reviews RAYMOND PETTIBON
rAymond
Pettibon:
Here’s your
irony bAck
(tHe big Picture)
DAvID ZwIRNER, NEw YORk
11 SEPTEMBER – 20 OcTOBER
Raymond Pettibon is a product of Los Angeles’s pop-culture
mythology, making a career of dredging its history and salvaging the
remains of sentimental mid-century Norman Rockwell clichés only
to tarnish them. Unlike similar LA artist Ed Ruscha, Pettibon’s work
is not elegant. He prefers to translate the crisp, delineated aesthetic
of graphic novels into expressive, more immediate figuration. Once
employed as an artist for his brother’s outfit Black Flag, using dark
punk rock influences to subvert gee-whiz Americana fetishism,
Pettibon humorously contrasts countercultural and mainstream
‘heroes’ with paraphrased text from overtly highbrow sources,
among them Proust and St Augustine. Morsels of winking allusions
are left for the picking.
Drained of the nostalgia that colours much of his earlier work, Pettibon’s meaty solo exhibition Here’s Untitled, 2007, pen, ink, gouache, and
Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) is viscerally shocking. Lustily, he disembowels American superiority, picking at
graphite on paper, 77 x 57 cm. courtesy
David Zwirner, New York, and Regen
embarrassments like Abu Ghraib, the troop surge in Iraq, the Ku Klux Klan and the media spectacle surrounding
Projects, Los Angeles
these and other events in American life. Unsurprisingly, President Bush is a recurring character, reprising his
worn role as an adolescent diplomat figuratively masturbating all over American foreign policy and rendered in
obsessively detailed narratives that could take hours to decipher.
For this exhibition, monumental one-liners crawl across the walls and divide the gallery into sections.
One reads ‘Israel is mortal’, another says ‘Two cheers for the red white and blue’. The irony of these phrases
is trite and expected, taking away from the nuance of the illustrations on paper that are clustered salon-style
beneath and around the text.
The illustrations are the real highlight of the exhibition. Detailed figures hyperactively overlap and
crowd. Paraphrased text cascades around the scenes, utilising any untouched surface. Illustrated in dark shades
of blue and black, a crowd of hooded figures surrounding a burning cross forms the drawing No Title (We Have
Applied…) (all works 2007). A concise paragraph in the top left corner reads, ‘We have applied it ourselves to
the current problems of American society. We have endeavored to light up with it the American sky.’
The adjoining illustration, No Title (10 Minutes of…), tackles torture as a form of power fetish. It is adorned
with variously interspersed graphic pen and ink depictions; a flaccid penis is accompanied by the caption ‘What
a shock to see them circumcised! We thought we’d gotten the wrong ones’; a man sucks the nipple of a hooded
prisoner; two gentlemen simultaneously perform fellatio on each other; a quotation details the need to ‘take
things into their own hands’. A Byzantine Christ figure hovers to the right, barely a sketch, underlining the
hypocrisy of a nation both zealously Christian yet flagrantly immoral. Who is the monster now?
Some critics will certainly contend that these inflaming images merely preach to the choir. While it is true
that there is little likelihood that a bus of Southern Baptists will unload its homosexual-fearing passengers at
the gates of David Zwirner, Pettibon’s drawings offer much for the liberal spectator to ingest. Rarely contrived,
Pettibon wins at crafting blatantly political work that is unsettling, regardless of audience. David Everitt Howe
Artreview 136
December_REVIEWS.indd 136 5/11/07 12:30:01
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158