Uncovering Jack Whitten’s mysterious abstractions | HOW TO SEE

Most people look for a literal interpretation of something, and that's hard to do here. Just looking at Jack's last painting, the sparks of light, especially under the skyline, it's alive. I've always felt that the paintings are alive. The paintings are my siblings, and they are definitely alive. Definitely your siblings. Definitely my siblings. My father was an abstract painter, and what he did was to take slabs of paint and break them down in such a way that they could become pellets of information. And so he's constantly experimenting with paint. What can you do with it? Can you freeze dry acrylic paint? Can you heat it up? Can you smash it with a hammer? That was his joy. This studio is a laboratory for paint. Witten shapeshifted throughout his career constantly, and so he's actually unlike many other artists in the history of post-war and contemporary art, because instead of one signature style, he had maybe like 10. At the turn of each decade, he has a breakthrough, and he invents something completely new to the history of Western art. In the 70s, he created this novel form of blur painting that almost looks like photography. And in the 80s, he actually started creating works that were infusing reliefs and molds, literally sculptures made out of paint. You could call them urban abstractions. I used the word reconstruction, taking these images and literally rebuilding them. Jack used to call these ready nows. So it's ready now. You can pick it up and put it in the painting. Put it into the painting. Jack liked having his private place. He didn't have people helping him in the studio. I think I was called downstairs like maybe once or twice to like, hold this. Okay, put it in place. But it was him alone. This is exactly as though he had just walked out the door. At first glance, many of Witten's works are just so mysterious. It's really hard to tell what he's done to make this artwork that you're looking at. This comes from the fact that he made all of his own art materials. And then when you put that together, it's just this puzzle that takes a lot of time to sort out as a viewer. One of my favorite quotes that he said was, I like the idea that people are suspended while asking questions about the process, that the viewer might be frozen by wonder. This is the first time a technical study has ever been done on any of Witten's artworks. This is Liquid Space 1. The first time I saw this work in person, it sparkled and it glittered in the light. It was textural. There were parts that were clumpy. Then I turned the piece over and I saw all these waves in the sheet. And a light bulb kind of went off in my mind. And I realized that the waves in the back of the sheet line up completely perfectly with the image on the front. At that point, I put it together that there's no way Witten could have made this work without having it completely sopping wet, that the image itself came out of water. Something paper does when it gets wet, it swells and it expands. And since the edges were taped down, they were constrained and the paper had nowhere to go. That meant all of these ripples formed in the piece of paper. Witten made this from white acrylic paint, gesso, pencil, and this amazing material he invented called acrylic slip. It was this beautiful, shimmery, gray, paint-like substance. It was totally innovative. And I am going to attempt to recreate that. He made that out of graphite powder and silica powder, aluminum powder, black pigment, like lamp black. That's all held together with an acrylic gel medium. And he combined it all with a kitchen mixer. The palette is gray and white, so it's very similar to a gelatin silver print. There's also this blur kind of happening across the work, which reminded me immediately of a motion blur. He was able to develop a new process of painting in the early 1970s that is almost like photography. And in his mind, he would often say, I am a camera. I think that every case, every historical piece, carries a metaphor. And the metaphor that I choose, that seems to be the overriding one, was actually a collective for all people today in technology. The paintings have a surface appearance that can look almost machine-made or mechanical. But in fact, Jack Witten used all handmade methods to make the paintings. Today, we're looking at Siberian salt grinder from the Blur series that have this kind of effect that he's using. The title definitely alludes to the Cold War era. And it seems like there's at least two or three layers visible. But then when you look at the edges, you can see the thickness indicates there's way more layers. He invented a very large-scale tool, which he called the developer, like you would develop a photograph. It's like a wooden T-frame rake. And he would attach different surfaces to it, like a neoprene squeegee or a flat metal blade or a serrated comb. There's photographs of him handling it, and it's way bigger than he is. So making these paintings was a very laborious kind of undertaking. He would drag this across layers of carefully calibrated acrylic paint that had been dried to different degrees. So when he had that last stroke, what would emerge is something that's like a very strange hybrid between painting and photography, something that looks like it's in terrific motion or speed of blur. It's opening up all of these tears and pulls in the acrylic. So you see many layers and beautiful colors emerging from below the topmost layer. He was adding materials under the canvas called disruptors that cause certain shapes to emerge. And you see that when you look closely at the paintings. In this case, he used a piece of wire hanger that he stapled underneath the canvas so that when the painting was made, you pick up the shape of the wire. You can see little staple marks in the surface. I don't like surface things. I have surface in the sense that we deal purely with image on the surface. I like the concept of working through the layers to locate what I call to be a truthfulness in terms of consciousness. So basically, the wall is inside of dad's brain. This is things that he's interested in. This is history, people he loves. Everything's here. Our lives are here. Even though his works were abstract, he always imbued them with some kind of personal or emotional or historical significance. Living through the 60s and 70s, Witten was part of the civil rights movement surrounded by demonstrations against the Vietnam War, confronting all of these major sea changes in society and the world. Witten has these incredible titles, often very mysterious as well. But he speaks of Siberian salt grinder as a kind of gesture to the experience of isolation and distance that the Cold War had affected between East and West, but also of the experiences of many political prisoners and people sent to exile. Witten connected that back to the struggle for emancipation, for civil rights, and for Black power. So when we look at Witten's water-like flows and forms, there are layers upon layers there, quite literally, and there are histories upon histories there. He transformed righteous anger into a kind of dazzling beauty. He didn't really talk about the South that much. Jack is one of the few Black artists in our circle who actually grew up there till the age of 17, 18 years old. Down in Alabama, growing up in the Jim Crow South, very hateful things happened that he saw. Burning crosses, Ku Klux Klan, people disappearing. Well, when I give talks, I don't even use the word Jim Crow anymore. I say I grew up with American apartheid. That's what I say. What we mean by that, I grew up with separate schools, separate transportation, separate neighborhoods. Do you have a favorite saying or phrase? Oh, being a child of the 60s, shit happens. The deep, dark stuff very seldom came out, but it was there. We all knew it was there. When he moves to New York in 1960, he plunges into a world of experimental jazz, John Coltrane, abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning, the artists who are hanging around at the Cedar Bar in lower Manhattan. You have to let yourself go to deal with things like this. It's the same going back to the analogy of jazz. To hear a Charlie Parker score, you have to let yourself go. As much as he paid homage to historical figures and to memory, he found a way forward. Witton invented his own type of mosaic, marrying a very ancient art with a very futuristic one, which he likened to arrays of pixels or bits of information or even stars and constellations of galaxies. He posited that art could actually change our perception in some way, and that would help provide a blueprint, if you will, for a future navigation of all of the crises that we're facing now. One thing about the mystery of his work is that he actually keeps an incredibly detailed and dramatic studio journal almost every day of his entire life, over five plus decades. And yet when you read that account and you look at his works, it's almost impossible to tell exactly how he made it. After he died, I would come downstairs and just talk to him, talk into the space, and it felt like I was being heard. And that feeling has never gone away. He ends his studio notes saying, my health is suffering, but I'm dealing with it. Art is our compass to the cosmos. Optimistic to the end.