nat King Cole, which were all destroyed in a fire. I’ve had two major fires in New York.

Rail: Could you talk a bit about what you’ll be showing at Alexander Gray this month?

Whitten: Five memorial paintings that are based on electronic-stamps, which are for friends and people I knew: Al Held, Al Loving, Marcia Tucker, Bobby Short, and the last one for my younger brother, Billy, who died last year.

Rail: I only know the two Als and Marcia, but my daughter Katherine and I are big admirers of Bobby Short.

Whitten: Bobby was a great supporter of the Studio Museum. He gave a lot of time and effort to the Studio Museum, and that’s how I first met him. I told him that we play his music loud during the summertime at my house on Crete and that the swallows would go crazy flying in and out of the porch! Bobby gave me a big hug and said, “Darling, that’s so marvelous.”

BOMB, June 1994, New York NY Abstract Expressionists in particular—I had no choice but to be well versed. It took 20 years to get into a position where I could work myself out of history. Every painter wants to escape art history. And now there’s a curve that’s leading me out. My emphasis on pop culture, video, science, on the urban environment, and everything on up to the Big Bang theory excites me. I see that as a way, using those metaphors, that I can escape art historical references.

I was impressed with you when we first met in Lodz, Poland at the Artist Museum for Construction in Progress, running around with your computer, engaging all of those people with sounds, compiling all those words—I instantly identified with that, that’s why I wanted to meet you and touch base, because as a poet, you’re into this pop thing, you’re into this immediacy of the norm.

KG What we both share in our recent works is that we’re binding disparate things we find in the culture, in the newspapers, in the material that’s all around us. I find a lot of my sounds on the street. I’m always listening. And when I look at your recent work, I know you’ve been scavenging the streets—molds off the sidewalk, metal grates and caps—you’ve been taking impressions from the world around you.

JW Sure, sure. That button painting was inspired by a Lisa Hoke sculpture, but I lifted the composition from a Lalaounis jewelry ad in the New York Times.

KG I wouldn’t know that.

JW No you wouldn’t. (laughter) It’s not important that one knows that, but it’s what gets me started.

KG You transform material, you don’t leave it as you found it, or do you?

JW Transformation is very important. Materials are just raw materials, that’s all. It’s like a word, anybody can have access to the same word, but a word in your mouth is totally different from a word in mine.

KG I tend to put a word into a context where it assumes a new meaning. It’s like taking a word out of the popular context and re-applying it to art. Tell me, what was your relationship to pop culture in the ’70s?

JW What governs those early ‘70s paintings is photography, and I don’t mean a photographic picture, I mean the process of photography. What happens in a camera when you set that f-stop and a small amount of light comes through and places itself on a sensitive plate. The speed factor. Speed is an important part of abstract thought.

KG Talk about your relationship with speed.

JW First, in terms of Abstract Expressionism as a gesture, later in terms of the instant, what happens in a split second, as in photography. So when I was doing those paintings, to place the paint in a split second—the whole painting was conceived of as one line, the painting as a gesture.

KG Physically, how long did it take you to make those paintings?

JW Over an extended period of time I might go backward and forward in layers. But the crucial part took place in three seconds, two seconds. I took the Abstract Expressionist gesture and amplified it. That speed removes it from relational thinking to non-relational thinking. Because when that tool I was using would fall across the canvas—it did not allow for relational thought.

KG What tool?

JW Paintings from the 1970s were made with a tool of my design that was 12 feet wide, so that the act of painting was raked across the whole plane of the painting in one shot.

KG But the funny thing is that the paintings have an un-handmade look. They look like a photography process, in some way related to video. Obviously the hand is really important in your work, but somehow it was masked.

JW It’s an extension of the hand. I’m coming in back of Pollock, I’m extending Pollock’s thinking, that’s what’s going on here. Let’s consider Pollock for a minute. The paint leaves the hand, falls onto this canvas, I take that and extend it several steps further.

KG With the tool?

JW I have to use the tool. The tool is a sort of medium, you might say, that stands between me and the painting.

KG Buckminster Fuller always said that one of the best tools he had were his eyeglasses, which he saw as an extension of the eye. So everything to Fuller was an extension of himself. That’s where the integration comes in. We’re really not separate from our tools at all. There is no need to shun or fear any type of technology. It’s all an extension of ourselves. Did you feel that the tool was an extension of your hand or was it something separate from you?

JW Very much like how Buckminster Fuller explained himself. That tool is an extender of my hand. It’s like saying the computer is an extender of one’s brain.

KG It goes into McLuhan’s old idea of an extended nervous system which has now come back full force into our lives with the Internet, global computer systems, and the new cellular satellite networks.

JW My metaphors are found in scientific processes. Hydrogen bubble chambers turned me on in the ‘70s. Electronic scanning devices—that’s where I found my images.

KG What do you mean by electronic scanning devices?

JW Let’s say you have an atom, a particle you want to scan. You put it into these chambers and get a picture of what it looks like, its movements, its tracks. Scientists have experiments they do in particle physics, they have whole caves built out there just designed to try to chase particles so they can track them. All through the ’70s these things were going through my head, they excited me very much.

KG To bring it back to the idea of the computer and technology, I have a little hand scanner that I use as a vacuum cleaner. I can just suck up images and suck up text and put them into my work. Like the way you scavenge the streets and suck up all that’s around you and put it into your painting.

JW This is beautiful, it is what I call the loop. Sucking in information, using technology and letting it go back and forth. It loops in and out.

KG In embrace of the world.

JW In embrace of the world. Let’s dig it. We live in a modern technological society . . . But in truth, I think we are in a primitive technological society. That’s where we are. Jack Whitten, Prime Mover, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 59 × 88 inches.

KG Primitive technological society. That’s an interesting idea. It reminds me of modern painting or modern music—perhaps jazz?

JW In John Coltrane’s music there is this phenomenon that we refer to as a sheet of sound. As a painter, I experience sound that way, light operating in a sheet . . . a sheet of light, a plane of light.

KG One thing I’ve always found remarkable about Coltrane’s music is the sheer amount of air and light he gives into his work.

JW He penetrates the world . . . the man penetrates the world. I believe in equivalency, as expressed in mathematics. My light in painting is equivalent to Coltrane’s sound. Coltrane’s music is non-linear. It’s circular. It’s not one-dimensional. Coltrane is multi- dimensional. And coming out of the ’60s, this affected my painting. When I speak of space in painting, I’m speaking in terms of multi-dimensional space. A space that is infinite in all directions. This is what I got from Coltrane.

KG Haven’t you dedicated works to friends who are musicians? There’s been a great interaction with you and music over the years.

JW Music has had a great bearing on my painting. The music is what has kept me going, even in my lowest moments. I’ve had moments of depression, especially in the late ’60s.

KG Knowing you as I do now, your spirit is so high and so generous that I can’t imagine you being plagued with depression.

JW I went through a period in the late ’60s of anxiety. I was catatonic, I was afraid to get out of bed. But the music was the thing that kept my perspective.

KG And comforted you down there.

JW And comforted me. Well, growing up in Alabama, with my strict Christian fundamentalist background, we couldn’t hear rhythm and blues in the house, because my mother wouldn’t allow it. But my oldest brother always had one or two records that he would sneak on when my mother wasn’t home.

KG Where did you grow up in Alabama?

JW In Bessemer, Alabama. Bessemer, Alabama is a steel mill town, the next-largest town to Birmingham. But the music I heard then was mostly gospel. Local rhythm and blues stations, early 1950s, played rock and roll, rhythm and blues. That’s the music I grew up with. KG Getting it on the radio.

JW Getting it on the radio. See, things were very much divided, as they are today, unfortunately. But then, the polarity was great, coming from a strict segregated society. You had a black radio station, you had a white radio station. White kids played Elvis Presley, and that whole crew of country-western sort of sounds. Black radio stations played black blues, Detroit-sound music. Early Motown.

KG But it strikes me that everybody was copping everything from everybody. The blues guys were copping country licks and the country musicians were copping blues licks. It seems to me that there might have been more interaction, or am I wrong?

JW Well, I tell you. In Alabama, growing up in the ’50s, there was a definite polarity. Definite. The word “crossover” didn’t even exist then.

KG But don’t you think it was happening? Wasn’t everybody listening to what everybody else was doing?

JW I would say yes, everybody heard the same thing. No doubt about that. Coming from the South, I maintain that there’s a certain southern sensibility. The language has that same intonation in the voice, white or black.

KG In the house that you grew up in, was there a lot of visual art?

JW My father was a coal miner. He died when I was young; my mom was a seamstress but she was a believer in education. There were books, magazines, a piano. My mother’s first husband was a sign painter, and he did some painting on the side, probably the first painting that I saw as a kid. His name was James Monroe Cross. He was also a gospel singer, one of the original founders of the Dixie Hummingbirds. And the old people in my community claimed that out of my mother grieving for this man I was a marked kid.

KG A what?

JW A marked kid. It’s a term which means that something can be transferred to another person. This man was not my father, but old people would say things to my mother like, “Anabelle, if James hadn’t died, I would have sworn you lied!” People were always pointing out that I had certain traits of his. I grew up with a painting that he did of a waterfall—I have it here. When my mom died, I requested from the rest of the family if I could have it.

KG What turned you on about it?

JW In those days, I had no idea what turned me on about that painting. Now I know that we carry ancient information in our head, in association to water. The first time we saw ourselves, the first image we saw of ourselves, was leaning over to have a drink of water. And we have carried that with us. So even today, water is an archetypal image. We carry a certain information about fluidity, translucency, transparency.

KG To me, it comes across in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the Ithaca episode, where there’s a beautiful body of writing about the properties of water. The question is, “What in water did Bloom, water-lover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” And he says, "Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sun-dam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides . . . " This is exactly what you’re talking about.

JW Exactly what I’m talking about. The first painting I saw, that painting stayed with me all my childhood.

KG I’d like to pause for a moment, with this painting, and make a metaphor of Odysseus’s journey, which Joyce used in Ulysses, around the islands surrounding Greece. In your journeys, in a sense, your wanderings, from Alabama to New York, and every summer to Crete and then back to New York, there’s a parallel between Joyce’s character, this painting (which was a forbearer for the future) and your life as somebody who travels and lives in many places.

JW And it’s carried on water.

KG It’s carried on water. As was Odysseus. It seems to me that you’re very connected to the flow of life itself, the sequence of events. You’re not fighting events as much as you’re going with things.

JW Part of that is my 1960s upbringing. I’m 54 years old, and you are . . .

KG Thirty-two.

JW That’s a considerable gap. In the ’60s, we grew up with a kind of philosophy. My generation never knew about the destination of the journey, our interest was being part of the journey. You ask somebody, "Where’s the destination?" Response: “Man, we don’t know.”

KG Well, the final destination is what, death? (laughter)

JW It wasn’t even death, because we didn’t accept that.

KG There’s a cornering of everything now, and a commodification, a tracking, and a counting, a competition and neurosis that’s based around professionalism and packaging. That goes against a lot of the type of flow that you’re talking about.

JW Well, my spirit from the ’60s was one of rebellion. We didn’t want to be packaged. You have to understand, Ken, that my generation, coming from the ‘60s, we never really arrived. It’s like we’ve been holding on to something all these years. I’m not talking from just a black perspective. White and black, everybody, it’s like we’ve never had our shot, we’ve never had our due, it’s never really resolved itself. And I’m beginning to see now, that there’s a pretty good chance that this philosophy of life— now it’s ripe for the pickings. It’s time to collect interest on that. That shit has been lying dormant all this time. I say tap into it. And I can see where it would play a role, primarily in terms of media, computers, technology.

KG When I look at the most progressive of the computer networks, it’s the Well, which is run by the people who did the Whole Earth Catalog.

I don’t know, Jack, my idea of being an artist is in step with that philosophy; you’re living for the moment, very much involved with what’s happening, it’s about living life, and it’s not about the goals, it’s more about the journey. These ideas have come to me via my parents. How did you feel during the ’80s?

JW See, the ’80s were a bad time for me as far as the commercial world was concerned. The ’80s really hit a peak of materialistic thinking. My work didn’t suffer. What happened to me in the ’80s is that I buried deeper into my mind. I got ten years of work out of the ’80s that is a solid body of work. I’m not one for knocking my head against a brick wall, so I went underground into the woodshed. But I realized that the works I was doing could not participate in the sort of thing that was going on in the ’80s.

KG Art has traditionally taken a long time to assimilate—if it ever does within an artist’s lifetime—which was absolutely not the case in the last 15 years or so, where you saw people reaping fortunes and benefits instantly. JW When I came to New York and first met Bill de Kooning I was 19 years old, and the man was in his upper fifties before anything started truly happening for him. I know artists today that have been working 40, 50 years and nothing happens. But there’s that love there that keeps them going. But there are no guarantees in art. There’s nothing out there which says, you work 20 years, 30 years, you’re going to get this fantastic benefit. There’s no such thing.

KG You have emerged in a big way in the ’90s. Did those ten years of interior work strengthen your projects and strengthen your resolve?

JW Sure. It strengthened me spiritually, it strengthened me conceptually. Those site paintings, which were acrylic skins, came out of the early ‘80s when I first started laminating a piece of acrylic back down to the canvas. I took the paint up off the canvas and then put it back down on the canvas. This was a major breakthrough. I’m dealing now with paint as a collage, paint as sculpture. I have changed the verb “to paint”: I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting. So the verb has changed. And in doing that, I’ve broken through a lot of illusionistic qualities.

KG Dancers always talk about “making” dances. There is a physicality involved in the word make that reflects in your work. What role does the construction process play in your work?

JW Well, it’s how I made my living. And in terms of my art, my building that big platform in the ’70s, that came out of carpentry . . .

KG What big platform?

JW Those paintings came out of that Whitney Museum show in 1974—I built a drawing board, a heavy duty drawing board, which was 14 feet by 20 feet. I built it out of 16-inch honeycomb centers of 2 by 4, covered with 3/4 inch plywood and industrial grade linoleum. I built it to my specifications, as flat and as level and as accurate as I could get it. And all those experiments in the ’70s took place on this drawing board.

KG So you would stretch a huge piece of canvas over this?

JW Yes, I would stretch canvas right down over this thing. All those marks that you see coming out of those paintings, those are not arbitrary markings, those are set up conceptually. I developed a process of drawing where I would place things beneath the canvas, between the canvas and the board, and that way, I would get a shape to come through, that’s how I would get line and form. I was using a process of drawing where the shapes, a piece of wire or a piece of pebble is placed beneath the canvas in a very precise pattern, wedged against the board. And when that big tool I was using would come across with that much acrylic—

KG It would print, like photography—

JW It would print, you got it, it would be like a kid working with a rubbing. All I’ve done in the new works is to lift that skin of paint up off the canvas and put it back down. And that’s a revolutionary step.

KG I keep coming back to the idea of integration with you, it’s hard to separate things in your life and your attitudes and your furniture and your house. I look at these cabinets that you built, that are built with as much attention, and love, as the painting, as the music that you’re talking about. It is really remarkable, really, admirable and rare.

JW It’s very simple, Kenny. The reason for this is survival. I found out at an early date that in order for me to survive and to do what I wanted to do as an artist, first I had to establish priorities. I had to send a clear signal to people around me what I wanted to do. And I knew that I had to set up my life and a lifestyle that was totally integrated to serve this purpose. So I wouldn’t have any hassles. There’s a lot of shit out there I can’t control. I don’t fight the world. I’m in it. I’m in the world. I don’t fight it.

KG I’m wondering if it wasn’t some person who helped you bridge into this philosophy.

JW My mom, and growing up in the South in a segregated racial society. When you are raised with hate all around you, and then you got a family who teaches you love, you have people in the church who are teaching you love, you got a family network. And making an emphasis on how much hate surrounds you, you don’t have to be that way. That’s a sickness, when people hate, when people get all into this racial stuff, that’s a sickness. My mom and grandmom would quote from the Bible: “Revenge is mine, said the Lord.” You can’t go out there seeking revenge, you can’t go the hate pattern, it’s just gonna destroy you. If you get involved with that, you self-destruct.

KG It’s a very Eastern idea.

JW I very much enjoy your bringing me Ulysses, that completes a circle in my mind. I love experiences like this, my life is built on experiences of this nature. I learn primarily through revelation. And I’ve just experienced one. Even today, a lot of things in society still bother me, racial issues and so forth. I’m not pleased with what I see. I’m not. I was thinking in my little naive mind, 35, 40 years ago, that things would be much better but hey, it’s depressing, I must admit. One of the most depressing aspects of my life at this point is that society has proven me wrong. Growing up with what I grew up with in Alabama, whoa, I figured, "My God, man, another 40 years, this shit will be over with," and it’s not, man, it’s not. Don’t kid yourself, it’s not. And when I look back and see what’s happening in Germany, to think that young people in Germany today would get involved in that kind of action. I don’t have the hope that I had. I don’t have the optimism that I had 40 years ago, that it will not repeat itself. It can repeat itself and all of us better wake up to the fact that it can repeat itself, the handwriting is on the wall. I see art as the only hope. That’s what I see. I don’t see religion, or politics.

KG You see art as something that can heal?

JW You ask me, What’s the purpose? What purpose does it serve? I’m not in art for art’s sake, or for decoration. It’s about dialogue. Romare Bearden spoke about art as a bridge. Art is the last hope.

KG Do you see, then, art as being a social experience?

JW Well, any involvement among two people is social.

KG But a lot of the time you’re alone in the studio . . .

JW We are alone, but the object is there. We are doing what we do now because of art. I never would have known you if it hadn’t been for art.

KG So when you send your work out to the gallery, you’re feeling that it’s a stand-in, that it’s an energy of Jack Whitten. And it’s communication even if you’re not there.

JW It communicates. Jack Whitten, 28 Black Holes, 1993–94, acrylic, mixed media on canvas, 60 × 60 inches.

KG Did you get a lot of critical attention from your show at the Whitney Museum in ’74?

JW No, no. Black artists at that period were not getting any kind of attention. My having that show at the Whitney Museum was primarily because of Marcia Tucker, a curator at the Whitney. There was a social consciousness in ’74. The gallery at the Whitney that I used was set aside for people who did not have commercial representation, and I fit the bill.

KG It seems that stuff would have been snapped up and sold, with the museum confirming a sort of status and value of the artwork.

JW Only if you have commercial representation and you have someone who is a believer in you and the work, and is willing to promote it, is work sold. Work sold through gallery situations comes through an endorsement of the gallery/museum world with a bag of collectors to back it up. If you don’t have that kind of an interest, you can stand on your head out there for 20 years, and it won’t sell. It’s just recent, what you see, people like Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, Martin Puryear, myself, David Hammons . . . This is recent man, very recent. We’ve had to live with this right from the beginning.

KG So why not become an artist . . . It’s a crapshoot, anyway—it’s like that old Dylan line, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

JW Yeah, but you see most kids coming out of the African-American community will take that line, and you know where they take it? Over into violence and criminality and drugs . . . It’s the other end of your coin, I’ll go the other way, I’ve got nothing to lose.

KG Coming from a ’60s experience, that whole “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” was strong. There was an idealization about dropping out. How, as an African-American, did you feel about “dropping out?” Or were you already dropped out in some sense?

JW One thing you have to remember about Jack Whitten is that I have a southern sensibility. That’s different from north, east, west, white or black. There is something instilled in you from the beginning. Where I grew up you didn’t ask for nothing. You worked for it. I remember as a kid, my uncle didn’t have any money to buy a Chevrolet. He went to the junk yard, bought a chassis, a motor; he bought some doors, he bought a frame. He made the damned thing. He took a paint brush and he painted it. He drove