April 29–May 6, 1999

art

Black Flag to Black Tie

Raymond Pettibon's art went from punk albums to art museum walls.

by Brian Howard

Perhaps the only major difference between the Raymond Pettibon opening at Chicago's Renaissance Society last September and the first public display of his art almost 20 years ago in Los Angeles is that the curators in Chicago didn't steal his work off the walls.

"[The first opening] is not even in my bio because I don't even want to acknowledge the guy who [ran the gallery]," says Pettibon, 41, on the phone from his Hermosa Beach, CA, home. "I lost literally years of my work because of him."

The road hasn't always been quite so dotted with treachery for the somber artist, but in several ways, his career has been a struggle against unfriendly forces.

Pettibon first gained recognition in the late '70s and early '80s through the punk rock scene. The album covers for several Southern California punk bands on the SST record label bore Pettibon drawings. Among the most notable were Black Flag's Slip It In (a nun grasps a man's bare leg) and The Minutemen's What Makes a Man Start Fires? (a tiny man holds a torch, walking from a room he has just set ablaze). While the images were not created for the purpose of sleeve art, Pettibon and punk have been forever linked. Pettibon was and still is a fan of the music—his connection to the scene was through his brother, Black Flag guitarist and SST head Greg Ginn. (Pettibon's given last name is Ginn; Pettibon, his father's nickname for Raymond, stuck.)

But that connection didn't gain acceptance for his art within the punk scene.

"There was no audience for what I did whatsoever," explains Pettibon. His non-album-sleeve drawings were ignored by the same folks that gobbled up records bearing his work. "At the time I made them, the [punk] scene… was completely anti-art. Art was the dirtiest word you could use, like if you described a band, you'd say, 'Well, that's arty.'… I wasn't into art rock or artiness."

Pettibon also had to deal with a prejudice against his medium. Artists who concentrate solely on drawing tend not to draw the same level of respect or big bucks as painters and sculptors—one reason, perhaps, why he has never had a solo museum show until now. He emphasizes that acceptance by the art world has never been a motivation, but he does feel that there are one or a few misconceptions about his craft.

"When you're in the world of drawing, people think you can just crank this stuff out at will," he laments.

The sheer volume of entries in his current exhibit—which started out in Chicago, stopped in New York's Drawing Center and will venture on to Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art in July after a two-month residency at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—could give the impression that he is unusually prodigious. The 550 or so drawings, mixtures of stark images and pointed text mostly in grim black-and-white, do have a fluency and consistency of style that suggest divine inspiration or at least supreme ease.

"You're never really buzzed from the clouds by a muse," counters Pettibon, perhaps his own harshest critic. He says there is work accumulating in his studio that he's been tinkering with for 10 to 20 years.

Pettibon once drew political cartoons for the college paper at UCLA, where he graduated with an economics degree. His drawings—usually one image or scene simply rendered, accompanied by a text "caption"—suggest those roots.

But political cartoons play on obvious puns or sight gags. The links in Pettibon's pictures and text, while sometimes playfully hinting at didacticism, are much more oblique. The images and words contain layers of subtext, suggesting ironic, unsettling revelations about the human soul.

His drawing of a revolver, captioned "my bout with depression lasted 5 chambers," seems bluntly to the point. Until the question of attribution pops up: Who's speaking these words? Whose bout with depression? At whom, if anyone, was the gun pointed? Were the chambers empty? Is it a metaphorical or actual bout? And is anyone dead?

The answers probably reveal more about the viewer than he or she cared to know. Pettibon's work serves as a pen-and-ink Rorschach test, each word weighty with significance. It has pop-cult immediacy with an ominous undercurrent; he's like Roy Lichtenstein's deviant cousin.

Once a voracious reader, Pettibon says that the text in many of his pieces is paraphrased from things he's read. Early in his career his drawings almost always began from a textual idea that spawned the accompanying image. As he matured, the process has reversed. "I think that's better because it keeps you on your toes," he explains. "I think some of my better work has started that way."

Even when he seems to condemn verbosity—as in his running "Vavoom" series—the nonsense word is the most important image of the piece.

This vital link between word and text is explored in Raymond Pettibon: A Reader (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a selective catalog and companion piece to the exhibit. Compiled by the Philadelphia Museum and Pettibon, the book collects 57 of his pieces with an eclectic group of "writers whose works resonate with his own," including Baudelaire, Beckett, Coleridge, Henry James, Saint John the Divine, Charles Manson and Wittgenstein, among others.

The inclusion of Manson (an excerpt of his trial testimony) hints at Pettibon's fascination with icons, perhaps the only point of common interest he shares with pop artist Andy Warhol, whom he deems "the Mr. T of art."

"Just the fact that I might reference Manson doesn't mean that I'm celebrating him," he continues. "I don't look at him as some kind of genius.… To me, he's a figure. You could ask me, Why in the hell would I, of all people, do drawings about Gumby? The reason is that Gumby is relevant to what I'm doing as an artist."

Other favorites include specific figures like Joan Crawford, pop icons like Gumby, and more abstract images like baseball players, trains and penises.

Another Pettibon book being published in conjunction with the exhibit, Thinking Of You (The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago), is 232 pages of silhouetted images, all erect or semi-erect phalluses. "It's not something I obsess on, God knows, but it's an image that, when I'd read books… it's kind of a hidden agenda." The uppercase "I" and the phallus, he suggests, are interchangeable. "It's about sex, creation."

So as Pettibon, whose work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial and at New York's MOMA, as well as solo shows in Europe, reflects on his current exhibition, he remains somewhat nonplussed about its significance. "I'm not anti-success, but I don't want to be in a position where I'm just repeating something I've already done.… That's not why I became an artist and sometimes I have to step back and think about that."

The opening reception for Raymond Pettibon will be on Thu., April 29 from 6:30-8:30 and is open to the public. The exhibit will be on view April 30 through July 3 at the Berman and Stieglitz Galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th St., 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org. On Wed., May 12, the Art Museum Wednesday night program Raw Material: Raymond Pettibon will include a performance by Bardo Pond, a screening of Ed Wood and a discussion by curator and Raymond Pettibon: A Reader co-editor Ann Temkin.