Pettibon's Talking Pictures - artist Raymond Pettibon

Art in America, March, 1999 by Michael Duncan

An exhibition now on view at the Drawing Center surveys the work of L.A. artist Raymond Pettibon, whose quirky combinations of images and texts reflect his fascination with classic literature and the fringes of popular culture.

Ever since Horace coined the phrase ut pictura poesis--"as in painting, in poetry"--art and literature have had a complicated relationship, each eager to infringe on the other's domain. In this century, attempts to mix the two endeavors have resulted in such eccentric projects as Gertrude Stein's associative word "portraits" and Frans Masereel's textless woodcut "novels." For the past two decades, seemingly from left field, Los Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon has been melding the verbal and the visual in installations of hundreds of pinned-up drawings, each work incorporating a hand-lettered text inspired by writers ranging from John Ruskin all the way to Mickey Spillane. Only occasionally appropriating directly from his sources, Pettibon instead responds in his own words to what he reads. Displaying verbal sophistication, sonority and rhetorical control, a Pettibon text combines with its plainspoken ink or watercolor sketch to emulate the qualities of a compact poem.

While moving over the years from a bad-boy esthetic to an increasingly complex stance, Pettibon has developed a unique kind of "talking picture." A traveling exhibition of more than 500 of Pettibon's drawings and artist's books, organized by Suzanne Ghez of the Renaissance Society and Ann Temkin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, provides an occasion for viewers to fully acquaint themselves with the work. Pettibon's output, which has been estimated at more than 7,000 drawings, offers a challenge to curators of a retrospective survey. Here, rather than selecting individual drawings, the curators have chosen to present 21 existing groupings of works belonging to private collectors and institutions, with each group hung in its own salon-style cluster. According to the curators' catalogue introduction, Pettibon "provides collectors a way of reading their own palms, and their collections of his work provide uncanny profiles of their individual obsessions and attitudes."

Although these groupings help to divide the large exhibition into manageable chunks, they also prove somewhat distracting, at best providing odd insights into the "obsessions and attitudes" of well-known dealer/collectors like Barbara Gladstone, Rudolf Zwirner and Tom Patchett. (It seems worth noting that the private collections of Pettibon's drawings are noticeably stronger and reveal more discerning connoisseurship than those of the public institutions.) A further problem for those trying to understand the development of Pettibon's work stems from the fact that the exhibition's wall labels do not provide dates for the individual drawings. Although Pettibon's dating of his drawings is not always precise, knowing roughly when they were made can help viewers to sort out the complicated distinctions between earlier and later work.(1) By eschewing chronology or even thematic organization, the curators clearly aimed to provide viewers with a kind of total immersion that they feel suits the artist's freewheeling subject matter.

Although the best of them stand on their own, Pettibon's drawings generally rely on the cumulative impact they acquire in his sprawling installations. These walls packed with drawings introduce a protean artistic sensibility unfazed by distinctions between high and low. The broad range of this sensibility seems equally to reflect a wide reading of literature and visceral reactions to contemporary popular culture and politics. The installations thrust upon viewers the task of scanning and selecting among hundreds of disparate works, each providing its own resonant frisson. To digest this multitude of poetic fragments is to experience the exhilarated overstimulation of an esthetic binge.

With their variously lyric, comic, arcane, sardonic, poignant and paradoxical texts playing off a far-flung repertoire of images, Pettibon's installations seem almost textbook-ready displays of a fragmented postmodern sensibility. Significantly, however, his approach seems shaped less by the theories of Barthes, Deleuze or Foucault than by the writings of literary figures such as Laurence Sterne, Ruskin, Proust and Sir Thomas Browne. In addition to these stylistic exemplars, of course, Pettibon's sources include political cartoons, rock-music lore, hard-boiled fiction and true-crime sagas, film noir, Goya's etchings, '60s children's television, incidents from American history, baseball trivia and left-wing politics.

The exhibition is accompanied by an unusual catalogue called Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, which brings together the artist's drawings and his selections from the writings of favorite authors. These excerpts conjure up an imaginative world steeped in the whimsy, vibrant rhetoric and poetic nuance of the classic Western literary tradition. Henry James's lists of potent character names, Jonathan Swift's fantasy battle between ancient and modern books, Sir Richard Burton's categorization of pederastic terms, Robert Henri's psychoanalysis of the brushstroke, Arthur Symons's fetishistic appreciation for book bindings and Samuel Coleridge's for proper ink wells--all serve as prose complements to various aspects of Pettibon's contemplative, word-besotted esthetic.