Then: there are new monsters, twitching muscles, snapping shutters, roughly-forged steel T-girders. The figures have degenerated into rumps, often individual limbs, occassionally there are arranged in groups of semi-intact beings which remind one of the mechanical and of the jaggedly indented figure of the universal fellow-man.
The most agreeable aspect of all this horror is Whiting's absolute economy in his symbolism: every physiological, anthropomorphic expression of his material is shown only once; as soon as one comes to the next figure, or fragments of a figure, one is aware of a derivation: the identification awakened by the previous figure is still there; in torment, I force myself to recognize another human being even in the merest twitching limb or physical rudiment; two steps farther on, this identification process will have to make do with even less prompting.
At the end the danse macabre compresses, heightens, spastically, poundingly, crookedly creeping or hanging, garishly into that cry which, for a Francis Bacon, was a life-long obsession, in which Whiting on the other hand - rejecting as he does any connection with a tradition, a classicism, a direction, etc. - perceives, at the most, the laughter of the technical (and, by the same token, extinguishing everything technical) universal spirit. "There you are, then, that's the way they all creep along, isn't it, the way all strive, everyone of them in his own place, giving a twitch of his muscles, Muskla". "To the question as to what kind of a psychology - always assuming there are such things as souls - invests these figures or their stumps, he gives the answer: "It's obvious. They are striving. I show their constant endeavour, the strain, how they try."
Excerpts from: Jürg Laederach: "Jim Whiting's 'Unnatural Bodies' " at the Littmann Gallery, Basel.
