WEBVTT

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[sound of tools being sharpened]

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["Jack Whitten: An Artist's Life"]

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Now I find myself doing a type of painting
where my hand doesn't touch it.

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This is an adaptation of the artist's palette.

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Okay.

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About ready to go.

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Each one of these carries information--

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it's compressed into each one--

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because it relates so much to
what's happening with modern technology.

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You know, bytes of information.
Bits.

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That kind of a thing.

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I can build anything I want to build.

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I'm not a narrative painter.

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I don't do the idea, or the painting
being the illustration of an idea,

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I don't do that.

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It's all about the materiality of the paint.

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I grew up in Bessemer, Alabama.

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Everything was segregated--
transportation, the buses.

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What I call American apartheid.

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I always did art.
I always did painting since I was a kid.

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But it was not encouraged,

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the theory being that it's good for a hobby,
but you couldn't make a living out of it.

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Lucky for me, I graduated with good grades.

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I went to Tuskegee.

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The idea was for me to be a doctor
in the U.S. Air Force and a pilot.

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It was always in the back of my mind
that I was an artist.

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That's what I wanted to do,
I wanted to do artwork.

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Tuskegee did not have an art program,

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so I left Tuskegee to study art at Southern
University.

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And that went well, for a while,

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but I got involved politically with the demonstrations.

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We organized a big civil rights march
that went from

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downtown Baton Rouge to the state office building.

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It was that march, what I experienced,
is what drove me out of the South.

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After that march,
which turned vicious and violent,

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that politically changed me forever.

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The fall of 1960,
I took a Greyhound bus from New Orleans

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to take the test at Cooper Union.

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And I was accepted.

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I studied art--painting.

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It was a good thing
and it was tuition-free.

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When I came to New York,
some of the first people I met was

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Romare Bearden,

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Norman Lewis,

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and Jacob Lawrence.

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And in 1960 in New York City,
the scene was open.

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Bill de Kooning would talk to you!

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I had a dialogue,
what I call, on both sides of the divide.

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I don't make a distinction between
there being Black, White, and whatever.

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I really don't.

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If they've got information
and my instincts tell me,

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"Boy, you got to meet that person"--

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"You got to find out what they're doing,"
"you have to understand this stuff"--

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I'd reach out.

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The young artist has to
have something to react to.

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My first influence was Arshile Gorky.

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Nobody springs forth from the head of Zeus!

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That was my first influence.

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Early surrealism.

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Figurative expressionism.

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It wasn't until the end of the '60s, though,
that I made a drastic change

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toward more conceptual ideas
that dealt with the materiality of paint.

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I removed all the spectrum color.

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Made a big move to acrylic.

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Restructured the studio.

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Restructured my thinking about painting.

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I built a tool.

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I called it "the developer."

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With that tool,

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I could move large bodies of acrylic paint
across the surface of the canvas.

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I call them "slab" paintings.
S-L-A-B.

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It became a slab.

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I wanted a painting to exist as a single line--

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one gesture, three seconds.

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That's why I built that big tool.

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I spent ten years working on that drawing
board.

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Ten years bent over, stooped down.

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I can't do that no more.

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There comes a time when the body
will not accept that type of abuse--

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and it was abuse.

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The slab is what led me into the tesserae.

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It's a chunk of acrylic that has been cut
from a large slab of acrylic.

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My interest, of course, is always about
how I can use it to direct the light.

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So with these surfaces,
depending on how I place them,

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I can direct the light.

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You see how it changes?

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That painting came out of a lot of pain.

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I started that painting
and then I developed a serious illness.

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I spent a month in the hospital.

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So that knocked me on my ass.

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And that painting was a way of hitting back.

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[LAUGHS]

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I'm not going to let this shit defeat me,
you know?

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It's one of the "Black Monoliths."

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It's called,
"Six Kinky Strings: For Chuck Berry."

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And that title comes from the fact that,

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anybody who knows about the personality
of Chuck Berry, he did some weird shit.

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The "Black Monolith" is a series of paintings that
I've been doing for a number of years, though.

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It started back in the early '80s.

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It's a Black person who has
contributed a lot to society.

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So I make it my business
to memorialize those people.

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And I find that each one,
I have to locate the essence of that person.

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That person becomes a symbol

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and I build that into the paint.

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I want to be remembered
as a very average guy

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who pretty much stays to himself.

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[LAUGHS]

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Dedicated worker.
But on top of that...

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The question was asked to Count Basie once,

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he says, "I just want to go down as
one of the boys."

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There was a kind of a modesty in that
that I've always admired.

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Nothing big,
just one of the boys.

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I like that.

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["Quantum Wall, VIII (For Arshile Gorky, My
First Love In Painting)"]

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[Jack Whitten (1939–2018), In Memoriam]