JACK WHITTEN

Music of the Spheres (Agia Galini) 

On the occasion of The Numinous at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, Athens Design Forum presents the movement of a psyche: Jack Whitten’s orientation of Greece. This is a history built from fragments, foregrounding a harmonic overture into the life of a monumental figure with the continuum of people and environments that shaped his cosmology.

The unpublished photographic record of the late artist is joined by interviews and newly commissioned portraits of Whitten Acres in Agia Galini, Crete, coalescing a polyphonic reading of how his identity was articulated across geographies. Before Whitten became an artist, he was a musician – transcending rhythmic gestures that were then shared in his language of sculpture. His initial journey towards Crete became a new orientation: “My first time in blue water with no horizon; I realized that I was in the center of a circle...a vast, unbelievable void of a circle” (Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, 2015). The metaphysical properties of the region cannot be reduced to the periphery; Agia Galini’s name means a refuge of spirit, known for its ‘serenity’ that encompasses release from a turbulent sea. An origin of the encounter may be described as signal flares, bright red fires into the horizon of sky that marked years of creative expression – a release from the compression of time and social paradigms of inequality experienced in the United States. A freedom that would be webbed knot by knot. It is as Mirsini Amidon, his daughter, suggested: “the landscape of Crete became embedded within the values of our family.” 

In early September, when the winds began to ripen, Athens Design Forum began a cyclical foray to find the solitary house in Agia Galini, allowing for transcontinental encounters with his family and friends to construct an image of life beyond what was known. Whitten’s occupation was received in obscurity upon his arrival in 1969, (he was commissioned to paint signs for a local hotel) as the trade of an artist was obliquely defined. It would deepen through the words of his trusted friend, Captain Yannis Kanaris, (at sea from the age of five) who deduced – “everything holds and requires an art”.

In 2017, Jack Whitten’s correspondence with Jarret Earnest for the Brooklyn Rail probed on the density of light, and the sound within – “it agrees with what the ancient philosophers refer to as ‘the music of the spheres,’” he would contend. Crete would provide the necessary movement and sharp quality of light due to the boreas (a strong cold, north wind that reduces humidity, aiding clarity). Mantinades, the region’s improvised songs, sporadic in form, had a vocalized constellation in relationship to land, estrangement, exile, and the topographic integrity of the landscape from which they stemmed.

The analytical dimension and photographic representation we have composed of Whitten Acres, as it survives, is therefore a testimony to how an artist’s field of expression manifests through shared terms of living – of assigning perspectives, of thresholds, and the shout towards a decisive homecoming. The rapture of a fisherman’s net unravels, torn from each new harvest, and is knotted anew, betrothed to another sea. 

At the base of Whitten Acres, two carob trees become the primary image of a phenomenon. Forceful winds caused them to bend inwards, seemingly reaching for each other. Their distinct bodies, visibly transfigured to an anthropomorphic embrace, become materially connected without effacing their autonomy. It speaks in reverence to Whitten’s journey, from his birth in Bessemer, Alabama—a steel-mill town entrenched in brutal racial segregation—to how the conditions were retained in the body of his work developed in Agia Galini from 1969. The title of the home, “Whitten Acres” is in reference to ‘40 acres and a mule' – a post-Civil War mandate of land redistribution to freed Black families that was later revoked during the Reconstruction era. The home, once shared with his wife, an artist of Greek descent, Mary, and their daughter Mirsini until his death, became a site of convergence. Of private origin, and once placed within the interior of Whitten Acres, sculptural works such as Lichnos (2008), The Death of Fishing (2007), and The Guardian I, for Mary (1983), re-positioned within the context of their creation, absorb a new specificity to their materiality of mulberry, carob wood, Cretan walnut, wild cypress, and marble. Crete offered Whitten a way to recognize and materialize a language that had already existed within him and an immutable desire to apprehend even the intangible. His physical labour in the fields and the transformation of decaying wood and ephemera into new matter allowed these values to be enacted through the landscape itself. As a familial act, Whitten Acres provided the foundation to discern a novel voice of reason into the creative process. 

The first dream that guided him and his wife to Greece, became an omen:

“I saw a tree standing in a clearing. . . heavily pruned with bare limbs. The dream was a command: Somewhere in Greece you are to find this tree and carve it into a totem.”

(Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, 2015).

The face of a fisherman, sculpted by Whitten, still stares out to sea – with an octopus wrapping its tentacles around the trunk. The interdependent association of man, fish, and sea, would shape years of experimentation, harvesting his ambitions within a shed under the prophylaxis of a wide fig tree in the courtyard of Whitten Acres.  

Sites of accumulated materials, graveyards in essence, were also identified in his works such as The Death of Fishing, and an amalgamation of fish heads, mountainous now,  preserved in his Queen’s studio. This form of re-orienting materials would follow him in New York, collecting extant material that then would be stored to one day be retrieved in his studio in Crete – amassed in a new form. The transatlantic referendum pays reverence to his ‘southern sensibility’ where he described how his uncle would build a car, instead of buying the car. Mary Whitten described: “You have to build from what you have around you,  and you mend,  and you repair, and you recycle. He had this his entire life. He grew up in that worldview in the countryside of Alabama… it was a way of homecoming for him to be in Crete.”  Upon the family’s return to New York, the placarded walls of the Queens Studio would pay reverence to Psarandonis, a musician of Crete who infused jazz principles. Bread dipped in Whitten's own olive oil would welcome guests (as observed by Kenneth Goldsmith), and the charismatic blown-glass of Nikos Haritakis lined the kitchen’s shelves. A friend of Whitten’s, Haritakis shared an exhibit with him in the Cave of Daedalus – a conversation between wood sculpture and glass. I originally journeyed to Agia Galini years prior to find Haritakis’ studio, who is a descendant from the literary-rich and artistic culture of Melambes.

The stoic harbor brought Jack and Mary to various outposts from 1969 –  the first proved only a solitary nail for hanging clothes. It would become the late 1980’s when the first sketch of a formal home was drafted by master builder, Yiannis Zeakis (Mary specified: “on a bed of thorns”) in an expansive olive field. Composing a house of their own dimensions in 1988 brought the scope of multidimensional space on a macroscale. Zeakis was a Cretan man ‘feared and respected’ as Mary would recall, of precise measurements – recognized to have tailored pants, custom-made in the village of Melambes. 

The strata of language and metaphor survives in communion with divine forces that obscure the ordinary. The seasonal return towards Agia Galini was heralded by a broad shout of joy. As Mary Whitten would recall, she would play “Ballads” by John Coltrane as Jack would return to their garden, pulling all the dead matter of winter into a spare tire. Reverberations across the valley were joined by sounds of sheep and the rare entry of noise that would soar from the village below (brought by the right wind). 

My meeting with Captain Yannis Kanaris, who sold his boat many years ago, on the shores of the harbour was mediated by remembrance. The photographs that remain aboard his boat – Mary seen in turquoise beads, Kanaris young and strong – foretell lineages of journeys that would remain continuous throughout the summers. Kanaris would guide Whitten to the island of Gavdos known for its shallow waters in the Libyan Sea. Recalling fondly: “Whitten is still remembered as the man who secretly transformed the death of a turtle by a fisherman’s net into a ‘kokkinisto’ stew for many of the village.” The fondness each shared for each other, even without common language (Mary would routinely translate) was replaced by a fascination with the sea. An understanding of how the fisherman was a custodian of a whole ecosystem, even as their trade neared disintegration.