Report from New York
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
The towering 53rd Street Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art seemed less crowded than during prior visits. The galleries less packed with frantic visitors. In fact, the streets themselves seemed less grid-locked and less raucous. Maybe it’s the “congestion pricing” impact? Or maybe it’s the policies of the current Administration?
Whatever the reason for the relative tranquillity, it was truly uplifting to wander through the show called Jack Whitten: The Messenger without feeling jostled, and to appreciate the achievements of this artist and more broadly, the achievements of so many American artists, caught now — like the rest of us –in this period of fear and dismay.
“Acryclic, onion, eggshell, molasses, copper, salt, herbs, rust, coal, ash, chocolate and razor blade.” These are a list of the substances Jack Whitten used to create the painting “Black Monolith II (Homage to Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man”), shown above. The painting, and many others of this period, is composed of hundreds of tiles, cut from sheets of dried acryclic embedded with varied ingredients and assembled into a painting. Jack Whitten called this invented technique “acrylic tesserae.” “Each tesserae is a piece of light,” he said, “The message is coded into the process.”
A lush jazz soundtrack (John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and others) plays throughout the show’s galleries, referencing Jack Whitten‘s love of jazz.
Many of the tributes and dedications he attached to his work honor the black musicians, writers and artists that impacted him during his six decades of living in New York City and making art, which he invariably viewed as experimental.
Shown above, “Homecoming for Miles Davis” was also made of hardened acrylic tiles, which in this case he spattered with white paint, a la Jackson Pollock, and put together into this dazzling painting, described by the artist as a “cosmic net attempting to capture Miles’ soul.”
The tiles in the painting shown above, named for Édouard Glissant, the French writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique, were infused with metallic, phosporescent and organic materials from aluminum to anthracite.
Repeatedly, this artist states he is interested in innovation. He wants to make abstract art that changes the course of painting.
Trained as a cabinet maker, Jack Whitten, made specialized tools to apply paint. He painted standing up for decades, smoothing paint in layers with a rake-like tool which is on display at the Museum.
He called the rake-like tool “The Developer.” He added layer upon layer of paint, raking and merging the color until he had the effect he wanted, which was “sheets of light.”
The photograph above doesn’t convey the startling, glowing, gem-like quality that some of Jack Whitten’s paintings hold. He “combed” the layers of paint to create colours found nowhere else and experimented like an alchemist, adding recycled glass, pulverized mylar, gold dust and numerous other substances to the paint to get the effect he was after.
In some paintings, the artist would bury items into the gallons of paint he poured onto wood panels. These items — bits of wire or wood, staples, insects, floor sweepings — he called “Disruptors,” since through the raking process they disrupted the smoothed surface to reveal transformations below.
I couldn’t help thinking about the giant squeegee paintings by Gerhard Richter. Like Jack Whitten, Gerhard Richter explored the relationship between painting and ph0tography in his earlier works. Later, the element of unpredictability was major in both of these artist’s big beautiful paintings of sweeping horizontals.
Political turmoil was a factor in the creative development of both men. Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, into the mayhem of WWII and its aftermath. Jack Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, at the height of Jim Crow. He grew up in Civil Rights movement and the era of political assasinations in the USA and, of course, the Vietnam War.
I particularly liked looking at Jack Whitten’s paintings of screens, or screen-like images.
The painting above is part of his Greek Alphabet Series. It has a mysterious quality of movement, as remote images seem to shift and rearrange themselves from within, like poor reception in an analog TV screen.
Jack Whitten said every colour carries ” a lot of psychological meaning” and he sought to avoid the “story telling” that automatically occured by using colour. His black and white paintings from the Greek Alphabet series of paintings, resemble a flickering screen, dissolving into abstraction.
I say to people, “Take everything you have ever felt, everything you have ever smelled, every sound you have ever heard, every sensation you have ever had that you have felt through your fingertips. Take all of that and compress it.” You would get an understanding of abstraction. – quote from Jack Whitten in the MOMA exhibition notes.
His sculptural work, on the other hand, tells a lot of stories:
…stories about the African diaspora, the history of art in the Mediterranean, trash and found junk, labour and work and many other topics.
Some of his paintings too, are depictions of fragments of a changing world. His painting shown below, which suggests apps on a screen, was made in honour of Obama’s election.
The showstopper, however, for many of the New Yorkers on that relatively quiet day at the Museum of Modern Art, has to be the painting titled “9.11.01.” Jack Whitten witnessed the World Trade Center’s destruction and produced an enormous painting in honour of the victim’s of that event.
I spent some very somber moments in front of this painting, recalling not just the appalling catastrophe of that moment, but the following days and months, when the country, and indeed much of the world, was so unified in the shared shock and horror at that violent act. It seems like a long time ago.
annetteandquebec 