Jack Whitten – ‘The Political is in the Work’ | TateShots

what I have learned art can be anything the artist wants it to be but me it was always different remember I was born in 1939 best Alabama deep south the height of segregation I was born in American apartheid so I've always had a sense of purpose right from the beginning Tuskegee did not have a art program so I went for herself to Baton Rouge Louisiana to study at Southern University to study art and I was there at sovereign for a year and things went well until I got involved with politics I had met dr. Martin Luther King in 1957 in Montgomery during the bus boycott when I was a freshman at Tuskegee and I believed in what he had to say and his theory of non-violence you know young people we absorb things when you meet somebody like Martin Luther King he has something about him what you would have to be damned unhhhh sensitive not to be attracted to the what came out of him but in today's turn a painting like the painting for Malcolm you know that this is this is symbolic abstraction the painting was done right after the assassination Malcolm had a grasp of the universal aspect of the struggle that he was involved with he knew that it's that convergent into the universal that gave him more power the most fitting way symbolic was to go back to the classical symbol of the triangle to offer that sense of strength that painting had to be dark it had to be Moody it had to be deep it had to give you that feeling of going back deep down into something and in doing that I was able to capture the essence of what Malcolm was about in my work I've always used photography as an analogy photography I don't know if you realize it has been the single most influence on painting the invention of photography most of anything was photography there ASA spellers acer was created out of something that i called a mystical king of my imagination the technique of aces palace it's all acquitted in 1970 i made this large to was toffee wire that I would use to rake the paint across the canvas it was a piece of wood and I attached a piece of neoprene rubber to it which is a tough material was shaped like a big T there's a long handle to it if this is where it starts I'm at the end of the canvas which would bring me all the way over to here that's how long the Hamill was I had to reach out with the handle and I had to pull it quite rapidly like this motion that sort of thinking came out of following bill the Kooning primarily for years whereas bill lacunae was using multiple gestures what we call relational gestures in painting I was after something that was none relational something that occurred in one big sweet pool this painting led me into the concept of paint s collage that was 1973 I discovered paint as collage for me coming out of best malabar what's happening today is nothing new for me this is what I was boarded one person cannot speak for a whole artists community you can't but I'm aware of the fact that people at least people I know very much aware what's going on we don't know what this is ability to we know that the present times though are pretty bad and it's a type of rhetoric that we're having to deal with every day escalates my thinking is that there has to be some point when it's going to explode even more so some people say I hope it doesn't hope helps but hope is not enough there's something global going on that comes out of hate and that's find a boss to admit that what were you experiencing it's not just regional and it goes beyond just being black so the political is in the work I know it's in there because I put it in there you

Channel: Tate

Views: 21,114

Rating: 4.985765 out of 5

Keywords: Tate, tate modern, jack whitten, soul of a nation, malcolm x, martin luther king, art, modern art, contemporary art, black identity

Id: QzxhXbXGeTc

Length: 6min 0sec (360 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2017