Artist, Jack Whitten: I'm a scuba diver. After years of spearfishing, crawling into caves and shit, the kind of light you see, space, sometimes I find walking out here on land quite boring. I'd rather be underwater.
Narrator: During his summers in Greece, Whitten spent lots of time swimming and fishing in the sea.
Jack Whitten: After so many years, I came to the realization that the Mediterranean is dead. There’s no more fish. The fishermen have been reduced to subsistence living.
So that’s what that piece is about. It’s carved as a hanging piece, an effigy, like a lynching, really. Open body carved out, lot of fishing paraphernalia from the sea, fishing nets, lures, hooks, lot of bones from a lot of different fish. All hand carved.
You don’t know what you’re looking at. Mixed metaphor: boat, body, some sort of ancient artifact. Often in sculpture, I do things that deal with inside-outside. How the outside affect the inside and vice versa.
Audio files of interpretation from the BMA exhibition, Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture; opening archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive