Notes from the Woodshed

"The publication compiles five decades of abstract artist Jack Whitten’s personal writings. So many artists love this book, so many artists say how important it is. It is really shaping up to be one of the classics by an artist writer, right up there with Delacroix’s journals. You’re seeing the process of experimentation, a jazz-like mindset, very much engaged with materials, very much engaged with his period, the civil rights struggle in the US, the socio-political context. And it highlights the importance of art as a form of self-reflection. It is a classic. “These books show that it’s beyond the solitary endeavour, it’s much more than that.” Even if Whitten said that he never intended for these to be made public. He was writing these as his private thoughts. These are his mitherings on the art world, his relationships, his practices, and especially his identity, his life in New York at that time as a Black artist. The point about Jack Witten is that he was very clever. His background was in philosophy and physics, as he originally intended to go into medicine. We know that he always thought with ambition about himself and beyond himself into the world, being human in the world. With all those skills and abilities he had, and the freedom of knowing that these were just writings for himself, he didn’t have the inhibition of worrying about writing for the reader. He was talking to himself, so his notes have a natural voice. They’re actually very funny. They’re emotional. They’re informative. It’s like the full package. He’ll write “I’m Black, I’m old and I’m tired of being teaching and having no money. What am I going to do?” We can admire his real sense of emotional durability. I think that every reader will relate to something that Jack says. It’s very human. As somebody who wanted to be a painter myself, passages that always hit me viscerally is when he talks about paint. “I just want a slab of paint.” The physical material stuff of paint is honestly expressed and you can feel it. But then he takes us through something that’s so deep, informative, mathematical, scientific, cultural, political. Artists carry out endless research into materials, into current affairs; they know about their contemporaries, they know about art history. When we see exhibitions, we credit the curators, we look at the beautiful paintings, but we don’t often stop and think about all the work that the artist is doing that isn’t seen. At the same time, there’s a light-heartedness in this book. And some great art world gossip! I read them as humorous comparisons with other artists when he talks about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty . Whitten gently mocks him saying he just uses tons of dirt. Then he goes on to say that he’s going to use an even bigger brush than de Kooning . Even while he says he’s the first artist in history to use an Afro-Comb to make a painting. It’s a funny competitiveness. Or “Art is not a substitution for religion. Someone should have told Rothko that.” I love it. That, in a way, is an enlarged sense of what the studio represents. We often fall into the trap of thinking that the studio has an inherent solitude about it. These books show that it’s beyond the solitary endeavour, it’s much more than that. The lingering idea of the studio as a soloist’s stage may be a vestige of the idea of the artist as a kind of romantic hero, the great individual. That’s very much a 20th-century idea that someone like Lozano or Whitten were looking to debunk, and it opens up so many more ways in which the studio can enlighten, inform and delight. Art need not be a rarefied experience, and it is never just a single story."