Artist, Jack Whitten: In 1980, starting with Dead Reckoning, it was the first time I stood up to do a painting in ten years. It felt good. It felt good to come up off the floor and stand straight. Using a lot of retarders and thickeners, which allow me to lay down a slab of paint vertically, without it moving—no gravity pulling it.
Narrator: Whitten developed new handheld tools to incise the surface of the canvas. The diagram of circles and lines recalls the navigational systems he learned about during his training at the Tuskegee Institute.
Jack Whitten: Dead Reckoning is a term I had first heard when I was at Tuskegee, when I was with the Air Force ROTC. It deals with navigation. I remember the instructor explaining, at a certain point, as he put it, “If some shit happens,” [laughs] he says, “you have to make a decision.” Which is your best chance for survival? Do you continue on your present course? Or do you turn around and go back? That was the first time I’d heard that term, “dead reckoning.”
Another version is that you throw away all your navigational tools. Get rid of all your tools. Learn to plot, to navigate, no tools. Just go by your heart, go by your feeling. It’s a rich term.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution