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 painting, 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, Romare Bearden, 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 paintings. In the 1960s, Whitten’s work was heavily influenced by the late Surrealism of Arshile Gorky and by the gestural and spontaneous abstraction of Willem de Kooning. 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 New York City 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 civil rights movement 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 Barack Obama. 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 National Medal of Arts. 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.