What Are We Looking At: Black Monolith XI, Six Kinky Strings: For Chuck Berry, 2017 by Jack Whitten
American artist, Jack Whitten, 1939-2018, New York City artist made painting memorializing African Americans who had an impact on the artist's (and America's) life.
Memorializing a person?
If I was going to try to memorialize someone, I would write about them. I would try to set out their life story, but I would want to add small details that tried to get to some bigger truth about the way that person really was. Details like, did they wear old shoes or what books they are reading. But we all know that to get to the soul of a person, all those details are but a reflection of a truth - something I am trying to get at, but that in the end you have to put together.
Jack Whitten (American, 1939-2018) was cool. His painting shoes were sneakers spray painted with silver paint. He hand made the cherry wood cabinets in his townhouse in downtown Manhattan. He was a professor at SVA. He received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. He knew the art world. He knew New York City and he was one of those artists who got a burned out building downtown in the 60s that he re-did himself. It had a wood burning stove on the top floor. The coolest.
I didn’t know Jack Whitten well. My first roommate, when I moved to Brooklyn, was his daughter. One time we went to her parents house for dinner. We bought a very overpriced bottle of wine from a crappy liquor store under the J train in Brooklyn. Then a few years later I spent a week with Jack and his wife Mary at their house on Crete in Greece. I should, for a different project, try to do a better job of revealing the soul of Jack Whitten. But this project is not so much about the artist, as it is the art.
Black Monolith XI, Six Kinky Strings for Chuck Berry was Jack Whitten’s memorialization of Chuck Berry. When Whitten memorializes a person, the details he gives you are small pieces of light. He arranges them to express the soul he sees. He is not using a narrative form. Our brains desperately want to turn everything into a narrative, where the bits of information build out something we can recognize.
Whitten doesn’t do narrative. “I like the idea that people are suspended while asking questions about process. I like the idea that the viewer might be frozen by wonder, trying to understand what they are looking at, or how the painting was made, or even what materials I am using. That search might generate an emotion that takes us beyond the intellectual.”
When you take in Black Monolith XI you are taken by the craftmanship. I saw this in NYC at The Met Breuer in the fall of 2018. It is a big painting and it is mostly made of small little pieces of unidentifiable material that are about an inch long. These little pieces reflect light and color of the the other things that create the canvas.
Whitten was a professor of materials in art at SVU. When he received his NEA medal it was for “remaking the American canvas. As an abstract artist, he uses “casting,” acrylic paints, and compounds to create new surfaces and textures, challenging our perceptions of shape and color. His powerful works of art put the American story in a new light.”
When I look at this painting, the little pieces, are like city buildings, each containing multitudes of stories. The motion flows, and you follow the blocks around. In Black Monolith XI he uses what look like copper strings. Guitar strings of Chuck Berry. Music flowing. Colors blending of blacks and blues.
I am always shocked at the amount of courage it would take to be an abstract expressionist painter. When I go see de Kooning or Jackson Pollock exhibitions, it is hard to imagine a time when these types of paintings would be laughed at or ignored. Now they are centerpieces of museum shows - they have crossed into cultural phenomena. What we are looking at with abstract art, is an essence we cannot name. The part of us that won’t be pinned down. It flows, it refracts, it ever changes and we know it is there. And when someone tries to take a picture of it. To set it to canvas. It is easy to dismiss it as nothing. But the point is to get “beyond the intellectual,” to a place where we recognize elements of the soul that cannot be written down. When we allow ourselves to empathize with that, then we can see in ourselves qualities that cannot be reduced to the shoes we wear or the houses we live in or even the jokes we tell.
We are multitudes. We are reflections. We are light emanating. That is what we are looking at in Black Monolith XI, Six Kinky Strings for Chuck Berry.
Post Script:
When I visited the Whitten’s in Crete, Jack was working on a mosaic tile patio. I was handy enough, and not doing anything else, so I offered to help. Much of Jack’s work was similar to mosaics, so I like to tell people I did a short residency with Jack Whitten. You can see at the bottom of the photo below some of what I learned.
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Can your posts be considered Art 101? I feel like I'm learning so much. Thank you.
I really appreciate the comment. Glad you are liking the posts.