Whitten exhibited at Met Breuer.

On entering Jack Whitten's Odyssey show at the Met Breuer I'm confronted with a blank wall bearing said title, emblazoned in blue, and a great white coffee table of a pedestal rising from the slate floor in the center of this initial space. Atop it like a fishbowl of orchids is a horned stump of bright wood, the base warm and warted with something like pearly fungus and the horn peaking into a a crooked point, a polished thorn stained like deep cabernet, rising from a whitewashed cinderblock. I approach and find the "fungus" to be really detris, bits of plastic, technological trash, seashells, teeth. A stripe of white paint, I realize, skirts the base of the stump, and I feel as though it were floating or really sprouting from the thing like a seed. A gnarly lima bean. And from the crusted stump sprouts the thorn, polished and crooked and sticking out a knotty arm as if to stabilize itself or grab at a nearby tree, more sure than itself. At the thorn's gentle crook the wood begins to bleed from an amber to red like blood, nearly black at its sinister point. Equal parts found and foundered, born and constructed, organic and synthetic. I'm attracted yet repelled. It's powerful yet passive, religious yet malicious. As much like a weapon or fetish-totem as a humble capturing of nature, a mound of mud to represent a mound of mud in a certain way. To pay homage to natural subject, or to cast the real thing aside? Lichnos it is called, after (I presume) the so called beach in Greece.

And now I realize the second piece at this threshold to the show, for the title-tagged wall was not really otherwise blank. My gaze must have deceived me. Behind and to the side of the sculpture is a pale painting on a canvas like for a great landscape. I approach. Blue and grey and yellow masked by the imprint of a map of bumps and lumps and a layer of hazy white in an inextricable stew. The textures appear to me as the stamps of the warted colored mats at the edge of sidewalk corners, the stripes of metal across the lips of stairs, and lots of crumpled paper. In the yellow and blue I see the world unspoiled by red (that is sex, blood, passion, violence, etc. Life really.), earth and sky (nature, God) undisturbed. The pimpled impressions feel obviously as obstructors, but also as warnings, precautionary measures, presages of transition, of a sort of change (as the edge of a sidewalk or stair), and also as a map, as said prior, or a cage. The white similarly obstructs, as a wash of clouds overtop the sun and its field of blue or a puff of smoke in the glimmering city or a blanket of mist upon the water. The haze of hex, of trance, of dream, of memory. The painting is called Bessemer Dreamer, after Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten's place of birth.

Now I need not go any further because these two who welcomed me to the epic Odyssey at the Met Breuer were also my favorites in the show. Different from all the others which could more or less offensively be encapsulated in the frame of "tribal African/Brancusi/Noguchi-esque forms and assorted driftwood phalli filled up and covered with trash (the trash which I will say wavers between (and so more or less equalizes) the natural (e.g. animal teeth, even fishing tackle) and unnatural (e.g. circuitboards and an American Express card))", Lichnos manages to transcend its figuration with a seeming balance of the natural, spiritual, symbolic, fetishistic, and formal, of the holy and the everyday. Abstract and conceptual yet narrative. And almost more importantly, it manages to transcend its material, not so that the material becomes a non-factor or even any less of a factor than it is elsewhere in the show, but so that the piece becomes more than a mere reference to the artist's process (like Pollock, e.g.) or to the connotations and histories of different materials and geometries.

Bessemer Dreamer has in my mind a similar relationship to its fellow paintings (thinking especially of the Black Monoliths, which mostly seem to want to serve to dismantle and reconfigure the space around the religious icon as they shatter stained glass windows and put them back together, so to speak, into post-Rothko/Pollock/de Kooning/etc. (that is beloved hyper-masculine Abstract Expressionism) abstractions, now with new and improved Afro-centric titular references) as does Lichnos to the many of the other sculptures.

Separate from the rest of the show, Lichnos and Bessemer Dreamer are delicate, powerful, subtle, attractive, repulsive, delightful, tragic, unafraid of color, and unobnoxious, unintrusive in the space they inhabit. In such balance they seem to float, and indeed they do as they guard the show's threshold. Not quite in, not out. A warning of what's to come and what's been left behind. What I have yet to lose. Time. A depressed childhood, a boring show, a wasted life.