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Summary: A selection of writings chosen by artist Raymond Pettibon
Review: "A fair sampling of the raw material that underlies Pettibon's drawing practice." This Reader juxtaposes over 50 of the artist's drawings with a selection of writings by authors whose work resonates with his own. Among them are Saint Augustine, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Catullus, Mary Baker Eddy, Heloise, Alice James, Henry James, Ring Lardner, Osip Mandelstam, Charles Manson, George Santayana, Mickey Spillane, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Complementing this anthology are perspectives on Pettibon, a series of essays by critics Benjamin Buchloh, Peter Schjeldahl, Ann Temkin, Hamza Walker, and Bernard Welt. California artist Raymond Pettibon's early admirers and collectors knew of him as an unofficial in-house artist for the punk music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, who also published his drawings in photocopied booklets that he sold for one or two dollars. Today his work is familiar to a wide contemporary art audience and an international field of drawing connoisseurs. His style, which initially relied on the conventions of cartoon illustration, is still apparent in his works but is today uniquely personal. Pettibon's genius rests on the alchemy of image and text that his drawings effect. This Reader presents an important look at an artist whose reputation continues to grow.
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Summary: I didn't even know he'd become this famous...
Review: As someone who first encountered Raymond Pettibon's alarming artwork on the covers of Black Flag and Minutemen LPs I'd bought in the late 80s, I sort of assumed that, by now, he'd sunk back into even more obscurity than he was subject to then. Imagine my surprise when I picked up this thing in a secondhand bookshop in Dublin - an anthology of various writings over the last few thousand years (the oldest extract is from the "Wisdom of Solomon", the most recent is a truly scary extract from Charles Manson's trial testimony), interspersed with Pettibon drawings, and with a good handful of critical essays on the man's work from, like, Serious Critics. The whole was published to coincide with an exhibition of the man's work organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. I mean, this man did the cover for "Slip It In". Something very odd is going on. But Pettibon has truly paid his dues, what with years of turning out small handmade zines and what can't have been especially remunerative cover artwork from that least MTV of bands, Black Flag. So if he's suddenly become a major American artist, good luck to him. The extracts are a fascinating lot. There are some old favourites like Borges' "The Library of Babel" and Walter Benjamin's fond account of being a book collector, "Unpacking my Library." There's a gory bit of Mickey Spillane and a beady-eyed extract from Cornel Woolrich's "Rear Window". There are also Swift, Johnson, Coleridge, Robert Burton, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Catullus, Mary Baker Eddy, Hart Crane and many, as they say, more. If nothing else, this is a splendid companion for a medium-length train journey through purgatory. The Pettibon drawings range from his sardonic early work to his more enigmatic recent stuff, and are all excellent. The critical essays are mostly very good, too, although there's a characteristically obtuse piece by Benjamin Buchloh in which the art-mag jargon seems not so much written as stamped out of tin. (To balance this, there's also a gruesomely funny piece by someone called "Bernard Welt" that could stand as a good short story, and for all I know really is one.) Pettibon is notoriously prolific, and it's a shame that there's a lot more other-people's-text in here than his drawings, but this is still a great book, and stakes a good claim for his "status" in the "art world", whatever that means. Hardcore is alive and well and selling for hundreds of dollars to private collectors in Zurich, apparently.
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Summary: I am a fan
Review: In the gray mist in Reykjavik I found this book by pettibon in the Mál og menning bookstore I was very happy to get it and i treasure it for a comfortable and inspiring reading.
Rating:
Summary: I am a fan
Review: In the gray mist in Reykjavik I found this book by pettibon in the Mál og menning bookstore I was very happy to get it and i treasure it for a comfortable and inspiring reading.
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Summary: under false pretenses
Review: OK... So I didn't actually read this book. I just thought I would write to say that I really enjoy Pettibon's artwork, and I recommend customers to buy the book, even if it's just for some cool visual material. Enjoy! Maybe one day I will too!
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