Notes from the Woodshed by Jack Whitten - Jazz Music Book for Musicians & Music Lovers - Perfect for Jazz Practice, Study & Inspiration

Product Description

Jack WhittenNOTES FROM THE WOODSHEDLegacy Russell2021Fred Motenwoodshed50

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—20211

Widely celebrated for his experimental approach to painting, Jack Whitten often turned to writing as a way to investigate, understand, and grapple with his practice and his milieu. ‘Notes from the Woodshed’ is the first publication devoted to Whitten’s writings and takes its name from the heading Whitten scrawled across many of his texts. As curator and writer Legacy Russell explains in a January 2021 conversation on Whitten with cultural theorist, poet, and scholar Fred Moten, ‘The definition of ‘woodshed’ comes from the world of jazz. To go to the woodshed or to woodshed means to practice in private, which gives room for different types of experimentation, but also suggests a space where real and rigorous work can be possible, where rehearsal and radical vision away from a particular type of gaze has been vetted before it enters into a public realm.’

Working across various forms—from meticulous daily logs and developed longer essays to published statements and public talks—Whitten’s reflections span the course of his five-decade career and give conceptual depth to an oeuvre that bridged rhythms of gestural abstraction and process art. Together these writings shed light on Whitten’s singularly nuanced language of painting, which hovers between mechanical automation and intensely personal expression.

‘It was this amazing thing to see these notes where you know he really is kind of mapping out for us in this incredible exponential, fractal, rhizomatic way, his road towards some of that—reaching towards a certain art historical greatness—through and beyond his definitions, or the world’s definitions, of Blackness and what limitations there are, and he just would break that all open.’
—Legacy Russell in conversation with Fred Moten on Jack Whitten, January 2021