Jack Whitten, First Gestalt, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 16”. Collection: United Yarn Products, Co., Inc. All photos courtesy of Horodner Romley Gallery

Bij Zeno X loopt momenteel een expositie van de Amerikaanse abstracte kunstenaar Jack Whitten (1939-).  In 1994 had Kenneth Goldsmith een interview met de kunstenaar:

Jack Whitten:  In those days, I had no idea what turned me on about that painting. Now I know that we carry ancient information in our head, in association to water. The first time we saw ourselves, the first image we saw of ourselves, was leaning over to have a drink of water. And we have carried that with us. So even today, water is an archetypal image. We carry a certain information about fluidity, translucency, transparency.

Kenneth Goldsmith: To me, it comes across in Joyce’s Ulysses, in the Ithaca episode, where there’s a beautiful body of writing about the properties of water. The question is, “What in water did Bloom, water-lover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” And he says, “Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sun-dam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides…” This is exactly what you’re talking about.

Jack Whitten:  Exactly what I’m talking about. The first painting I saw, that painting stayed with me all my childhood.

Lees hier het volledige interview.