In Conversation: Fred Moten and Legacy Russell

Introduction hello everyone i'm yuta nakajima senior director at hauser worth in new york thank you for joining us to celebrate our exhibition jack whitton i am the object which is on view at our new location in chelsea at 542 west 22nd street until this saturday january 23rd we hope that you'll make a reservation online to come and see the exhibit before it closes uh we're thrilled to welcome poet and scholar fred mon along with associate curator of exhibitions at the studio museum in harlem legacy russell before handing off to them for those of you who are unable to attend the exhibit in person we have prepared this video walkthrough of the show Jack Whitten so maybe fred as as we walk through since it seems that there's no sound um we can be the sound um and i just want to um note as we're getting started just how honored i am to be here today uh to talk about jack whitten especially with you uh you know mutually honored and of course to kind of consider what it means um you know to quote when how art can be our compass to the cosmos um i brought with me a little bit of biographical information about jack whitten for those who are new friends to his work although i know there are many folks who are deeply followers and admirers of his work long-time friends but a little bit about jack whitten born in 1939 in bessemer alabama in 1960 he moves to new york and leaves the tuskegee institute and in 1964 graduated from cooper union um in 1974 he had his show at the whitney museum and then in 1983 had a 10-year retrospective at the student museum in harlem which you know resulted in an incredible publication for those of you who are lucky to own a copy it's very special with essays from uh you know kelly jones and mary schmidt campbell um and then in 2018 i had the privilege of being able to spend some time uh with his work yet again uh in odyssey um the jack wooden sculpture exhibition that took us from 1963 to 2016 at the met museum so you know all of this is to say that there's been this incredible career of this individual and um you know to be here in this moment now thinking through the lens of this question of the woodshed it feels like a really apt place to start maybe an intimate place to kind of be considering what it means to be in the woodshed well i'm glad to see if we can get in the woodshed together honor for me to be here and able to to talk about mr witness work and it's especially gratifying to be able to talk with you um so uh yeah i mean i i guess my own acquaintance with his work is relatively new relatively recent um and i i i came to know you know more about his work and to really be um you know to begin to be deeply invested in it um because of my friendship with another with a friend of mr witten's um greg borderwitz um and i've talked with greg a lot about about whitten's work um and learned a lot about whitney's work from him and then subsequently from from reading you know really beautiful and insightful criticism by the folks you mentioned kelly jones and mary schmidt campbell um guthrie ramsey um marie geldzahler um there there's a there's a beautiful wealth of of of sensitive work um that that i think has been touched by by him and touched by the way he touches the canvas and that there's maybe maybe one of the things that we could could really talk about today um because i believe that it actually does The Woodshed have deep cosmological implications is touch yeah me too yeah i love the the um the woodshed as a meeting place that perhaps we you know are in that space even now and i know that we've intimately been in that woodshed as we prepared for being in this space here um and for those again who are kind of new to the term um the definition of woodshed comes from the world of jazz um to go to the woodshed or to woodshed means to kind of practice in private which gives room for different types of experimentation but also fred of course right suggests a space where real and rigorous work can be possible or rehearsal and kind of um you know radical vision away from uh you know particular type of gaze um is uh sort of embedded and you know how that can happen before it enters into a public realm and so you know i've thought a lot about this question of the woodshed given that you know we have intimately now had time with this sort of incredible publication of jack whitton's journals right um and that we're entering into this conversation um with the great honor and privilege of having been able to spend time intimately with his discussions and kind of perspectives of the world but maybe as well things that we weren't supposed to see yeah i mean it's it's a very complicated thing a difficult maybe sort of ethical position to be put in as a as a student of witness and as a fan of witness and as someone who you know has people who are always hungry for more particularly in the wake of his passing where you know that the more that you're gonna get is somehow limited you know it's it's it's it's not infinite you know there's not infinite horizon of more and more work and so to get notes from the woodshed is uh this tremendous gift at the same time is you don't know in a certain kind of way if it was a gift that was meant for you or if it was a gift it was meant to be to be given totally at the same time when i think about the woodshed i i guess i really think about the most sort of or at least for me the most most memorable or resonant instance of of a musician of a jazz musician going to the woodshed is is the famous sabbatical that sonny rollins took um when he sort of stopped playing in clubs in the early 60s and would practice at night on the williamsburg bridge um and i think that there's something really deep and interesting about this public wood shedding um what it means to to have to practice in public what it means to have to grow and engage in a sort of meditative and even monastic practice when when everyone's there whenever when anyone can listen um and what it means is that the the space of the woodshed is maybe a space of a kind of open secrecy you know um of course yeah to the extent that we're talking about black folks you know and we're talking about this horrific interdiction on the very possibility of privacy for for us you know maybe that open secret secrecy that public wood shedding is is the general mode that we've all you know been engaged yeah i mean i think this idea of kind of being hidden in plain sight is one that is deeply meaningful in the context of talking about this work i mean even as we um were able to peek into the gallery and spend time with some of the work obviously an initial entry point was coming into the awareness that the work actually was stored in his studio kind of rolled up and tucked away right that these were things that were these monuments that actually um are being shown uh many of which for the first time and so you know i've been reflecting a lot about um this in intersection with the work of um one of my uh favorite humans andre brock who wrote an incredible book called distributed blackness but i think about this idea as you're presenting it right of kind of rehearsing in public the private spaces that exist within uh the public eye and you know what comes with that alongside of andre's term uh kind of as enclaved counterpublic what it means to exist in that third space and how that third space maybe is uniquely black um because you know these questions of privacy and and sort of the public um have always been things that blackness has to negotiate you negotiate or or obliterate yes yeah obliterate the cosmos Obliterate the Cosmos right and i think it's like interesting too because you know thinking about the notion of legibility there that you know the idea that something can exist in plain sight but perhaps only be readable or you know to a specific group of folks right um that the intention behind that um allows for a certain level of opacity which is you know really exciting um and sticky um and you know really imaginative and that you know within whitten's work there is this kind of complex undoing of what he calls this binary of abstraction this idea that you know abstraction equals object set against representation which equals subject and that kind of unlearning that becomes part of this process of allowing these works to be deeply encrypted and then you know us to do the work of kind of having to you know look into them to travel through them as kind of this incredible outer space yeah yeah i mean i The Dead Sea Scrolls at one point um [Music] i had begun to think that you know first of all to save it um to say that wouldn't there's a black painter a black artist to to speak about him in a way as having been engaged in a job that what rifles didn't think he was supposed to do which is something he says it's a great long uh interview that they did with him at the smithsonian institute but to to think of him and to consider him as a black painter um nes is also necessarily to consider him as as in a sense a mediterranean painter um and and as part of this sort of larger black mediterranean sort of complex of thought and of uh and of artistic production you know partly obviously because of his time in crete um but also i i guess i was thinking about in a lot of ways i was thinking the idea of those those beautiful pieces that are in the show having been rolled up made me think of them as scrolls um something like you know maybe witness version of the dead sea scrolls you know right or use your word monastic they're like monastic texts right and and like spending time with them i think their repetition within them right obviously there's a sonic capacity to that right which is almost like reads like a score but then there also is this thing fred that i just love you know in terms of the the reading of it the way that we look at it which is that there are beats within it and there are breaks within it right within our view and vision and the way in which we're able to kind of digest and take on these pieces and so that in itself becomes a really complex way of sitting with these works it encourages a certain kind of silence yeah and when you think about it in The Algorithm terms of you know the the notion of distributed blackness and that the sort of digital you know cybernetic sort of implications there it makes you think of you know another great mediterranean you know intellectual innovation from you know a thousand years ago but the algorithm you know and and and it kind of reminds me of something that my friend stephan o'harney writes about and thinks about a lot um the notion of an algorithm you know yeah there's the the rhythmic nature of the algorithm or the the the the insurgent you know alternative rhythm you know in a sort of caribbean sense you know or jamaican sense of that term that's also at play in this work you know because of its the tessellation the beat the you know you could even say you know uh to quote another great critic the the glitchiness you know of his work um yeah yeah i mean i i think it's like you know this idea of the algorithm i deeply appreciate and as well the rhythm within algorithm because you know this idea of the meeting place as being this woodshed and that in the woodshed there is the kind of production of the code these scrolls these things that you know exist is kind of text but also monuments and have this complicated relationship and you know that witten's time and crete embeds him deeply within the classics right so there's like a heightened level of awareness of context around his work of art history around his work and part of the thing that really cracked me up actually as i was reading through um notes from woodshed was that he was very much aware of his position in art history like dude just knew he knew that there was you know something that he was working towards um and it was this kind of amazing thing to see these notes where you know he really is kind of mapping out for us in this kind of incredible exponential fractal rhizomatic way his road towards some of that right reaching towards a certain art historical greatness reaching um kind of through and beyond his definitions or the world's definitions of blackness and what um limitations there are right and he just breaks that all open so it's this amazing thing to see and he does it with a sense of humor which i really you know i adore um because his voice is really in that and you see that too you know the way in which he's toeing the line between kind of critique and memory and at points bringing in you know color within that right it's not something that operates you know as a static subject it's dynamic Afroclassicism yeah yeah no the the the classicism is interesting too there there's a this afro-hellenic thing going on and it it actually very much kind of put me in mind of the work of really great important scholar and classicist emily greenwood who writes about afro-classicism she writes about the the influence and the importance but also the the transformative work that you know that well particularly caribbean afro-caribbean writers did in in in in sort of transforming the the legacy of the classics that were you know maybe impose upon them as a function of colonial education i mean the most famous is you know is is is is derrick walcott you know great sort of reconstituted epic foam omarosa and i kept thinking about walcott a lot you know in relation to in relation to whitten and partly too because um what you get is this this whole other kind of if you think about walcott or think about somebody like kamal brathwaite and then you know or you know aubry williams you think about you know what it what it would mean to to think about witness part of this more general sort of afrodisporic multi-generic multi-disciplinary insurgency against you know within but also against the history of art but as well the history of painting uh the history of of of of poetry you know those those notes man they're so cool because yeah he's definitely just as you say completely understands himself within the history of painting in this very detail very very knowledgeable and erudite way and he also understands himself as bringing as trying to bring the history of painting to a hand you know right which i love right and i think like you know i appreciate that you bring up walcott because you know i also recognize that there's something that's you know deeply diasporic about the work how it travels in journeys but also there's something too that's embedded and entrenched in this question of america and so you know that he's kind of tangled up in that but also as well like really looking to get free and giving us the language to find a way towards a certain type of emancipation right and that comes through his pushing through technique right like this kind of explosion that takes place on his canvas and even just using like you know this the kind of technique of the tesserai which has such a tradition to it right it brings in byzantium it brings in like deep deep art history um and you know the royals of that right which i think is really kind of um incredible to think through what it means to situate um some of the questions he's asking into that history and then you know also thinking about the the kind of text within it you know i i was thinking about the souls of black folks right which is like thinking very much about w e b du bois and the work of that you know the questions being asked towards navigating a certain type of um space of language um of kind of an american site that allows for both a reconciliation with questions of a kind of black presence um in intersection with you know really a kind of toxic american whiteness right and the kind of history's there but then also too trying to do the work of something different right allowing that to be something that is not you know situated and entrenched in that um that ends a possibility of life right but rather that you know it celebrates it and extends it and allows it to kind of take on different forms well it's definitely it's situated Birmingham Alabama you know it's um i'm i have been interested in the fact that i mean a couple couple weeks ago i did this a similar convocation today talking with courtney martin about um about uh about sam gilliam's work and it just struck me as this amazing thing that that sam gilliam and and arthur j for both born in tupelo mississippi um which heretofore had been most famous for being you know the birthplace of elvis presley you know which is a whole other thing and of course when i think about bessemer alabama i think about the amazing people who came from that area in and around birmingham alabama um right so angela davis on the one hand the great literary critic deborah mcdowell who writes really beautifully about growing up in bessemer in a great book called um oh man i'm gonna mess up the name but i want to say it's called remembering pipe shop because pipe shop was a very specific neighborhood in in bessemer alabama see bessemer alabama had a huge huge steel works there you know birmingham is an industrial town it's a steel town right and then of course you know when sun raw first landed you know in in on on the planet it was in birmingham alabama which he famously asked us to remember has a nickname the magic city and then of course thornton dial you know live for so long in customer alabama so it makes me think man maybe bessemer was the other end you know of this great sort of cosmic wormhole you know which is like you know the sort of a privileged spot where people you know where these black folks whose origins are in another galaxy they kind of came through birmingham you know in order to you know to to to spread the the gospel so to speak of what they were doing and um but but it it and it's situated it bears the mark of that specific history which is a history of beauty and the history of brutality but at the same time you know it's um it's another thing right it's like what if we thought about alabama as just the northern caribbean you know in the same way that we think of new orleans that way sometimes or if we you know when we think about zarnil hurston we can think about her as a caribbean you know you know author i guess what i'm trying to say is that you know the americanness if they're you know of of somebody like whitten is an anti-national international thing yes yes is like kind of trying to trouble that right those boundaries there and i i appreciate that wormhole because the wormhole towards this space of industry and you know of a technical space of a certain kind of um kind of technical training too you know goes back to whitten's root you know he was trained in this pre-med space and actually had to figure out a way to you know navigate to new york city to get to cooper union to begin his career as an artist but that he maintained this real commitment to the science of the work that thinking about you know the kind of technical uh root of that as a material thinking about you know quite literally like as he was grappling with the questions of you know how do you make this material work what are the things that are successes and failures within that right um you know what is the life and death of a canvas there are these like really amazing moments of kind of trying to push this into kind of a multi-dimensional interstellar place and i i love that because it makes me you know very much aware that his kind of interest in in the kind of data and technology of this work i you know as i think about this route as you're putting forward um you seems to be the thing where the technical live so deeply within this creative training and where he brings in very much so a certain history of a black america into center four of this art historical narrative right allowing for those things to be possible and perhaps as well to be um negotiated differently through the lens of race and class [Music] yeah it's it it places a A Burden you know it's a it's a you know i mean i guess you could say it's a burden in the sense that it's a it's a heavy deep responsibility that that he has to take up as an artist and it's a responsibility again both to the history of the of the of the media and the genre within which you work and it's also um but it's also a recognition that the ultimate fulfillment of that responsibility to that history is to bring that history to a close right to an end um and what it means is that maybe you just can't that that the ordinary definitions don't apply and that you have to kind of constantly be finding your way as you say through through through the material and through a different so to speak relation to the material although maybe relations not even the right word when you look at the details of of this totem you know that we're looking at now and what you see what it makes me want is you know it it you see how clearly it is the case that he is refusing the comforts of the simple opposition between painter and sculptor and that because he refuses those comforts he seems also to be refusing those those names and and and it makes me wanna what it really makes me want to do is to call him a fabricator um not a pain i think i feel like he might appreciate honestly because like part of you know the thing that was also really neat to read more about his work and spend time with it is that he was deeply committed to the fabrication of it and as well this idea of kind of um the machine of it like you know he would talk about technological imaging and was deeply invested in trying to understand like how do you make an image quite literally what does that even do is it even possible to do that and kind of the taking a part of that there's where the industry is there's something there that's incredibly tactile the artist's hand is always in it but i agree with you so much that you know there is something there that is shocking these different titles and as well forcing us to recognize a sort of different type of dimensionality yeah no i think dimensionality is TwoDimensionality key you know i mean i think he's a i wouldn't want to say that he's and again this is something that i think links him to to gilliam and so to other artists too you know in over the last 50 years but but what if it's something that for various historical reasons is a particular both burden and chance for black artists which is that he he's he's a deep deep deep investigator of two-dimensionality um and you know that there's a kind of you know commonplace set of art historical formulations that emerge you know out of the the criticism in the history particularly done by by greenberg and his circle that you know that wants to maintain a commitment to a certain notion of painting but in order to do so you know valorizes if not fetishizes the what is called the flatness you know of the of the plane um and you know what i think what you get i think in whitten really really richly and intensely um is a kind of thing where he's just like let's investigate what flatness means let's get so close let's get so haptically caught up in the flatness that we begin to see as contours that we get to see its depths that we begin to see the irregularities and the topography of its surfaces and and that's what and that's what his practice both you know that his practice not only calls it to our attention but it imposes it upon us and he makes these works that we can that we can it feels sometimes that you can walk up in them you know i that that exactly that is the articulation of my experience when i stand in front of one of these works the idea of being able to walk through the streets of them almost that there's something there and as well that i think that if you're talking about like greenberg right that there's a space that cannot be reached by anything other than who is you know kind of willing to do the work of getting into them right and so there's a real um kind of uh refusal of of criticism because the critique will always be something that that you know can reach a certain point but can't go all the way around and that for me i found to be you know this really decadent and amazing place to exist within in that obviously you know as i'm standing in this moment right that i'm seeing very much so that these are um streets that we can kind of navigate collectively it's like it's like a topographical map um exactly exactly that of a topographical map of the wreck Improvising you know um i guess i mean the the benjaminian wreck you know the the wreck of our of our history um and and insofar as he allows us to look back on that recce he calls upon us you know to improvise with him you know and um and he's engaged in this work of of improvisation of of which is also a work of accompaniment you know and and and when you and again it's not it's just refuses that simple opposition between representation and abstraction because what's that stake it's not a representation of kenny dorm the great trumpeter or train you know or you know not not a representation of milk jackson you know in those those paintings but he's he's accompanying them he's he's playing with them he's sitting in um and by the same token they're they're accompanying him too um and and as we view these paintings um and as we view the way in which they're not simply paintings and as we deal with the fact that they're not being simply paintings means that we don't simply view them we we play with them we we engage and we accompany them and uh it's it's a what it creates is a totally different kind of set of ethical arrangements that that obviously have aesthetic implications but they have social implications too absolutely i mean i think that the the question of presence here um and presence you know in terms of the sort of directionality of the work this idea of mapping um the kind of uh sort of space that it occupies in in that you know we are able to see almost all of it but there always will be a space that is uniquely written that is basically this private space that is held within the public is something that i think is like you know it's what makes these works ones that you can keep coming back to and you know i i'm thinking about like you mentioned the totems right but we've got of course you know across this the language of a kind of art historical reference right of totems and masks that of course goes through the the kind of um histories too of bringing in this sort of hellenistic blackness right um but then as well the the kind of um other language of the work which is you know the crosses the memory sites the altarpieces so there is this deep sense too of um both remembrance and also of mourning really right which i think is something that i found to be really remarkable that you know he allows those things to kind of occupy the same space and to do so in a way that is really generous yeah Religious painting it makes you yeah i mean i feel like you know i mean what i want to say and then i immediately don't want to say it is that he's a religious artist um right i mean but you mentioned as we were chatting you mentioned some of this kind of religious painting which came up well it's a maybe the better word would be devotional um you know because because maybe you know in terms of what what he's reading and what you know devotional in that same way that we could talk about coltrane let's say um where or you know maybe maybe maybe maybe the other word would be would be spiritual you know it's just that it's a it's a spirituality which is so fundamentally and deeply material um or maybe a better way to put it even would be that it's a physical spirituality you know um like like um it's a tactile spirituality um it's a it's a spirituality of touch um and but but as you say it it's it's it's in its devotional quality it's also maybe this is always a kind of work of of mourning you know um but in both senses of of that of that word you know or both spellings mourning as in as in you know how we remember and how we carry with us what is lost right but also mourning as in you know the next day what's coming next done yeah and it's it's um so these beautiful elegiac works that um [Music] that that that consider the the death the loss of of ron brown of milt jackson of of ichizak ravine you know um of his teachers you know you know that that's man i kept you know the altarpiece you know um that's definitely that's that's that's maybe maybe there's there's a piece that's not in this well it is in the show there was a piece where it felt like he had layered the paint over um over a cross right as and so the cross is situated as a kind of frame or as a as a as a as a scaffolding upon which the work is laid but it's as if that cross is bearing the weight of the art you know in a way you know you think well what what is the why is art this crosses why is art what you know that the cross is being why is it that art is what the cross is being made to bear you know right and the scaffolding itself it is like a it's an architectural proposition right that you know if we're thinking about that the way in which these works are are viewed completely right is that you know there is an aerial component to it there's a sonic component to it there's a spatial component to it that you know within that is this scaffolding i so agree with you you know and as well the the um challenge that comes with that like thinking about you know who is doing what kind of building and the ways in which that you know for example an altarpiece can do important work and allowing for a different type of memory and a different type of documentation of archiving right which i think too is you know really um necessary when viewing these works because you know the material is vast this is like not for the faint of heart right to create these works is a meditative practice to go back to you know where we began but also as well kind of there's a there's a ritual folded into them right and and it's well sort of keeping which i appreciate right because to kind of have these different pieces these tesserai come together to create a form requires women to be able to do that work over time and that the durational element of it is something that you know is phenomenal but it's felt right you can really feel the labor in them and the tactility too yeah no i it's like um Annunciation well i i was i was really trying to understand you know also how to how to get at how to how to understand the use of certain terms you know that are that are so crucial for uh for a certain kind of christian mysticism especially in in his in his work and and the one term that that kept coming back partly because of particularly that piece called totem totem 2000 number six which is dedicated to coltrane but the term is annunciation um you know which in in sort of christian mystical history is the the moment when the when the holy spirit descends and informs mary that she is blessed of all women because she will um uh will bear you know the the son right and i kept thinking what what's this what's i wonder what the what the significance of that term is for for for whitman and of course what's interesting is that there's a series of paintings this is from 2000 um and and he writes about it in the woodshed notes um but then there was another set of paintings that he was doing at the term you know 1979 um another piece called enunciation um annunciation 14. and and in that piece you know i was he was again it's it appears to be the case that he had been thinking this deep deep deep relation to train to coltrane by way of this notion of enunciation for a long long time yeah and i don't know what to say about it i'm just interested in it you know like i'm trying i love that you're bringing up cold train though because spread like it is sound right that that is something that you know i almost feel like is a part of this that we can keep we could keep unpacking infinitely um and there's so much i think you know as i look at that these works that that does the work of speaking right um but also of making sound right of making music yeah well he he there's a beautiful essay in the that great kind of priceless small catalog that the studio museum did for that show there by i hope i'm get henry geltzeler and yell solar quotes whitney witness says because whitney's talking about train and he says um the sound you hear in his music comes at you in waves he catches it when it comes by and he'll grab at as much of it as he needs or uh or can grasp i think that in plastic terms translating from sound i was sensing sheets waves of light a sheet of light passing that's how i was seeing light that's why i refer to these paintings as energy fields and you know a whole lot of critics were well there's two sort of common places in in jazz criticism and particularly in criticism of train that i think he's working with and indexing there and one is that the formulation that that some of what train was doing particularly after 1965 um was was that one term for was energy music that that train was dealing in these energy fields as well but also um but also that that formulation that the critic ira gitler makes about coltrane where he says coltrane is playing sheets of sound right and and and i begin to think well maybe what it is that whitten takes from that is this notion of a kind of sheets of paint that he begins to think about the paint as fabric and that as much as he's a again and that's part of why we might want to call him a fabricator on a literal sense he's thinking about the paint as fabric and and his and his his tools his utensils are not really so much the brush anymore but but the blade right he's cutting this fabric he becomes a seamstress in in a certain country i'm there with you that cutting right and that also that kind of um it's a splice right it's slicing and cutting and then it's there's a stitch there too which i think is like a really great place as you know kind of reconciling with this question of almost a fissure Stitching yep a glitchy kind of stitching too right because it produces that kind of weird you know tessellated pixelated effect that you get you know and um and and so you look and then you have to look again and it produces this glint and this shimmer and this kind of shiny kind of thing in a way that almost makes it feel like what he's doing is is his sequence you know um that that he's a that he's a he's a seamstress who works or a designer who works with sequence you know which i know you know runs in the family right right and someone is saying in the chat right now right that you know dad was a coal miner mom was a seamstress right so this stitching was something that was innate right but also like this sort of presence of the industry right that industry and as a kind of fabrication as a sort of machinery and also marking him really as a technologist too um running alongside everything else when you think fred about you know what this could be as fabric right i'm seeing that you know that this could be printed you know in terms of almost a kind of data score and so there is something there too that you know could read as a sheet music right as a kind of composition um that could be played and these perhaps are also these different notes that the tesserai give us almost keys to put our fingers on and that actually for me standing in front of it is like the tempting thing too right like that's why this two two-dimensional plane is a complicated thing to navigate because you really want to step into it you want to come into contact with the work it's holographic but it's and it's cool because um but the other thing that i know you know is you know in addition to his mom and dad his brother is a really renowned designer named bill frank exactly was a renowned designer of shirts and and particularly you know for musicians but but i guess his most famous piece was was was michael jackson's sequined gloves i know which else i have to say you know thinking about when you were talking about kind of the glint within this work right i mean there is something to there that is this um kind of language of dazzling right that like how do you take something that actually is an ordinary material right like a glove how do you take something that you know is is something like you know like in the intestine case almost operating as a brick right as a brick layer towards a structure that there is something there that is you know very straightforward right but then every piece of this is its own work and so you know within that too right there is this kind of incredible opening of each of these pieces because you know each piece Work of Love of it is a canvas well it it it reminds me of uh you know a famous phrase uh in zora neal hurston's essay characteristics of negro expression which the will to adorn and of course that's also the title that cheryl wall the great leader at critic took for her last book you know but but clearly you know whitten is imbued you know with the will to adorn and and to adorn is is also to adore you know i mean it's it's work of of love um yeah yeah i love i appreciate fred you sang devotion absolutely yeah because i think like you know to do that work is is deep work it's something that is specific right it's it is it's you know it's planned yeah um and done so you know in a way that really is quite deliberate and thoughtful and so within that i also you know see so much within each of these pieces that you know whitten really is helping us think differently about sort of what it is to create these works right and have them be both whole and deeply abstracted um that there's you know a drive there that is so specific and a language that he's kind of working towards and helping us maybe define and redefine but i noticed too that there were folks in the chat that kind of were noting about you know some of the titles of the work um you know coming up to uh mask three for the children of dunblane scotland um you know and and the relationship you know that as i kind of spent time with that work which is an incredibly important work um you know alongside of the work of 20th april 1999 number one right and whereas one um noting in 1986 right these are pupils and a teacher who um you know were murdered in the deadliest shooting in british history and that that within that context really established um the gun laws within the uk um and then you know kind of conversely almost you know within this kind of discussion and dialogue we're seeing in the same space as we're kind of walking through the gallery um this work which of course um you know features the two protagonists of the columbine shooting um and so there is this kind of complicated dynamic right you know in terms of this question of the work as they you know what was intended to be seen right where in the woodshed these works as they have been kind of unscrolled as we're reading them because as well too there's you know kind of commentary there's media deeply embedded in this um and there's kind of a response and kind of a broadcast too and responding to a kind of global awareness as someone who is deeply embedded within an america but as well aware of what is taking place around him in the world yeah no obvious there's information and uh you know there's you know very very famous celebrated formulation that the poet william carlos williams makes you know about the news being in poetry you know um and and you know and poets love that because you know poets love to think that they're doing something special and unique but but but there's but the news is in these these these paintings too um there and it's cool right i mean it makes you want to get all you know uh highfalutin about it in a way but but maybe the the paintings that that we keep that we remain invested in are the ones to keep keep keep keep telling the news right that keep bringing the news you know and it's you know it's the good news you know it's it's it's a gospel of a service sword but it's also the bad news too you know and it's all the you know all the all the brutality um you know that's that's what's that's what's here and um he writes it out for us you know he makes it known he gives it you know he i think that this is where there are these different layers of you know sort of legibility right like moments where he's letting us read something head-on and with clarity right and moments where he actually is really requiring us to do a different type of work in in kind of decoding it and being in conversation really too with him allowing him to kind of talk to us and then for us to talk back to him i'm seeing in the chat um you know as we're kind of moving into the q a uh part of this um a comment uh about you know someone who um ran into jim barton who was a studious assistant of jax and they're talking about the way in which he worked which you know of course feels significant here that you know there was a moment where jack whitten let go of the brush altogether um and so the comment is is remarking about you know him pouring acrylic paint in pools on the floor the ways in which you know he would kind of move with the work and you know i think that that in itself too is something that is remarkable and exciting to think about because as well it helps us understand that you know even though the material itself the paint is dry right um that actually the intention of the work began with gesture um and a deeply studied dynamism too yeah yeah yeah that kind of that choreography um it's a it's more on the ground you know i guess i was you know the you know the the sort of famous dance that that produced you know pollux lines you know in his his his images are you know it was it was vertical in a certain kind of way um and you know and what was happening was happening from above you know and and from a certain kind of movement that was in some ways you know felt to me always like it was separated you know from the ground none of that is meant to denigrate it or to to lessen the impact of it at all but but this is a grounded thing you know um and so it makes you you know and again it may it's there's a there's this question of tilling and digging you know and uh is in his work um and in witness working and uh and grounding you know and maybe like in that walter rodney kind of sense rooting as otto rebecca says you know yeah that's it's a it's a well it's just beautiful work i mean it's just it's amazing it's beautiful to be able to to see it i feel sad you know that all this this show happens moment when we can't you know where it's difficult for people to be present you know with that work um right because the work encourages that presence as you said you know and uh i hope i hope you know i hope we'll get a chance to be there with it um not just to look at it but to look with it you know um someday soon yeah i mean the the question of convening around the work um is one that you know i keep coming back to and i know that in a different iteration a different terror in space and time right that we would be there standing with these works and be able to spend some time with them um you know intimately and physically um but you know i will say like whitten was before his time in so many ways and so for me it is remarkable to be having this conversation about you know all that he was kind of putting together thinking through um especially right now because so much was very prescient to this moment um to this week even right um kind of thinking through ways where abstraction and gesture um and sound and space can do different types of work of kind of enclosing protecting um you know creating space right to to do a different type of thinking in in public and also in private so almost it feels unique and apt to be having these conversations in the privacy of our homes um and then still in this public right which is with all of these incredible folks who are here today um so i thank you brad because you know it's super special to be able to take the time to just sit and just vibe a little bit um and you know i couldn't think of a better uh you know combination of folks that you know an afternoon with jacqueline and with you i appreciate being with you too this is good this is you know as you say he he calls up you know the altarpieces call us to the altar you know i mean to call us to to to a kind of gathering um and it's really important because as you say on the one hand we've always had to gather under constraint we've always had to figure out a way to gather when gathering was interdicted and now it's predicted like never before and at the same time what we see is these brutal vicious degradations of gathering you know the form of you know you know druid viking fascist you know sort of you know political hella druid yeah but but i think that uh you know we still have to we still have to figure out how to get together and there's uh and there's nothing better than than being able to get together around his work and it was really fun and cool to be able to get together with you so thank you yeah well thank you and thank you all for joining us i mean fred i could seriously be on the line for you with another six hours of time so we're gonna have to do some kind of part two part three um but this afternoon has been a treat um and please of course keep the conversation going my hope is that for those of you who can see the show and are comfortable doing so that you'll brave the streets and get out there to see it before it closes but for those of you of course who are at home or working remotely um there's so much online that you can kind of continue to come back to beautiful images of jack whitton's work and essays and such that continue to be um really inspirational along with interviews so encourage you to check those out as well have an incredible afternoon and thank you fred thank you thank you