Forum Gallery
February 3 - 25, 1999
Eric Whitten
Layers of Signs:
Paintings by Eric Whitten
Curator’s Essay
David Newman
Gallery Director
Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.
Norman Bryson 1
Eric Whitten’s paintings are screens of signs, manifesting the mediation of visuality. Layers of signs is the mode of composition through sequential sedimentation of layers, a positing of things one after the other, distinct from the juxtaposition of things beside each other. This is already to re-open the discursive field of modernism at its ground. Things after each other and things beside each other are the fundamentum divisionis underlying Gotthold Lessing’s distinction of the spatial from temporal arts, the move grounding the reductivist, essentialist, purist turn within the modernist paradigm. Thus Lessing:
in the one case the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after the other [nacheinander] in a sequence of time, and in the other the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence [nebeneinander] in space. 2
Clement Greenberg’s formulation of the modernist paradigm continues Lessing’s separation of the spatial from the temporal arts:
What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure. 3To treat of a distinction of temporal and spatial works is to engage the manner of experience of the work. Developed from the Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, 4 Lessing’s distinction of temporal “different parts occurring one after the other” [nacheinander], and spatial “different parts developing in co-existence [nebeneinander] in space” suppose what Lessing terms a “‘convenient relation’ (bequemes Verhältnis) between medium, message, and the mental process of decoding.” 5 But this supposed homology is suspect. The supposed at-once of perception of the spatial versus the reception of the temporal as an unfolding is doubtful: while the surface of two-dimensional spatial works are ostensibly everywhere equally accessible, their surface is never isotropic, but is always already inflected by the defining of the surface as such, that is, by the choice of the shape and proportion of the surface, as well as by what subsequently occurs on the surface. This inflection of surface perturbs and shifts viewer response from the mode of the immediate all-at-once to the mode of the temporally mediated. One does not in fact attend to the surface equally and all at once, but rather through a hermeneutic circle sequentially, thus temporally, employed. Whitten’s layering of the surface with a successive superposition of screening planes renders the temporality obtaining in the facture of the work as a simultaneous sedimentation. The superposition of successive planes enacts the operation of différance as an absenting of origin: the supervening plane effaces “the first in order to represent it.” 6 As the supervening layer masks the ground, it simultaneously reiterates the ground as another plane. It is in this reiteration that différance 7 manifests itself as such: in the difference of ground and supervening plane, in the deferral inhering in the shift from ground to plane to plane. Like collage, layering contravenes the modernist assertion of the ground. As Rosalind Krauss notes:
It is often said that the genius of collage, its modernist genius, is that it heightens—not diminishes—the viewer’s experience of the ground, the picture plane, the material support of the image; as never before, the ground—we are told—forces itself on our perception. But in collage, in fact, the ground is literally masked and riven. It enters our perception not as an object of perception, but as an object of discourse, of representation. Within the collage system all of the other perceptual données are transmuted into the absent object of a group of signs. 8
If collage “operates in direct opposition to modernism’s search for perceptual plenitude and unimpeachable self-presence” 9 so also its variant, layering. But as layering is the trace of the temporality of facture, its opposition to the unimpeachable self-presence sought in the modernist project increases with its increase of perceptual plenitude. Whitten’s Knowledge has as its lowest layer a black and white photoemulsion image, perhaps of a wrecked house, rotated clockwise ninety degrees. The black of the photoemulsion image masks the white primed canvas, while the white primed canvas is read as the lighter values of the photograph. At this level, ground and image coalesce in the paired opposition of figure-ground. The skewed white lattice overlaying the layer of photoemulsion partly obscures and partly reveals the image beneath, acting as a screen that reiterated the planarity of the surface. Stained passages of burnt sienna and green and blue break up the white lattice structure; the burnt sienna area is more extended, dominating the upper third of the field. The lower right of the field has burnt sienna circles approximately two inches in diameter; one of these is developed with chiaroscuro as a solid sphere, its illusion of volume contradicting the flatness of the surface. Knowledge reads sequentially, out from the inherent flatness of the primed ground to an illusion of three dimensional space. Sequence in reading is narrativity. Narrativity is the antithesis of the modernist separation of the spatial from the temporal.
Narrative is central to Whitten’s works, not only to Knowledge, but also Maisha, Vishnu’s Rags, Saigon Thirty Nine, Appendix B, Seminole, Section Eight, 160 Acres, 5:30 a.m. Mist, and
Thirty Five Falls. Maisha, and Vishnu’s Rags, like Knowledge, employ acrylic and oil over photoemulsion; however, Maisha is entirely in grisaille, and Vishnu’s Rags is nearly so, with thin, almost wash-like layers of chromatic color and with rather heavily drawn figuration in black paint. In all of these works, layering enables and enacts the sequentiality of viewer response as a duration. In the landscape works, 160 Acres, 5:30 a.m. Mist, and Thirty Five Falls, the layering of patterns in slight shifts of chromatic color fuse from a distance, similar to the effects of pointillist
paint application or scumbled paint application; in these works the sequential facture of layering is discernible only on closer approach. In these landscape works, narrativity is reduced, more implied than developed as in Knowledge, Vishnu’s Rags, Saigon Thirty Nine, Seminole, and Appendix B.
Apart from the particular iconography employed as in the narrative semiotics of each painting, Whitten’s facture of the paintings through the explicit layering of planes parallel to the picture plane, inscribes at the most fundamental level the temporality
of the construction of the image and the temporality of viewer response, and the contravention of the modernist paradigm that the temporality of narrativity entails.
Eric Whitten is an alumnus of Brookhaven College, completing the Bachelor
of Fine Arts at Kansas City Art Institute in December, 1998.
| Appendix B | acrylic, oil on canvas | 47 x 32 inches |
| 5:50 a.m. Mist | acrylic,oil on canvas | 36 x 47 |
| Thirty Five Falls | acrylic, oil on canvas | 35 x 61 |
| 160 Acres | acrylic, oil on canvas | 42 x 58 |
| Saigon Thirty Nine | acrylic, oil on canvas | 47 x 32 |
| Seminole | acrylic, oil on canvas | 53 x 53 |
| Maisha | photoemulsion, acrylic, oil on canvas | 53 x 52 |
| Knowledge | photoemulsion, acrylic, oil on canvas | 53 x 52 |
| Section Eight | acrylic, oil on canvas | 48 x 50 |
| Vishnu’s Rags | photoemulsion, acrylic, oil on canvas | 53 x 51 |
| Position Nine | acrylic, paper on plastic laminate | 43 x 11 |