To produce his cultural objects, Tim Whiten relies on natural materials such as wood, stone, glass, brass, iron, gold leaf, talc, adobe, cloth, leather, fur, hair, bone, teeth, and chewing gum. Often temporal, they are subject to decay. Their inherent qualities inform the essence, character, and meaning of his work. In addition to those informing properties and the handling of the materials―hammering, carving, casting, burning―the artist’s considerations include the historical, cultural, and symbolic references; the presentational context; and the impact of the work on his audiences. The result is a deeply resonant compression of form, colour, material, and meaning.
Drawing: Ritualized Gestures of Mark-Making
Since the early 1970s, Whiten has held a daily drawing practice. Culled from the rhythmic actions of the body, his repetitive strokes echo the mundane labours of daily life (washing the floor, sweeping with a broom) and the fundamental act of breathing (inhaling, exhaling). Exuding a pronounced sensuality, his tactile surfaces register the gestures made by rubbing, erasing, rolling, and wrapping. For example, the early graphite drawing Untitled, 1972, reveals traces left by erasure marks that cover the entire surface.
Whiten’s compositions present us with a lexicon of graphic expressions—cursive scripts, musical vibrations and notations, stellar constellations, esoteric symbols, recitations, and incantations—often forming a dense aggregate of marks. Leaning on a kind of spiritual diction, his iconography is transformed into poetic meditations. Each work possesses the durational quality of a performance and a syntax embodying the full consonance of corporeal gestures—exemplified by his 1981 series Magic Gestures: Lites and Incantations.
Whiten employs various media: graphite, charcoal, spray paint, pencil whittlings, sutures, and stitches. Lemon and other fruit juices, coffee, spices such as turmeric, and distilled rose essence imbue his works with a lingering aroma and a redolent somatic presence. His palette is comprised of earthen materials and pigments, such as the red brick dust originally swept across the thresholds of private homes by his ancestors to ward off evil spirits, evident in the drawing His Presence Has Always Been Known to Me, 1988. Colour is rarely additive; instead, colour is born from the natural materials, subject to the flux of ambient conditions. For example, in his recent series of works on paper Saying His Name…, 2017, vertical ribbons of cross-hatched black pencil marks appear to shift in hue depending on the angle of perception; the intense saturation of graphite unfolds from the monochromatic to embrace a spectrum of colour.
Whiten uses gestural mark-making to summon the subtle faculties of perception, both within himself and within the viewer. Approaching drawing as a child might, he suspends artistic or intellectual judgements. Akin to the mystical rituals believed to be the source of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, drawing is a means of accessing other worlds, a way of stepping through the portal into new and unfamiliar territory. Encountering the artist’s 1991 Constellation drawings in the 2005 exhibition Tribute: The Art of African Canadians, curator Pamela Edmonds comments: “I recall being astounded by these mysterious enigmatic wall works that felt otherworldly yet intimately human. They seemed ancient yet very contemporary.”
Eluding a static reading, Whiten’s dynamic compositions refute closure. His complex articulations disperse and coalesce, ordered by an innate rhythmic pulse, before mounting to a crescendo. Light captured on the surface of the paper appears fleeting, transitory. As points of illumination, they punctuate the visual field, suggesting epiphanies, portals, or apertures to the ineffable.
Performance: Ritualized Behaviours
Ritual is traditionally understood as acts of repetition and renewal governed by a religious authority and conforming to an orthodoxy of set rules and behaviours. Whiten’s interest lies not in ritual but in ritualized behaviours or gestures, the conscious repetition of simple acts that lead to human understanding. These gestures need not be large; they can be basic and embrace everyday experiences, from breathing to chewing gum. As he states: “It’s the recognition of its importance that matters.”
The avant-garde composer, musician, and philosopher John Cage (1912–1992) was a formative influence on Whiten. Cage’s practice was also a stimulus for the development of the Fluxus movement in North America, which focused on art within the small, repetitive gestures of daily life. Given Whiten’s interest in ritual, Cage invited Whiten to participate in his 1976 performance Lecture on the Weather, 1975, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo with other collaborators James Tenney (1934–2006), George Manupelli (1931–2014), David Rosenboom (b.1947), and Casey Sokol (b.1948). Each participant was asked by Cage to contribute a text, either to be read or sung, simultaneously providing seven different voices. None of the individual texts were discernible; instead, when experienced together, they resembled a Ramayana Monkey Chant (also known as Kecak). Whiten’s contribution to this performance focused on seven different vowel sounds related to colour, exploring how sounds manifest in the physical world as vibrations.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Whiten produced several major performance installations. In 1977, he created Morada for Artpark in Lewiston, New York, an outdoor installation in which he invited viewers to move through a series of ritual stations, descending into and ascending from an unground chamber that held symbolic elements: twenty-two human skulls, a garland of cedar, twelve roses, pine needles, and copal rock. During his ritual performance Metamorphosis (Stage III), 1980, the artist donned a bearskin pelt and then struggled to free himself without using his hands, a gesture of rebirth and transformation. In subsequent manifestations of this work, Whiten displayed the evidence—the residues—of this ritual act.
In 1982, Whiten produced Matrix, a performance combining the elements of fire and water, held in an underground cave in New York City’s Central Park. Whiten was dressed half in white and half in black, while his partner Julie Freeman was dressed in the opposite, their left and right hands bound together by ropes—a gesture symbolizing the uniting of opposites. As the artists advanced to an adobe urn to light a fire, a simultaneous explosion occurred in the stream outside the cave. Assuming a supine position on a large stone altar, they waited for the flames to subside. Rising together, they exited the cave, crossing the stream that separates the cave from the land. Two skulls remained in their place, witness to this ritual process of transformation and renewal.
The Human Skull: Presence and Absence
Since the 1970s, the human skull has figured prominently in Whiten’s performance installations, including Morada, 1977, and Matrix, 1982, as well as in his cultural objects. For example, his 1976 exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto featured a work with fifty human skulls displayed in a large basket (Ark, 1976). In later works, human skulls are tethered to objects on wheels: a battering ram (Ram, 1987); a child’s wagon (Canticle for Adrienne, 1989); and a bicycle wheel (Hearken to the Service of Emmanuel, 1990).
The gesture of wrapping or covering human skulls is also common to Whiten’s practice. In Descendants of Parsifal, 1986, eight human skulls are layered with chewing gum, leather, talc, and glue, some featuring glass eyes in the sockets. In Rebis II, 2010, a leather-covered skull is placed in a wall-mounted glass boat, while in Horus Negotiating the Waters, 2017, a leather-bound skull is slung in a fabric hammock. Leather pulled taut over forms conveys that which is hidden under the surface: the act of wrapping, of covering, both conceals and reveals. A precursor to his use of human skulls, in the early 1970s, the artist sutured stones into leather coverings, yielding forms that were simultaneously visible yet invisible, present yet absent.
Art historically, the depiction of the human skull belongs to vanitas iconography. A memento mori, its portrayal is a reminder of the transience of life. For Whiten, the skull is symbolic of life, death, potentiality, transformation, and transcendence. It is the container of knowledge, the seat of psychic memory, and the basis from which we spring, possessing both residual energies and ancestral lineages in its DNA, as present in chewing gum as it is in human hair or bones. For the artist, the skull is also a link to the bone graves of Central Africa and the boneyards of the Black communities in the southern United States. Continuing this African American ritualized activity, the descendants of enslaved Black people living in his Michigan hometown built an animal boneyard in the woods near his childhood home. Given that his mother was a butcher, bones were commonplace in the artist’s familial environment.
Whiten’s artistic choices have been shaped by other early influences, including a comic-book character from his youth. He recalls, “The Phantom, Lee Falk’s popular superhero, used the mark of the skull to psychologically outwit his enemies. He dwelt in a cave configured as a skull, sat in a stone throne with a skull mounted at the upper part of the armrest and wore a ring in the configuration of the human skull.” These early impressions gave rise to the sculptural piece Siege Perilous, 1988. Here, a white wooden throne, supporting a human skull at each armrest, denotes the seat at King Arthur’s table reserved for the knight who seeks the Holy Grail, the knight who makes the necessary sacrifices in his arduous quest for self-knowledge. As the artist comments, “Every piece with a skull is about sacrifice.”
Mirroring: Concealing and Revealing
In the early 1990s, Whiten began producing three-dimensional works employing mirrors as metaphors for the nature of human consciousness. In works such as Vault, 1993, Draw, 1993, Courting the Caliph’s Daughter, 1993, and Snare, 1996, mirrors intentionally capture the viewer’s reflection, in full or part, implicating the viewer in the work. Whiten’s use of mirrors references mystical traditions in which the soul is envisioned as an inner mirror, heart, or organ of perception, necessitating the repetitive rituals of cleansing, polishing, and purification to be able to receive and reflect divine light. Furthermore, as art historian Robert Farris Thompson (1932–2021) observes, Whiten draws on the Kongolese belief that the mirror can provide a portal to another world, mediating between the visible and the invisible.
Adopting the antics of the mythological Trickster, Whiten uses contradiction, subversion, and humour to destabilize our habitual patterns of thought and perception. Reflected in the mirrored planes of Victor, 1993, and Vault, our self-image is obstructed, our gaze hindered. Snare, the artist’s mirror-lined wooden crate, invites us to retreat into its interior space of infinite reflection. Once the drawbridge door is pulled up, our vision is lost within this mirrored container. Draw, Whiten’s mirror-surfaced go-cart, possesses only rear wheels and no visible means to steer; its implied mobility is curtailed, much like Clycieun, 1991, Whiten’s attenuated unicycle.
In Courting the Caliph’s Daughter, Whiten presents us with a mirrored-top billiard table that reflects the ceiling above. No pockets are visible; instead, the inner perimeter is lined with human hair. The table supports a single red stone ball and a six-foot-long cue stick. The usual conditions of play are absent, confounding our expectations; its function evades logic. Instead, the artist requires that we suspend the rational operations of our mind and rest in the paradox, allowing the disparity between form and function to co-exist. To court the Caliph’s daughter is to seek a union leading to a higher order, requiring different faculties of perception to take the reins.
The principle of mirroring is embedded in all of Whiten’s works; his works are, in fact, mirrors. The artist writes, “I believe my work to be a continuous response to being in the world; the results of an active self-reflective principle.” For Whiten, consciousness is viewed as the mirror of reality triggered in the act of reflection.
Glass Works: The Conditions of Light
In 1983, Whiten led a series of design workshops for students in the glass program at Sheridan College in Oakville. In exchange, he was given the opportunity to use their facilities, supported by their glass experts Peter Kehoe and Daniel Crichton. With fabrication assistance from technicians and glass masters such as Libor Furbacher and Alfred Engerer, Whiten has since produced an extensive body of work in glass. Enlisted as a sculptural medium for its inherent physical properties, glass is versatile; it can assume numerous colours, shapes, and states (from liquid to solid); and it is capable of transmitting light in varying degrees.
Whiten’s oeuvre embraces the transformation of quotidian objects. While each item retains a semblance of its utilitarian prototype—in size, form, and implied action—its material constitution, function, and symbolic resonance are radically altered. One series of glass objects emulates the contours of ordinary hand tools used by his parents to perform their daily tasks. Human-scaled, they generate a continuum between lived experience on the physical plane and the spiritual realm.
One, One, One, 2002, a life-size replica of a straw broom with a long wooden handle, recalls his mother’s employment as a domestic servant in Michigan. This ghostly apparition leaning against the wall conjures the ritual processes of purification and spiritual cleansing. Furthermore, transformed by fire, its fabrication necessitated burning away the original organic materials during the casting process, leaving only this rarified shell.
Mary’s Permeating Sign, 2006, also pays tribute to the artist’s mother. Here, a sandblasted, cast glass reproduction of a wooden rolling pin that his father made for his mother as a wedding gift is placed on a lace pillow. Numbers derived from her birthdate—November 26, 1914—are etched into a “magic square.” For Whiten, the rolling pin celebrates the importance of sharing food in African American families and the love that goes into this labour. On a personal level, it commemorates the life of his mother “as her imprint carries on in the DNA and memories of future generations.”
Similarly, T After Tom, 2002, honours the artist’s father: a carpenter, brick layer, and Mason. Constructed from glass, it constitutes a partial brick wall and a series of tools: a carpenter’s square, a level, and a plumb bob (a spade, a divider, and a pickaxe were added later). Whiten’s spectral instruments were inspired by a dream in which the artist’s father appeared to him saying, “Don’t forget to take care of the tools, Tim.” These are the symbolic tools required to build the temple within and a strong spiritual foundation.
Whiten comments, “Tools are the way in which we can materialize things; they become the means by which we can take things from an idea to a physical reality. They’re almost a means of transcendence that way.” Toys are tools. As imparted in the narrative that inspired his blue glass rocking horse, Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, 2010, Whiten observes that “when children play with toys, they are available to another world.” In the artist’s hands, ordinary objects made of wood, metal, or straw translated into glass become elevated in stature. Each becomes a subtle technology intended for spiritual purposes, just as the body becomes the tool of the soul.
Whiten’s ritualistic vision also transforms artifacts of religious devotion. Calling to mind the artist’s Baptist upbringing as well as the belief systems of other cultures, his glass works trace the contours of sacred objects such as altars, reliquaries, caskets, prayer carpets, and illuminated manuscripts. For example, Book of Light: Containing Poetry from the Heart of God, 2016, comprises a large glass book placed on a wooden lectern, its facing pages spread open to reveal burnt and torn drawings. An allusion to sacred scripture, this book is fixed; its pages cannot be turned, its sentences cannot be read. Without a cipher, a textual interpretation remains elusive. Instead, we are faced with the question of how to “read” light. Artist and long-time colleague Vera Frenkel (b.1938) comments, “One gazes into the half-clear, half-frosted book form, wondering about its contents which, as so many of Tim’s pieces do, invite us to enter another world. Everything about Book of Light—the choice of materials, the shape and proportion of the stand and what it contains, what we can see and what we must imagine—all combine to take us to a realm that Tim knows well and where he leads us.”
For Whiten, glass not only embodies the conditions of perception; it is a transcendental material, mediating the visible and invisible, allowing passage from one world to another. One of the artist’s favourite verses from the Qur’an (24:35) describes glass as a vessel for divine illumination: “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. His Light is like this: there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, a glass like a glittering star, fueled from a blessed olive tree from neither east nor west, whose oil almost gives light even when no fire touches it—light upon light—God guides whoever He will to his Light.”
The Material Conditions of Being
I have pursued expressions of being in the world as a series of passages, perceiving mortality itself as threshold, giving form to transcendent moments by tracing the contours of the ineffable.
—Tim Whiten
Questions around the nature of existence and human consciousness are central to Whiten’s artistic practice and are reflected in the evolution of his material choices. In 1983, Whiten created his first glass skull, Cosmos. Thirty years later, he produced Perceval, 2013, a rose-coloured glass skull, uniting two enduring images: the rose, emblematic of spiritual passion; and the human skull, signifying potentiality. While the skull is anonymous, the title of the artwork identifies it as a rendering of the Arthurian knight in quest of the Holy Grail; it can also be viewed as a self-portrait by the artist. Conceived in glass, its translucency denotes a receptiveness to the presence of a luminous, transcendent “Other.”
Whiten’s planning is exhaustive, embracing a critical and abiding level of care, coupled with a strict austerity of gesture and inflection. As his technical associate Srebrenka Bogović comments, “Tim’s approach extols the final result over the means used to achieve it, demonstrated especially in his three-dimensional objects, by concealing the extensive planning and effort in creating a perfect object with a complex message. Such undertaking frees his art from being admired for technical prowess, demanding instead our spiritual, perceptual, and philosophical engagement. The choice of unforgiving materials further contributes to the viewer’s intricate emotional reactions.” As artist Bonnie Devine (b.1952) comments, “He is always aware of the limits and capacity of things, questioning ‘What does the material afford?’”
Drawing from a rich repository of archetypal narratives and images, Whiten transforms everyday materials into exquisitely rendered symbolic objects, re-engaging the ritual function of art. His artistic and spiritual pursuits are intertwined: his technical processes open into his spiritual practice; his spiritual practice is his technical process. For him, “Making art is not a vocation, it’s a way of being, a spiritual calling. It’s a commitment to Life, real Life.”
The various stages of Whiten’s artistic production over the past fifty years, reflected in his material choices, can be read as the evidence of his own spiritual journey. From the opacity of human remains to the translucency of glass, his material choices trace a spiritual passage from flesh to spirit, darkness to light, the finite to the infinite—a transformative path he illuminates for the viewer to follow. In an artist statement from 1980, Whiten writes, “The work in its material aspect exists as ‘signs’ marking a path taken by their author, at times revealed as corresponding very clearly to that travelled by others, but in other instances, seemingly the notations of unfamiliar territory, less travelled, and therefore more difficult to define and read.” Ultimately, his cultural objects function as spiritual tools engaged to transform both the maker as well as his audience. As the artist comments, “The work is about what we can become.”
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