2024Dieter Buchhart

If you think like me, you are my brother. If you don’t think like me, you are two times my brother because you open me to another world.

—Amadou Hampâté Bâ

The cosmos—the eternal, infinitely expansive three-dimensional space in which all physical events take place in absolute time—is the pivot around which Ouattara Watts’s art and life are centered. Watts draws from a spiritual connection with the cosmos that he initially developed as early as age nine, when he was initiated into the Senufo spirituality.1 In his work, the artist combines what Chika Okeke describes as the “cosmic theme of things” with a Eurocentric tradition of modernism and postmodernism that he encountered, at the latest, at age nineteen, when he moved to Paris to study.2 His work is in dialogue with both African sculptural legacies and European traditions from the Renaissance and modernism, as Okeke pointed out in 2002 to mark Watts’s participation in Documenta 11.3 When he met Jean-Michel Basquiat at the opening of an exhibition at Yvon Lambert in 1988, this was the encounter of two world-connectors “discussing,” Watts recalls, “art and the relationship between African and Western arts.”4

Watts later expanded on this: “We did not speak specifically about sculptures from any religion. We spoke about the beauty and power of African sculptures, in general, and specifically about the influences that those sculptures had on modern art. The relationship with Picasso, Modigliani, etc. . . .”5 This is reflected in both Watts’s and Basquiat’s nkisi, or power figures, an African and African American tradition in which the powers of spirits are at work or can be activated by investing a sculpture or vessel with sacred energy. Accordingly, with the recumbent figure in SAMO the Initiated (1988), Watts created a monument for his friend, Basquiat, after his unexpected death on August 12, 1988. The horizontal silhouette, reminiscent of a mummified Pharaoh, refers to the funerary cult of Ancient Egypt as a point of departure for West African death rituals like those of the Senufo. Watts added a Senufo mask to the upper–right half of Ritual Painting #2, made that same year. The relationship of Western art history to African sculpture is thus an important lens through which to approach Watts’s work.

African and African American art had a profound influence on European modernism and postmodernism. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and André Derain took inspiration from nkisi figures.6 As the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten put it:

In studying European modernist painters, I realized that African art had a huge influence on their work. Cubists in particular accepted this influence as an alternative aesthetic for experimentation. I understood the formal elements of color, surface, geometry, and the overall stylistic influence on Picasso, Matisse, and others, but I knew there was something deeper than formal sensations. There was a ‘missing element’ that the Cubists did not penetrate. When identity became an issue to me, I knew that this ‘missing element’ had a use value for me as a young artist searching for his own way.7

While Whitten recognizes the formal influence of African art on Cubism and its experiments with color, form, and space, he understands the movement to lack the material qualities and spiritual dimensions that characterize African art, noting:

The ‘power figures,’ minkondi, have inspired me profoundly. The combination of wood, resin, plant fiber, textile, pigment, leopard teeth, ceramic, nails, cowrie shell, animal hide, hair, mud, and blood is truly the first example of mixed media. More than anything, these sculptures triggered my ongoing investigation into the secrets of physical matter, and how matter transforms itself into the metaphysical dimensions of space and time.”8

It is these world-connecting “metaphysical dimensions of space and time” that also define what Okeke calls Watts’s “statements of cosmic dimensions.”9

In his critical view of Eurocentric art history, Peter Bradley goes a step further, contradicting the assumption that Western art developed abstraction on its own: “My feeling is that black artists have been pushed into a kind of realism feature which is not acceptable to our race as we are abstract people. We invented all that. . . . Picasso stole every bit of it.”10 Rejecting the claim that abstraction is “the white man’s art” grants color and abstraction a sociopolitical significance and power of resistance.11 But how does this resistance express itself in Watts’s work in a cosmic context? Can his art be classified as part of a particular artistic conception or movement? How does the specific materiality of his works link to their aforementioned cosmic-spiritual dimension?

MATERIAL, SPIRITUALITY, COSMOS

The term cosmos has its origins in the Ancient Greek word kósmos, meaning “harmonic order.”12 On the one hand, rupture and resistance seem to be an intrinsic contradiction of kósmos. On the other hand, order and harmony are, at least according to a Western perspective, born from disorder and—especially in reference to the universe—chaos. In fact, Watts himself connects seemingly oppositional concepts, invoking a polyvocal spirituality linked to music and movement. “The basis of my work is spirituality, meditation carried by music as a motor for painting,” as well as the striking materiality of his works.13 Like Joseph Beuys, Watts seems to suspect that “meaning emerges from the material itself.”14 For example, by applying a mask to the surface of the canvas in Ritual Painting #2 or an animal horn in Voodoo (1988)—like Basquiat with his addition of a bent metal rod to Water-Worshipper (1984)—Watts emphasizes both the impression of an assemblage and authentic materials. A link can be established between Watts’s work and Beuys’s sculpture, particularly in the context of what Hans Dickel describes as “regressive moments” in the German artist’s aesthetic theory due to their similarity to cultic religious acts.15 However, many of Beuys’s works require the artist’s intervention or commentary, for, as Peter Bürger clarifies, their significance emerges by no means primarily from the material: “Beuys imposes a clearly defined allegorical significance onto the materials he uses. We might be able to understand this significance intellectually, but it does not adhere to what we perceive with our senses.”16

The work is a metaphor based on Beuys’s sculptural theory in the field of tension defined by the terms material, movement, and form, which in turn finds parallels in Watts’s work: “This is because I was born a painter and a sculptor and that I paint music and dance.”17

But while Beuys’s work generally engaged with growth and decay in the natural world and approached the “problem of substance” as a point of departure, seeking to transform natural processes into artistic ways of working, Watts negotiates within a cosmic dimension of spirituality, movement, physicality, and music.18 Beuys engaged much less than Watts does with color and form, which for the former are but accidental aspects that can be overcome; for Beuys it was about the material in itself and for its own sake. He argues with the materials; with his sculptures, especially his fat and felt works, and his idiosyncratic uses of non-artistic substances, he contributed to anchoring their materiality as a device of Eurocentric modernism and subverting the domination of form over materials. The two artists meet here, although Beuys communicates through allegory and metaphor and Watts always has his eye on the world-linking aspects and also uses magical shapes and mental spirituality. As a result of Beuys’s use of natural materials and his emphasis on their authenticity, the artist has often been read as a kind of shaman in his later reception in art history.19 Here, his work remains ambivalent, because on the one hand he allows the materiality of the dislocated natural materials, often without a tradition in an artistic sense, to speak, and, on the other hand, demands the—equally untraditional—legibility of their metaphoric potential. Like the ritual of a shaman, the power of what Dickel calls Beuys’s “material stagings and subjective ascriptions of meaning” are dependent on the artist’s presence, or more specifically on his interpretations.20 Beuys’s art is strongly dominated by motifs of ecology and social criticism.21 Ultimately, his engagement with nature and technology is deeply material-based and, despite the necessity of commentary, the credibility of his work lies in their very materiality as well as the work’s expression of an alternative, material-based modernism.22 This Beuys and Watts share. The masks and horns Watts affixed to the surface of his Ritual of Tutankhamen (1988), as well as the nkisi figure on the upper-right edge of the picture interacting with a branch fragment found in Paris on the upper left, require commentary in the tradition of European modernism. Although Watts’s work, especially The Trance of the Shaman (1990), can be read in dialogue with Beuys’s sculptural theory and the work of shamans and healers, his pieces in principle have no need for commentary. This is because his work is embedded within a cosmic field of tension between the religious systems of the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic, and the equally artistic and spiritual power of their sculptural and object-like approach. Watts creates artistic fields and engages with what Okeke describes as “interzones of the mystical and the material, and the juncture between the local and global.”23 Without commentary, his works stand on their own with their aura; the artist creates new spaces of thought and connection in the cosmic plan. In contrast to Beuys, Watts’s works do not rely on the presence and interpretation of the artist himself, but rather provide room for beholders to come to their own conclusions.

MUSIC, MOVEMENT, MEMORY

Music is a point of departure for Watts’s thoughts and movements on the canvas. As he says: “My work is rooted in the spiritual, in a musically driven meditation that acts as a motor for painting.”24 This is something he and Basquiat had in common.25 Watts’s works are, Stéphane Vacquier argues, “painting[s] in motion,” and “when he was a child, painting came to him indissociably linked to masks, dances, music and the secrets of rites.”26 In the words of the artist, “music is part of it: drawing is like meditation to me. Drawing and painting have the same role, that of creation.”27 In this sense, the artist combines music, meditation, movement, drawing, and painting in his cosmic view of things. Watts creates artworks from his knowledge, experience, and consciousness of the cosmos in a way that has parallels in Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition as a metaphysical experience.28 Watts’s method of composition and his approach to work recall Kurt Schwitters, who used the term intuition himself to describe his artistic process: “These artworks are rigorous to the extent that they emerge in the artist in the moment of artistic intuition. Intuition and the creation of the artwork are here one and the same.”29

Watts, like Schwitters, has created an intuitive, “boundless metaphorics,” that is to say, a symbolic system beyond mere allegory.30 Unlike Schwitters, however, Watts’s emphasis is on the ideas of improvisation and communication within the ensemble inherent to jazz: “For me, painting is like music, part improvisation, part not. You’ve got to go deep. The way I work is so connected with music, so connected to dance. I don’t want people to look at my paintings just like a mathematician, even though my paintings are inspired by the sciences.”31 Works such as Hip Hop Jazz Makoussa (1994) or No. 1 for Miles (1997) refer to music both in their titles and by collaging various album covers.

Just as for Basquiat the act of drawing itself was crucial not only because of the artistic result, but because of how it served as evidence of his existence, Watts’s creative process is both an important part of his art and represents his everyday existence, particularly thanks to his inclusion of found objects (objets trouvés), collected over a long period of time, in his artworks.32 The artist captures time and lifetime in the sense of duration in his work by linking several events within the overall process: the point in time in which he makes a work, the duration of his own treatment of the materials, as well as the temporality of music and movement. This conservation of time in Watts’s work justifies the concept of duration, la durée, a key term in Bergson’s philosophy.

In his 1896 book Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that the past, when confronted with duration, does not simply cease to exist. He sees duration as essentially an element of memory.33 Memory as duration is, first of all, a form of preservation, since the moments that become the past do not disappear but rather survive in the now and are constantly brought back to life. Secondly, memory, particularly in the way that it preserves the past, is also subject to continuous change, in both a quantitative and cumulative sense, through what Bergson calls “the ceaselessly growing image of the past moments,” and qualitatively, due to the sensation of “the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us.”34 The duration of memory also consists of this flowing character. Then there is the trace of material memory from the remains of the past, which gradually dissipates. With their emphasis on the material, Watts’s assemblages of fragments amplify the silent memory of the past through both the works’ spiritual power and the mental effort involved in making the past present in memory, over and over again. Or, in Bergson’s words, “pure memory is a spiritual manifestation.”35 Knowledge and the traditions of generations and continents combine at the intermediate zones, to paraphrase Okeke, of the mystical and the material, the local and the global.36 Watts’s work summons the constancy of duration and preserves memory; in his creation of surfaces adorned with striking materials, textures, objects, sculptural elements such as masks, nkisi figures, fragments of fabric, horns, or branches—materials on the margins of mourning—the traces of the past are saved from disappearance. Watts preserves duration by freeing the oppressive memories embedded in found materials, instead preserving the objects in a present. For him, memories can be stowed in both accidentally found and more legibly valuable materials—as well as in their form and texture.

Watts frees his art from regional systems and ways of thinking, for he thinks in neither a local nor a global way, but rather in an eternal, endlessly large three-dimensional space: the cosmos. This way of seeing echoes Édouard Glissant’s contention that, “It’s time to stop thinking within the system . . . music is a self-transcending trace—jazz, beguine, reggae, salsa—and the creole language is a trace that has ‘jazzified’ French words.”37 This self-transcending power—found in the connection between music and dance—manifests itself as a stimulator of spiritual work on the material memory of traces. Music is one such trace, as it is transferred through the body of the artist into the work. Together with movement, music, and the mystical, Watts’s objects, colors, pigments, signs, and symbols form the traces of what Roland Barthes calls “that-has-been”—a connection to a past reality.38 This makes his works available to experience in a spiritual cosmos as a “certificate of presence.”39 The preserved duration of his own existence transforms his works from the representation of his own experience to a collective experience and emotionality in the sense of Mark Rothko: “A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”40 He sought to generate these collective emotions in his works, especially in the Rothko Chapel, which was consecrated briefly after the artist’s death: “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on . . . [If you] are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”41

POLYMORPHISM, MULTICULTURALISM, COSMOGONY

There seems to be a great temptation to categorize Watts according to various Eurocentric or global art developments. However, his work consistently refuses simple classification, just as it eludes the trends that shape the art of a period, as Pablo Picasso once criticized:

Nowadays people talk about painting in the same way as they do about mini-skirts. Next season it’ll be longer, or it’ll have a fringe on . . . We want something they’ve never seen. Something that’ll really puzzle them. But when you look for that something, everybody’s already seen it, everywhere, with a crease in its trousers.42

Accordingly, Watts’s work is shaped by the multivocality of postmodernism and post-postmodernism, or by what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “altermodernism,” in the sense of polymorphism, the great paradigm of modernism.43 Watts always counters attempts to classify his work with his decisive creed: “What I paint, always, is the Cosmos.”44 For his multivocality reflects the cosmos, the mystical, the timeless. His works are moving and generate emotions, just as they conserve personal and cultural histories between various worlds. Watts invokes references and materials as seemingly disparate as Beuys’s sculptural theory, West African sculpture, Fela Kútì, Italian fabrics, and the magic of numbers.45 The resulting works are disruptions of the everyday, inviting viewers to pause, “puzzle” over what is before them, and ask, what does that mean?

The question of the so-called “globalization of cultures” is an intrinsic part of Watts’s art. This is a useful framework also for reading Jack Whitten’s Memory Container (1972–73), which preserves memories in the form of photographs and organic and inorganic materials both as a hinge between African and Western art and as a way at the same time to forge new paths. Emerging from a reckoning with the particular climate of early 1960s American racism and with the political potential of art, as well as his search for the missing element in art history, Whitten began carving sculptures inspired by nkisi figures in 1963. In 1965, following the murder of Malcolm X, he created Homage to Malcolm as a memorial sculpture. His choice of form and material can be understood, per Aleesa Alexander, as “a symbol of power in many African visual traditions.”46 In 1983, the same year that Robert Farris Thompsons’s influential book Flash of the Spirit: African und Afro-American Art and Philosophy was published, Whitten dedicated The Guardian I, For Mary to his wife. In a correspondence between form and concept, he created a display case filled with her hair and various other materials as a stand–in for a power-figure head, and thus imitated the materials added to nkisi figures, such as healing plants and animal substances. This work is comparable to Watts’s Morning the Name Is, made for the Whitney Biennial in 2002. Like Watts’s, Whitten’s works mix and associate both the materiality and spirituality of power figures with aspects of Western culture. This is visible in Watts’s use of abstraction, which refers to Abstract Expressionism, the use of techniques such as scraping and layering paint that are associated with the art of the West, and his engagement with cultural and social issues such as identity and racism. Watts’s series Flash of the Spirit, dedicated to Thompson, features a work from 2016 (Flash of the Spirit #6) that combines symbols, signs, and a power figure to create an artistic power station of disruption, bafflement, and emotion.

Like Whitten and Watts, David Hammons deals with the materiality and spirituality of power figures in his work. He did this, for example, in 1973, with Spade with Chains, creating a simulation of an African mask using everyday materials. Beginning in the mid- 1970s, Hammons became increasingly interested in West African art, as Dawoud Bey has explored in his research. Bey describes Delta Spirit (1985) as “notable for the way in which it defines a Kongo-defined tradition of decorating one’s yard in such a manner as to make it a kind of spatial nkisi, a way of bringing power not only to the structure itself, but to anyone who dwells within the space laid out around the house.”47 While both Watts and Hammons use everyday materials in their work, the former artist seeks, with great openness, a link between the past and the present toward the future. As Okeke notes: “This visual plenitude, the complex mix of iconic, even cultic forms and popular imagery, and the combination of flat color and expressionistic brushwork [in Watts’s work] speaks to the multicultural realities of [sic] late 20th-century world.”48

Watts, like Hammons and Basquiat, explores the complexities of identity, racism, and repression in the context of the African American experience, the Black Atlantic, and the diaspora in works such as Usual Suspects (2008), Rebel #4 (2009), and Corruptions Impunity (2011). In Usual Suspects, a black target in the shape of a human body constitutes the upper center of the picture. This develops into a dramatic plot featuring mystical combinations of numbers, layers of signs, a red fish, impasto, and a gesturally splattered ocher passage. In another visually powerful work, Impunity (2011), a red, silhouetted figure writes numbers on a white surface, while men with weapons, their heads covered with African masks and question marks, seem ready for war. The warrior on the left sports a tie and the machine guns seem to point to a photograph collaged at the center of the painting. Bright violets and a spiral alluding to both geometric and celestial constellations link the dramatic events to a cosmic plan.49 These thoroughly conceived works are emotional and recall Rothko’s refrain: “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” They shake up our everyday lives with, to paraphrase Picasso, something really puzzling, leaving us with the great questions of existence and our place in incomprehensibly endless space. As Watts reminds us: “I am part of the cosmos.”50

Watts’s highly complex works are laden with symbols. He creates an artistic universe of color, music, material, movement, spirituality, emotionality, and energy. His titles, such as Spiritual Gangster (2016), Citizen of the World II (2016), Traveler in the Cosmos #4 (2017), T: Rhythm of painting (2018), and Cosmogony 01 (2023), mark key points in the constellation of an artistic cosmos. Everything remains and appears fluid in Watts’s works, which at the same time seek to be pure painting. As the artist has said: “I love color. I grew up with color. When I went to the market in Africa there was color all over. It was like my small garden.”51 His works compress and decompress in their own force field, like a life pulse. In the artist’s words: “As long as there will be humans on Earth, they will always need emotions, as humans rely on emotions. Pure painting will always exist.”52

1. See Chika Okeke, “Ouattara Watts,” in Documenta11 Platform5: Ausstellung/Exhibition. Kurzführer/Short Guide (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 178.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ouattara Watts in Stéphane Vacquier, “Ouattara Watts: ‘I was born a painter . . .’” Ouattara Watts: Résonances (Eymoutiers: Espace Paul Rebeyrolle, 2019), 48.

5. Watts in “Attentive and Generous: Ouattara Watts in Conversation with Anna Karina Hofbauer,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Of Symbols and Signs, eds. Dieter Buchhart, Antonia Hoerschelmann, and Klaus Albrecht Schröder (Munich: Prestel, 2022), 73.

6. See Carlo Severi and Bernard de Grunne, “Fang Sculpture: An Art—Just Called Classical,” in Imaginary Ancestors (New York: Almine Rech Gallery, 2017), 33–34.

7. Jack Whitten, “Why Do I Carve Wood?” in Odyssey—Jack Whitten: Sculpture, 1963–2017, ed. Katy Siegel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 37.

8. Jack Whitten, in “The Artists’ Artists: Best of 2016,” Artforum 55, no. 4 (December 2016): 107.

9. Okeke, “Ouattara Watts,” 178.

10. WITH PETER BRADLEY, directed by Alex Rappoport (Import Media, 2023).

11. For “the white man’s art,” see Vivian Ayers, quoted in: D. J. Hobdy, “DeLuxe Art Show in Ghetto Met with Mixture of Reactions,” Houston Chronicle (October 1, 1971), n.p. For more on the relationship between Black artists and abstraction, see Darby English, who writes: “Artists such as Bradley and Thomas did not use doctrine or physical actions to exploit their intimacy with nonblack modernists. But they enacted advanced integration by working rigorously within the modernist paradigm, which they found capacious . . . What makes them important is the opening in historical thought this deviance invites us to enter.” See English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 22–23.

12. See Salvatore Lavecchia, “Kosmos. Die Zukunft eines antiken Begriffs,” Das Goetheanum (September 17, 2020): https://dasgoetheanum.com/kosmos-die-zukunft-eines-antiken-begriffs.

13. Watts, quoted in Vacquier, “Ouattara Watts: Music – Medium – Matter,” 11.

14. Joseph Beuys, quoted in Hans Dickel, “Joseph Beuys: Natur, Technik, Kunst. Von den ‘Wunderkammern’ des Künstlers zum ‘erweiterten Kunstbegriff’ der ‘sozialen Plastik,’” in Kunst als zweite Natur: Studien zum Naturverständnis in der modernen Kunst, ed. Dickel (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2006), 170. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of quotes from the German are by Brian Currid.

15. Ibid.

16. Peter Bürger, “Der Alltag, die Allegorie und die Avantgarde. Bemerkungen mit Rücksicht auf Joseph Beuys,” in Postmoderne: Alltag, Allegorie und Avantgarde, eds. Christa and Peter Bürger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 208–09.

17. Watts in Vacquier, “‘I was born a painter . . .’” 47.

18. The “problem of substance” in the work of Joseph Beuys refers to his artistic view that every human being and material in the world possesses a spiritual or metaphysical substance. He believed in the transformative power of art and saw artworks as a means of bringing about social and political changes by taking recourse to the substances and energies of the materials themselves. For more on the “problem of substance,” see Beuys, in “Gespräch zwischen Joseph Beuys und Hagen Lieberknecht,” in Joseph Beuys: Handzeichnungen und Objekte (Sankt Gallen: Sammlung Lutz Schirmer, 1971), 15. See also Dickel, “Joseph Beuys. Natur, Technik, Kunst,” 174.

19. See also Gérard A. Goodrow, “Joseph Beuys und Schamanismus,” in Joseph-Beuys-Tagung, eds. Volker Harlan and Dieter Koepplin (Basel: Wiese Verlag, 1991), 96.

20. Dickel, “Joseph Beuys. Natur, Technik, Kunst,” 170.

21. See also Marga I. M. Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry: Toward New Collaborations between Art, Science, and Technology (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 127–29.

22. See Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst. Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (Munich: C.H. BECK, 2001), 197–221.

23. Okeke, “Ouattara Watts,” 178.

24. Watts, quoted in Vacquier, “Music – Medium – Matter,” 11.

25. As Watts notes, “Basquiat and I were equally interested in music and how the rhythm of music helped us in the process of doing our work.” See “Attentive and Generous,” 72.

26. For “painting in motion,” see Vacquier, “‘I was born a painter . . .’” 47; for “when he was a child . . .” see Vacquier, “Music – Medium – Matter,” 11.

27. Watts in Vacquier, “‘I was born a painter . . .’” 47.

28. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929). See also Christine Eckett, Kurt Schwitters. Zwischen Geist und Materie (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2012), 59–116.

29. Kurt Schwitters, Merz 2, no. i (April 1923): 19.

30. Gottfried Boehm, “‘Die Härte der Großen Dinge’: Arp und Schwitters in ihren frühen Jahren,” in Schwitters Arp, ed. Hartwig Fischer (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 15.

31. Watts, in KJ Abudu, “Conversation,” in this volume, 30.

32. See Dieter Buchhart, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: A revolutionary caught between everyday life, knowledge, and myth,” Basquiat, eds. Buchhart and Sam Keller (Ostfildern; Hatje Cantz, 2010), 38–46.

33. See Bergson, “Conclusion,” in Matter and Memory.

34. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1949), 40.

35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 320.

36. See Okeke, “Ouattara Watts,” 178.

37. Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 280. Translation by John Tittensor.

38. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.

39. Ibid., 87.

40. Mark Rothko, quoted in MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 196.

41. Ibid.

42. Pablo Picasso, quoted in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Says, trans. Christine Trollope (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 114.

43. On postmodernism, see Werner Hofmann, “Ein Amerikaner zu Wiens Fin de siècle oder Kulturfinale als Dauerwerbung,” Die Presse (May 10/11, 1980); “post-postmodernism” is a movement in reaction and subsequent to postmodernism; “altermodernism” is a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud to contextualize art in relation to globalization and commercialization. See Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” in Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 11–25. In the context of postmodernism, the term “polymorphism” refers to the existence of manifold shapes, perspectives, and identities. It underscores the flowing, dynamic nature of meaning. See also Werner Hofmann, “Zur Postmoderne,” quoted in Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), 193–94.

44. Watts in conversation with the author, October 7, 2023.

45. By the “magic of numbers,” I am referring to the assignation of a metaphysical or spiritual significance to numbers and the belief that certain combinations or sequences thereof can have special powers or exert a certain influence.

46. Aleesa Alexander, “Homage to Malcolm,” in Odyssey—Jack Whitten: Sculpture, 1963–2017, 45–46.

47. Dawoud Bey, “In the Spirit of Minkisi: The Art of David Hammons,” in Third Text 27 (Summer 1994), 52–53.

48. Okeke, “Ouattara Watts,” 178.

49. Watts in conversation with the author, February 12, 2024.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Watts in Vacquier, “‘I was born a painter . . .’” 48.