More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten
The exhibition of paintings past Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth was his first solo prove in the UK. I remember a dozen of them, like the apostles or a carton of eggs, only there were 14: five paintings from 1979, 1 from 1984, three from 1986, 1 from 1987, two from 1988, ane from 1989. The decade isn't represented evenly, but it wasn't an fifty-fifty decade. In an interview in BOMB magazine from 1994, Whitten described the commercial difficulties he faced, as 'materialistic thinking' peaked. Simply as he says, his piece of work didn't suffer. There'southward a rhythm of urgent discovery to the piece of work collected here, so much and so the room can hardly comprise information technology. Though each painting has its own accomplished integrity, they're not discrete works: they work together like a forcefield.
Whitten was born in Alabama in 1939. His female parent was a seamstress and his father a coal miner. He enrolled as a medical pupil at Tuskegee, earlier deciding to written report art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In that location he became involved in the Civil Rights movement, meeting Martin Luther King and organising demonstrations before leaving the South permanently for New York in 1960. As he put it in an interview in 2009, 'I grew up in strict, segregated apartheid.' In New York he met painters, poets, and musicians, was mentored past Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Norman Lewis, and started showing his piece of work in the belatedly 1960s at Allan Stone's gallery on the Upper E Side. Afterwards an apprenticeship in the modes of abstract expressionism, he began working with a method of raking or combing acrylic paint, using Afro combs and saws among other tools of his own making. He aspired to the status of photography: a decisive movement, the unmarried draw of the tool making multiple lines as the teeth sweep through pigment.
Whitten's Asa's Palace (1973), on evidence with Homage to Malcolm (1970) at Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in 2017, exemplifies this technique. Working with the canvas on the floor, he used a tool every bit wide as the canvas and with a handle long enough to cover the length of the surface in 1 go. It's a mode of pulling through the pigment, rather than pushing it: or letting the half-inch-thick layer of acrylic push itself, left to take a chance. The method is maybe virtually familiar to usa now from Gerhard Richter, only Whitten was the originator. In a video on the Tate website he explains that he was thinking of de Kooning, and the manner de Kooning used multiple gestures, what Whitten calls 'relational gestures'. Whitten says by contrast he was interested in non-relational gestures. Looking at Asa's Palace, gorgeous royal interrupted with olive green, it isn't easy to effigy out how it's been fabricated. But there's zero mystifying nearly it. It's just that the creative person's hand isn't forcing your attention. Other experiments in the 1970s included working, later on a grant from the Xerox Company, with dry toner to produce monochrome images. He began going to Crete each summer, where he'd work on woodcarving, sculptures, and drawings. And so the paintings gathered in More Dimensions Than You lot Know come up after a decade already of serious work. The primeval pictures here are four from a series called Deoxyribonucleic acid (1979), uniform in size, xvi by 16 inches. They're acrylic grids, which play with a monochrome surface that obscures and reveals geometric colours beneath. Up shut they're almost Op Fine art, and hurt if y'all wait at them for also long. But from the other side of the room the delicate experimentation shimmers into view. Beryl J. Wright commented in 1990 that:
There is a diagnostic character to Whitten'south abstruse paintings in that, by design, they take the viewer through the procedure of visual perception pace by step. The multiple and often disparate associations that rising out of his carefully synthetic surfaces are directly linked to the way in which the human eye, as photographic camera, locates objects in infinite; breaks down their constituent elements; and and so enters, analyzes, and stores visual information in a mental bank.
Maybe we tin can think of the Deoxyribonucleic acid paintings every bit didactic. They teach us how to see, and how to observe ourselves in the process of seeing. Simply this doesn't account for the emotional annals of Whitten'due south work, the deep feeling everywhere apparent. In truth, the four DNA paintings at Hauser & Wirth, on evidence for the first time, aren't the best examples of the series. Just Richard Shiff, in the conclusion of his essay for the Hauser & Wirth catalogue, makes a fruitful comparison between these works and photographs of an Egyptian prison, viewed through a chainlink fence. The thought doesn't get completely worked out, but suggests an intriguing line of thought. For the creative person politicised past the Ceremonious Rights motility, how could the mass incarceration of African-Americans, begun in the 1970s and withal ongoing, fail to brand an impression?
Only the real drama of this exhibition comes from Whitten'south motility from the floor to the wall. In an ecstatic studio note dated February 12th 1979, reproduced in the catalogue, Whitten writes: 'I AM FREE OF ART HISTORY. At final I am off the floor, it has been ten years of hard labor on the floor. I can now execute my works on the wall. There is no limitation upon scale.' This movement is as conceptual every bit information technology is literal. The larger canvases on display are so densely worked it'south difficult to tell where the center of gravity falls: it seems likely that both the flooring and the wall were involved in the limerick. The most extraordinary painting on brandish was Black Monolith I, A Tribute to James Baldwin (1988). It'south one of four memorial paintings on testify from 1986-88, including works for Andy Warhol, a young student of Whitten'due south named Packy La Belle, and the fashion designer Willi Smith. The painting for Baldwin hangs in the opposite corner from the entrance to the gallery. It'due south human being-sized: about equally broad as spread artillery, and a little taller in superlative. The calibration, despite having 'no limitation', is precise. These canvases are thick with material collaged on the surface. The lower corners of Black Monolith I are patches of corrugated monochrome with splashes of turquoise, blue-green to the left. There are blackness columns on either side, patterns drawn from manhole covers bandage in plaster of paris. The painting holds the imprint of the city's horizontal metal features. It'due south uncanny because they're what we meet when we await down: raised chevrons that almost look like tyre tracks. It's equally if when Whitten moved from the floor to the wall he but brought the floor with him.
This method of collage comes from an earlier phase in his work, before the combed-acrylic piece of work of the 1970s. He has described in an interview with Wright how in the 1960s, he accumulated constitute objects:
I used to find things in the street. My studio used to be filled with things that I found in the street. I come across now that that was a way of finding myself. When y'all selection upward something and bring it home, yous see something in that object. We were working on a carpentry job one day and an object fell to the floor. I stopped and picked it up and Jeff [Waite] grabbed my arm and said, "Why did y'all pick upward that one and not that ane?" I had never though about it like that. I but always knew that I had to selection this one upwards considering I identified it with something. Now I see, in retrospect, that this was the start of my personal aesthetics.
In the method of casting and collaging the street, Whitten reaches back to the emergence of his discerning judgement at the start of his career. Only he pulls these objects through the 'non–relational' gesture of the 1970s, both preserving and transforming his repertoire of techniques. Information technology's a graceful dialectic of invention, reinvention, and recovery.
The centre of Blackness Monolith I is a mass of black paint, with bubble wrap worked in monochrome, so the suggested hardness of the cast metal gives fashion to the softness of protective wrapping. Bubble wrap absorbs shock, so here works as part of the human action of mourning. But bubble wrap is oftentimes also ane of the outer surfaces of an object in transit. I can't assistance thinking of it equally some atrocious twin to the hold of the ships of the Middle Passage, equally recently theorised past Christina Sharpe. In a letter to Henry Geldzahler from 1983, Whitten made clear his own relation to the 'Art HISTORY' he was trying to free himself from:
I eventually understood that abstraction every bit preached in Greenbergian terms was abstraction as an ends to itself. I wanted abstraction to be a means to something else. That something was to exist located in 'black sensibility' that is translatable into a worldview.
Office of the isolation Whitten experienced in the 1980s was that he was neither displayed in grouping shows of the new Abstract Expressionism, nor in exhibitions of art with African–American 'themes'. The sensibility of a painting like Black Monolith I, even as it memorialises the death of Baldwin, insists on salvaging the traces of black life. There'due south room for everything: at that place's no climax to the composition, only the process of see, new thought, new feeling. The bubble wrap, deflated and punctured containers, make up the throat and lower caput of Baldwin's contour. Amiri Baraka's elegy for Baldwin called him 'God's black revolutionary mouth', but the painting doesn't have a mouth: it's all head, the tender focus of the whole face. Really the gallery is too modest for this work. I want to approach Black Monolith I from very far away. I mean, from one-half a mile and see it coming into view. The only way to do this is to think near the painting on your manner to the gallery, to hold it in your head until yous're at the doorway, full of apprehension, and y'all expect until the last possible moment to look – to really look – and there it is.
In the gallery my friend said the work reminded her, strangely, of Agnes Martin, and I could see information technology, and not simply in the grids of DNA. How the dimensions of her paintings imply a body even when what they come to correspond is the vanishing point of the horizon. Information technology's all emptying for Martin and that'southward beautiful. But for Whitten, it can all go in: the city, history, the body, the whole erotics of protection and loss and memory and memorialisation. For days after seeing the painting I would feel like I'd lost something. I idea back to the Martin retrospective at Tate Modern in 2015, and particularly the room dedicated to her white serial The Islands I-XII (1979), painted the aforementioned year equally More Dimensions Than You Know begins. Information technology would be easy to say that the apparent tranquillity of these paintings is the reverse of Whitten's great and hurting surfaces, the vacation of gesture rather than the reckoning with the non-relational gesture. I recall thinking what it would be similar to stare at these monumental depictions of whiteness for hours at a time, equally the security guard in the room had to. Just at that place'due south a comparable devotion to perception, which the viewer just might catch in the corner of their centre. Notwithstanding thinking this mode, the non-relational aspects of Whitten's piece of work give way to the deep grounding in social relations that informs his work. There'southward zip oblique about the politics. It runs from the finished painting to method and back again.
Baraka might help the states to locate Whitten more precisely. There's a recording of a poem from the late 1970s called 'Against Bourgeois Art', where Baraka – in his fully-developed phase of anti-revisionist Marxism – denounces the epigones of Abstruse Expressionism:
you walk thru a museum all
the colors of the spectrum right in that location but not one
image, except of checks
passing. Pollockdollarsigns Dekooning fortunes,
Larry Rivers pots at the
finish of the pelting bow
no people
no beloved
no eye and soul insides flowing out
no fighting in the street
no children screaming expiry
no police force no state, except it is the land, bullshitting
on the wall
Baraka had been one of Whitten's early friends in New York, but he'd broken from the white art world in 1964/65, if non earlier. The poem – with its need for socialist realism, a homophobic jibe at Warhol, and its over-confident judgement on what does and what doesn't qualify as life – is perhaps easy to dismiss. Only Baraka's analysis of the recuperated aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism are relevant to Whitten's piece of work in the 1980s. Whitten had to reckon with the stop of the heroic age of Abstract Expressionism, and then the much-vaunted death of painting. As the championship of a contempo exhibition puts it, Whitten and his contemporaries had to reinvent abstraction, and for Whitten I retrieve this involved a reconsideration of the image itself. The movement from the flooring to the wall was as much about content as it was about form, as the detritus of the city mingles with the detritus of the studio in paintings that frequently mourn black icons. Can nosotros recognise in his paintings the qualities Baraka lists above? People, dear, fighting in the streets, heart and soul and police? I remember we tin can, and I think Whitten shows us this struggle taking identify on every inch of the canvass.
The nigh startling particular in Black Monolith I appears beneath the layers of bubble wrap and metallic netting, in the form a single perfect imprint of lace. It's what I'd call a doily, a black doily, intricate and fine. It sits at heart level on the left side of the painting, level with the viewer's heart. Or perhaps slightly college: where the heart would be if I was taller. It's perfect. And correct beneath the circle of lace is the banner of the tiptop of a pigment can. Two circles, the lace too fragile to show up in reproductions. You take to get close to see information technology. And this piece of lace now seems so strong, the point of composition the rest of the paintings turns effectually. What I want to say is that function of Whitten's achievement is that he tin make this doily hit you with the whole strength of turmoil that Baraka wishes for, as improbable as that may audio.
There'southward another circle in the show, a painting called Annabelle II (1984) which is actually four concentric rings focusing a white-gray surface of oil. Merely after Whitten's escape from art history, a fire seriously damaged his work and living space in Tribeca. This was one of the outset works he fabricated after the fire, after a three-twelvemonth silence. In a way I think of this as another memorial painting, for the lost years of work. Perchance everything in the bear witness is a memorial relative to Blackness Monolith I: the slice of lace at present of a sudden a token of his mother the seamstress, the melting black acrylic everywhere like coal from the Alabama mine his father worked in. Whitten said he tried to eliminate metaphors from his work, but maybe these traces are metonymic: the piece of work of mourning seems to need some form of substitution. Only perchance I'm projecting. In the cityscape of The Souvenir (1988), again built from corrugation and the imprints of the street, I thought inevitably of Grenfell Tower, the skeleton of the building but over the other side of Hyde Park. While Whitten's method involves layers and layering, it also involves taking things away, and looking at what'south left behind. So information technology parallels life exactly, the cardinal process of experience.
With Ode: For Andy Warhol (1987), instead of drawing the viewer in we're almost pushed out to the side. It's adamant by patches of yellow that can but be Warhol's pilus. At the pes of the painting there'south an inlaid foursquare image that almost looks like a photograph of his wig, drained of colour into a melancholy still blue, or non quite blue. There's joy to this, art every bit show of survival in the face of trials of loss. Now we need to encounter what came side by side: his mosaic work in tesserae of treated acrylics, his monumental painting for ix/11, his memorial for Baraka, his sculptures, his unswerving delivery to spirit and matter surrounded on all sides by technology. Whitten, in 2016, described working with three-dimensional low-cal, and maybe that'due south finally what his paintings are. He's more serious than I can say: how he makes light this heavy, because information technology is heavy, and he did it, and he's gone.
Jack Whitten died on Jan 20th 2018.
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Source: http://enclavereview.org/more-dimensions-than-you-know-jack-whitten-1979-1989/
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