Gus with Joe Bacon at an exhibition of Frank Stella’s work. Photo by Janet Maher

Gus’s essay, FRANK STELLA The Whiteness of the Whale, republished in Gus Blaisdell Collected in 2012, originally appeared in Artspace Magazine, vol.13, no.3 (July/August 1989).

Frank Stella: The Whiteness of the Whale

The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its repose brings out the raging of the sea. –Heidegger

            Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987, is named after one of the most famous chapters (XLII) in Moby Dick. Of this chapter Yvor Winters wrote that it is “equally one of the most astonishing pieces of rhetoric and one of the most appalling spe­cimens of metaphysical argument in all literature.” Melville himself, in a letter to Evert A. Duycknick (Saturday 3 March 1849), declared that he loved “all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will. I’m not talking of Mr. Emerson now–but the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.” D.H. Lawrence said generally of Melville what I find applies uncannily to Stella: “It is the material elements that he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all.” I will treat glancingly of all this material, directly and briefly. Of Stella and Melville one can only ask, Is there any relation between the godfather and his namesake?

            The famous chapter itself seems to me lost among the grosser slidings of its elements. Ishmael/Melville never closes with his essential subject: “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” The rest of the chapter is a foundering attempt to explain himself and convince us of the higher horror of whiteness. True, as Winters says, the rhetoric generated for the essay is good. But the undiscovered, only partly suggested subject renders much of the rhetoric bombast, hence often beautiful and sometimes irrelevant. The general hunch of the chapter is touched when Ishmael remarks that “there lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue.” That elusive something is albinism.

            He first trenches on this subject with a phrase descriptive of the White Steed of the Prairies when he speaks of the steed’s “warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness.” Two paragraphs later, in three sentences, he rhetorically raises the question of the albino man, dropping the subject entirely until the penultimate sentence where he merely asserts, “And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.”

            Why would an essaying of albinism ground the rhetoric and disperse its desperations? Briefly, an albino is deprived of the colors typical of its kind. Relative to its kind the albino is un­natural and natural. An albino is unpigmented, pallorous and drained of color. This suggests death and supernatural interventions and accidents, perhaps especially horrifying ones since they take place in that supposedly most accidental of cat­egories, color. If anything is accidental about (most) things it is their color. Order all white things. Even among white things the albino is displaced, a natural outcast, castaway because of accidents. Call it Ishmaelean. Melville remarks albinism as a phenomenon “more strangely hideous than the ugliest abor­tion.” What does albinism abort? Color; while remaining col­ored. That would give Melville ground for his speculations on the contradictions seemingly internal to white: that it is simultaneously blank and full, empty and filled, concrete and abstract, present and absent; and all these visibly manifest when we think of whiteness or look at it contemplatively.

            Melville, lacking his essay on albinism, ends his chapter formulaically, resorting to the hackneyed conceits of whores that are charnel houses under their cosmetics and the world as a whited sepulcher, a figure Matthew rendered at 23:27 in three sentences while Melville has taken pages, paragraphs, and a chapter to end in roughly the same place, only appropri­ated, not original. While working up these conceits Melville turns to physics, the idea that under all hues, nature too is but a harlot and were we to apply the vanishing cream of unmediated light we should see the world lie before us a palsied leper. But the colorless form that unmediated light would take would be darkness. We would not see the albino world that lies under this one. We would see nothing or our vision would have to adapt to the night. Mediated light provides us with a world, one that is solid and on which ground we stand, and in that world is evil and good unequally mixed. Life is good and then you die. No tombstone bears that epitaph. It is too hard. What is appalling about Melville’s rhetorical metaphysic in this chapter is not any higher horrors of insight into whiteness, which al­binism might have provided, but that the metaphysic is conceited and jejune. Wittgenstein’s challenging question in his Remarks on Color, Why is there not transparent white? takes deeper bearings and sets a potentially more frightening course.

            Stella doesn’t illustrate or narrate the chapter. Neither does Stella’s picture share in any sense Melville’s “appalling specimen of a metaphysical argument.” Considering the frontal white template and its treatment the thought recurs that Stella is giv­ing Melville his satirical due. The green colors of the dolphin-torn, gong-tormented, Yeatsean upper-left motif shares as much with another whale as they do with Moby Dick, and that is with Walt Disney’s Monstro in Pinocchio, lacking only his baleful and luteous eye. Disney’s cartoon whale made an indelible impression on children Stella’s and my age, an experience that we would have had before either of the stories of Jonah and Moby Dick, and one that determined an inflection at least of our subsequent encounter with those more prized cultural artifacts. Without the bombast, the Stella retains a Melvillean exuberance. The inspirations are different, but then Stella improvises Melville out of his experi­ence, out of his recursions within his own images and motifs, and perhaps with a (colored) memory that Moby Dick was among Jackson Pollock’s favorite books, and that it was origi­nally to have been the title of the painting we know as Pasiphaë, 1943–the ignominious queen and the white bull and the white whale all equated as monstrous symbols of unconsciousness.

            The painting stands out from the wall, is (frontally) con­structed of four templates of motifs. It has sides and each side has insides. The first template is an irregular-shaped expanse the left side of which is cut out into the (negative) shapes of a gull’s profile and a sketch of wings that might be a shearwater. This side suggests those wide-roaring seas of Homer, his epithet for beaches. Its white is brighter than the bluish tinged right-­hand side, and the whole lower half of this shape is cut to resemble a manta ray or skate. Incised on the surface of this template are lines and contours that remind me of aerial pho­tographs of naval battle groups engaged in combat; here, per­haps of the wakes of the Pequod or its whaleboats on the whale­roads of their quest.

            The second template is a large cutout whose central negative space is a palette from the left side of which projects an upside­-down whale’s head, the unhinged sickle-shaped jaw open, and from the right side the upraised hooked beak of a bird’s head. The ground of this section is painted yellow-gold and gestured over with cursive reds and blues, trawlings of work characteristic of the New York School of the 1950s. Behind this is the third section that from the upper left corner to the lower right forms a powerful diagonal. The upper left, on which I will focus on completing this description of the whole, is a green wave thrust, white aluminum etched free, that is topped by a hatching that turns the whole into a dolphin, a pug-nosed snout plunging leftwards. (This motif occurs together with the lower half of the white template, rotated, in Stella’s later Heads or Tails, 1988.) Attached to the wall and supporting all these tem­plates is a structure resembling a corbelled arch. (Because later pictures in the series are attached to a circular, Mercator-like projection, my guess is that the corbelled arch is the circum­cised alb from Chapter XCV, “The Cassock.” After all, daub, from dēalbarē, means to whitewash, one untoward result of Melville’s speculations on the whiteness of the whale.) The whole frontal array is toroid.

            The right interior is composed of wheels within wheels, of fretwork grilles–a kind of A1 Held space, and reminiscent of the little quern in the fairy tale that fell overboard and made the sea salt. A labyrinthine pattern of canals or valves and wheels–paddle or stern or side or mill wheels–that fill and spill water to move and drive the templates above them. Is there an internal painter’s pun here on the French salon idea of the machine? This is a machine the works of which are inside, and the power on which those works depend surrounds it outside and is generated from within: the seas that drive the works that churn the seas, a quern of another kind, a Rube Goldberg of a perpetual-motion machine, suggestive of the metonymies of the open sea. Torque in Stella’s handling is an essential part of any whiteness, of whale, of paintings, or otherwise. His painting is not what Ishmael fears for his “white-lead chapter about whiteness;” that it is “but a white flag hung out from a craven soul” who “surrenderest to a hypo.”

            The left interior is pinkish orange and mother-of-pearl. These fleshy labial colors reflect off each other creating a spher­ical cavern of color: Enter. Remember putting a shell to your ear and projecting the warm rush and surge of blood as that of breakers, and remember Pound in the second Canto: “And poor old Homer blind, blind as a bat / Ear, ear for the sea surge. . . .”

            The upper left? It is a dolphin or porpoise-bodied, breaker-­powered motif that arises from a trough at the lower right; or, like a Cartesian vortex, that desperate attempt to account for motion in a plenum, it might be seen as screwing back in, a tornado collapsing down around its tail. The color is the deep blackish green of open sea and the iridescence of ship-polluted bays. The hatching at the top (in the manner of Stella’s earlier Cones and Pillars) is a drafting technique for rendering those points at which contour begins to pass from one dimension into the next. It is a swell in drawing. Polar, adversative tensions are suspended in the painting, their thrust and drive located in this motif. Dolphins school; the bow-wave of the ship under full sail is windrowed by their plunging, rearing, and playing.

            Two schoolchildren rounded the partition at the museum, the corner of which contained a TV monitor running a tape of Stella talking about his work at the Fogg. The first boy suddenly saw The Whiteness. “Whoa!” he said as the painting hove and breached and loomed above him. His black companion caught up and stood a moment still, beside his friend; then stepped back, arched as he raised a knee and his right hand high in the air, paused, and then brought the hand down for a dap of imaginary hip-high, high five. “They-ey is baaad!” the term of approval stretched into a tripthong. Then the two of them rushed to the painting, ducked under each side and poked their heads up in­side as one might surface from underwater into a painted cave or wake into a colorful dream. “This thing is painted every­where.” Rapping excitedly, “You oughta see my side,” they ex­changed swiftly. By this time the rest of the schoolchildren had heard them, broke away from their tour and rushed up to see where the real fun was. But by then the guard had also gumshoed up and was sternly scolding the boys out from inside the painting. They popped out obediently, stepped back, rose on tiptoes and danced a moment before the painting, casting at the guard quick, contemptuous glances of disbelief. He was so uncool. It was a plaything! It wouldn’t hurt them; it had just en­folded them. It was better than anything on the playground at school. Where was this uniform coming from? So uncool!

            On the TV behind the partition an image of Frank Stella was saying, “part of projectiveness is to include the spectator, not harm her.”

1989