Tilt your ear to a Jack Whitten painting and you might hear music. “You gotta be able to think like John Coltrane to do what I am doing in painting,” the artist said in the final decade of his life. In his “slab” paintings from the early 1970s, Whitten pulled a rake through layers of acrylic, revealing an improvisatory multitude of hues that pulse and crescendo on the canvas underneath. A musicality haunts the resulting lines of paint, though this musicality is not quite expressive. It emanates from no singular body. Rather, Whitten’s lines evoke the grooves in a vinyl record or the strings of a guitar—mechanized media that record or produce sound.
But it was a different kind of sound that brought me to the behemoth retrospective Jack Whitten: The Messenger, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Chimes from my iPhone notified me of DMs on Instagram. “Have you seen the Xerox drawings in the Whitten show?” asked a fellow writer. Another artist friend messaged me after their walk-through: “This is Elizabeth’s shit.” Last year, I began research for a book project about the cultural history of the Xerox machine, and since then, friends and colleagues have regularly alerted me to instances of Xerox they’ve encountered in the wild, treating my inbox as a sort of photocopier tip line. Whitten’s Xerox works were unfamiliar to me, in more ways than one. I hadn’t known he’d experimented with the technology—nor had I seen xerography by any artist that looked quite like his. These drawings were astonishingly formal interplays of presence and absence. If Whitten’s paintings reveal the sound of color, these drawings reveal the sound of light. Listen to them closely, and you’ll hear the repetitive, whirring hum of the world’s first commercial copy machine, a Xerox 914.
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Whitten was attracted to Xerox for its impersonality. For years, he had been trying to figure out how to remove his hand from the drawings and paintings he created. He left Jim Crow Alabama in 1960, at the age of twenty-one, to enroll at Cooper Union, where he was the only Black student in his class. He was influenced early on by Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis, and he became entangled with Abstract Expressionism, still the predominant mode in painting when he began his studies. In the drawing Untitled (1964), broad strokes of pastel coalesce into forms that vaguely resemble human faces, a nod to Jackson Pollock’s late figurative work. But at the same time, he was querying expressionism’s nostalgic, egocentric attachment to the individual gesture. Whitten’s “gray paintings” of 1964 look both outward and forward. Using fine mesh and a scraper blade, he smeared black and white paint over cotton canvas and then removed its excess, creating spectral works without any legible mark-making that not only recall photographs in the development process but also evoke histories of racial violence. Blurred forms concretize the utterances—screams, gasps for breath—that emanate from a body in pain. The gray paintings also provide insight into Whitten’s resistance to the legible mark. Pollock and de Kooning were more than happy to flaunt their machismo, as Hans Namuth’s portraits of them in their studios demonstrate. But Whitten, creating in the aftermath of the murder of Emmett Till, would have been skeptical of the spectacularization of the Black body. His choice to title a later painting after Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant indexes an insistence on the right to opacity.
Jack Whitten, Siberian Salt Grinder, 1974. © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Photo by John Wronn.
To remove his gesture from his work, Whitten turned toward the mechanical. In 1970, he fabricated the tool for which he would become best known. The “Developer” was an oversize rake with a twelve-foot edge, which was sometimes modified with squeegees, Afro picks, and metal blades. These smaller-scale tools enabled Whitten to imbue his paintings with lines of various styles and weights. At forty pounds, the Developer required considerable strength to maneuver—but Whitten, a onetime ROTC cadet, was up for the task. First, he built up layers of acrylic, sometimes half an inch thick, on the surface of a canvas laid on the studio floor. Then, in one fell swoop, he pulled the rake through the paint. Whitten’s slab paintings were one product of this process. Multiple intermediaries separated his hand from the canvas: the thick layers of acrylic, the rake itself, and the objects used to modify its imprint. No identifiable human gesture can be seen in the resulting paintings.
Other artists might have stopped there, content to have made one major innovation. But if one thing is made clear by the MoMA retrospective, it is that Whitten possessed an inextinguishable need to experiment. The third room in the exhibition shows the artist’s varied attempts to improvise anew in advance of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. He placed “disruptors” such as stones and sheet metal on his canvases to interrupt the marks made by the Developer, while also speeding up his scrape: like a sprinter preparing for the Olympics, he reduced the time to a pat three seconds. Greater velocity created more spontaneous works. “The main thing is immediate raking, horizontal rakings,” Whitten wrote in the catalogue for the Whitney show. “They’re organized by chance. When I rake them in a split second, there’s no way of knowing.” By moving so quickly, he said, he hoped to “catch and freeze” something he would not be able to see until after the image was created.
Jack Whitten, Liquid Space I, 1976. Acrylic slip on paper. © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Photo by Peter Butler.
These experiments yielded large-scale paintings rendered in vivid corals, bracing lilacs, and neon yellows, which flank the walls of the MoMA exhibition’s third gallery. But positioned in the center, in a vitrine one must peer over to see, are a few black-and-white drawings Whitten made following a weekend-long residency at the Xerox Corporation headquarters in Rochester, New York (the residency was in May, a few months before his Whitney opening in August). Along with artists Stephen Antonakos, Robert Whitman, and Agnes Denes, Whitten was invited to visit Xerox’s factory and take home any equipment or products that he wished. It seemed a serendipitous opportunity for an artist who had decided earlier that year to reclassify his studio activities as “laboratory work.”
Serendipity underpins Whitten’s engagement with the medium in other ways. His birth in 1939 followed the invention of xerography by a handful of months. He arrived in New York only one year after the Xerox Corporation’s most famous model, the 914, was introduced to offices throughout Midtown. The artist, it would seem, was always on Xerox’s heels. But his creative aptitude also enabled him to take a step ahead. Though the Developer allowed Whitten to remove his gesture from his painting, the athleticism required to wield it still smacked of a sort of Ab-Ex heroism. Xerox provided him a medium—dry toner powder—that was much lighter than acrylic, more liable to bend to the winds of chance. In the drawings and paintings that he created following his short residency, Whitten investigated the photocopier’s mechanism of image-making. He became one of the first artists to substantively explore the very technology of xerography, and in so doing, ushered in the medium’s modernist moment.
The Xerox machine is primarily an instrument for office workers, not artists. Following its introduction in 1959, the 914 model became, per an oft-repeated quote of apocryphal origin, “the most successful single product of all-time.” It was one of the great technologies of capitalism, engineered for the express purpose of making workplaces more efficient, and thereby more productive. But like many tools, it could also be used to dismantle the house that created it. In 1974, college freshman Robert Ellsberg received a letter from the US Justice Department notifying him that he was being considered for prosecution because he had, years earlier when he was just thirteen, told his mother that he helped his father, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, make photocopies of the Pentagon Papers. Artists, too, embraced the technology for its democratic potential. It was easier to use and more accessible than older, traditional printing methods such as lithography. The Xerox Corporation capitalized on this embrace through the residency program, and while archival records for this residency are scant, we have reason to believe that Whitten and his cohort were not its first invitees: Eleanor Antin’s CV lists an undocumented group show at Xerox’s Rochester headquarters in 1973. The corporation’s motivations for engaging artists are not clearly documented, but it could have easily been the idea of its enterprising sales department, who saw an opportunity to introduce new constituencies to its products.
Jack Whitten, Mirsinaki Blue, 1974. Acrylic on canvas. © 2024 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
Whitten embarked on his two-day residency in Rochester during what I would call Xerox’s young adulthood. The photocopier had become a mainstay in businesses and schools by 1974, but it was still a novel technology, and its process was not quite understood by those who benefited from it—it had not yet made a lasting social imprint. To deepen my sense of Xerox’s cultural presence in the early 1970s, I turned to my favorite keeper of mid-century anecdotes: my dad, who attended Catholic school in Cicero, a working-class enclave just west of Chicago’s city limits. He remembered his school having a photocopier. What he did not remember was having a conscious awareness of Xerox’s aesthetics, of the mottled corners and hazy text that characterize a document that has been photocopied too many times. On the other hand, the look and mechanics of the photocopy were integral to my experience when I was in school. I have a distinct memory of filling out a second-grade math worksheet in 1997 and registering the ghost of a paperclip lingering in its corner. I’d seen the original workbook it came from, and I knew it was a blemish.
Many early experiments in Xerox art embraced its tendency toward these kinds of blemishes, its habit of disfigurement. For Barbara T. Smith, arguably Xerox’s first great artist, the medium allowed her to explore the instability of bodily representation and capture ephemeral movement, presaging her later performance work. In Just Plain Facts (1965–66), Smith smushed her face against the machine’s glass plate, making her nose look piggish. She dragged a calculator across the plate while scanning for In Self Defense (1966–67), leaving a ghostly trail. Whitten similarly referenced the ghostly qualities and glitches of Xerox; striations reminiscent of jammed or folded paper characterize the appropriately titled Broken Spaces series of 1974. But Whitten’s Xerox experiments differ from those that came just before him in a few key respects. Smith’s work still contains content—her face, her poetry, her hair and hands. Text, numbers, and renderings of the earth populate Seth Siegelaub’s pioneering 1968 conceptual-art publication Xerox Book, created in collaboration with artists including Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Morris. Whitten’s works, by contrast, are completely devoid of content. They focus instead on the very process of Xerox—while not even using a photocopier itself.
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I should correct myself: there is one photocopy in the MoMA exhibition. It is likely Whitten’s earliest experiment with the technology, a photograph of his wife, Mary Staikos, laid over a document that might have been pulled from a Xerox instruction manual, or perhaps his residency contract. Whitten’s abiding love for Staikos quietly pulses through the show—pebbles and other materials used to disrupt the path of the Developer were sourced during summers the couple spent in Crete. Yet it is only through Xerox, an impersonal medium, that her features become known to the viewer. She appears in a vitrine adjacent to a handwritten journal entry from Whitten, dated May 17, 1974, detailing the initial experiments that followed his residency. He writes of the material that particularly excited him: dry toner powder. “I tried the toner from Xerox,” he says. “It worked just as I expected it to — IMMEDIATE — NATURAL — SPONEITY [sic]— VERY CRISP — EVERYTHING I’VE ALWAYS WANTED FROM A DRAWING — THANKS TO XEROX!”
In interviews and artist talks, Whitten often underscored his desire to analogize the photographic process to painting: “The image is photographic, therefore I must photograph my thoughts,” he wrote on his studio wall in 1965. But the way he worked with his canvases laid flat also mirrors the act of drawing. He used toner powder much in the way one would pastel. With a small scraper, he pushed the toner powder into and across sheets of paper, and then set it with heat lamps. One of Xerox’s great innovations was its use of a dry pigment, which required neither a binder nor an emulsion. Within the Xerox 914, printed paper passed through heated rollers, bonding the pigment to its substrate. But Whitten, in essence, transformed a mechanical process back into a manual one. That he often mixed toner powder with actual pastel betrays an understanding that the novel technology had roots in the past—old and new intermingle.
Through the course of my research, I have often felt compelled to climb into a Xerox machine. I want to see what happens as the electrostatic process in its mechanical guts unfold. What flashes might we glimpse when the light hits the plate—what visuals do its sounds, its grunts, its sputters correspond to? I speculate that Whitten’s Xerox drawings attempt to concretize these ephemeral moments, suspending them in time. Rectangles and lines predominate, though almost always in the negative. In Xerox Project (1974), toner powder is wiped away to create a ghostly mise en abyme reminiscent of a photocopier’s glass plate, while delicate stria pulled through pigment recall a sort of inverted notebook paper. White streaks, smudges and spatters, and hairline fractures distinguish Untitled and Organic Series XI (both 1974). These imperfections are the result of toner powder’s sensitive nature: almost weightless, it bends and reacts to the slightest movement, whether intentional or not. This reactivity is part of what makes Xerox such an efficient technology. But it also makes it error prone.
Installation view of Jack Whitten: The Messenger, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from March 23 through August 2, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.
Most of the Xerox drawings in the MoMA retrospective are installed in two vitrines: one in the third gallery alongside the vibrantly hued paintings that Whitten created in advance of his Whitney survey, and the other in the fourth gallery, which showcases the artist’s dramatic turn toward black and white. But a few are hung on the wall, scattered among the canvases. It is Whitten’s Anomaly series that holds my attention most. Traces of the glass plate conjured by Xerox Project can be glimpsed in Anomaly #6 (1974). But the image looks like it is being wiped away—over half of it appears washed out or erased. I think here of the technician whose job it is to clean the office photocopier, to ensure that it is performing effectively. I also think of Xerox’s internal cleaning mechanism. After an image has been transferred, the machine’s drum is discharged with light. A blade not unlike the one Whitten used brushes any remaining toner off the drum, leaving the machine charged and ready for its next job. The Anomaly series evokes the negative afterimage left on the drum before it is erased.
Whitten’s engagement with xerography could be read as similarly ephemeral; all of the drawings I’ve cited so far date to 1974. But quietly tucked into a vitrine in the exhibition’s final gallery is a small drawing made with photocopier toner, Transmission ‘J’ #3 (2013). Created during the final decade of the artist’s life, it evinces his enduring interest in the medium. By invoking a single letter in the Roman alphabet, its title reminds us that xerography is not just a medium for image-making, but for language and communication. Yet its spectral presence in this gallery also portends Xerox’s cultural obsolescence. Installed adjacent to the drawing is the sculpture Technological Totem Pole (2013), a teetering tower of flip phones, circuit boards, disc drives, and other outdated tools for disseminating information.
Most offices today maintain some version of photocopy technology. Yet with the push to go “paperless,” the Xerox machine is no longer the staple that it once was. Last summer, only weeks after I had begun research for my Xerox project, a curious sight caught my eye while I was walking home through central Brooklyn: a broken-down copy machine on a brownstone stoop. I pondered the novelty of its location in a residential neighborhood. But more intriguing was the fact that this particular copier had been branded with a graffiti tag. It was a quick throw-up, rendered in black marker, done hastily. Though the machine was likely headed for the landfill, someone had still felt compelled to augment it with their signature.
Whitten might not have foreseen Xerox’s eventual obsolescence—in the 1970s, the copier was still being heralded by techno-optimists as the “great American vision machine.” But I’m not sure this knowledge would have changed his approach. There’s something about the Xerox Corporation’s insistence on the preeminence of its technology that recalls the heroism that defined Abstract Expressionism. The triumphant phrasing we ascribed to Xerox in the 1970s, we might have ascribed to Jackson Pollock in the 1950s—for Pollock was certainly another kind of “American vision machine.” Whitten, meanwhile, embraced the ego death that accompanied the disavowal of the individual gesture. His continuous urge to experiment with new forms required the obsolescence not only of old forms, but old paradigms.
