Raymond Pettibon. A Certain Lyrical Distance
Guest of honour at the International Art Book and Film Festival (FILAF) in Perpignan (17-23 June 2019), Raymond Pettibon, one of the most prominent figures of the American art scene, presented a selection of his books and films. Robert Storr met him for a public discussion on June 22nd. There was talk of music, literature, religion, but also baseball and gangsters – everything that constitutes America and, therefore, his work. On October 16th, the David Zwirner Gallery opened its space in Paris with an exhibition of his works, old and new.
If you want to characterize his work in a general fashion, it is a version of collage, a collage of interior monologues and exterior encounters, and what you get is a work in progress in every drawing. The elements change according to many circumstances and what I would like to pursue is what makes the difference between one drawing and the next, between, one body of work and the next. The first question I’d like to ask is, when you go on the road, as you are now, do you work and what’s your work like when you’re not on the road? Do you have a daily routine, do you work on projects that you have to complete or is it a sort of stream of consciousness that you make yourself available to? I’ve taken a kind of hiatus for the last several years, because of personal issues. My whole life has been on the same grind. It’s a good question, I’ll get back to it.
Some artists simply show up for work. For example, Joan Mitchell used to say, “I don’t care what I was doing the night before or what I’m doing the morning after, I simply go to the studio for six hours and I do nothing or I do something, but I am there”. There are many artists who follow some kind of similar routine. You just put yourself in a position where something could happen, but without necessarily having a specific goal. Well that was the working method of the Abstract Expressionists, to clear their head of everything and then to work on automatic drawing, drawing, rubbing or splashing paint on canvas or like De Kooning, painting on canvas. I bring a lot of baggage to my work, I can’t deny that, and I can’t say that one is better than the other. I like Joan Mitchell. That method was with the
times, the psychological… clearing of your mind and starting anew. It’s very distant from what I was doing, for one thing growing up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, a different working process.
A PHYSICAL ORDEAL There’s a lot of information in your work, references to all kinds of texts, all kinds of writers, all kinds of situations. Do you have an archive of that material now – you did once – that you have around you or that you can tap into easily, or do you start with the proverbial blanc sheet of paper, white
canvas? Yes, I do have an archive, I wouldn’t say voluminous because it’s not in volumes but in notes and passages, and on the other hand sometimes it’s easier just to wing it. As far as notes and archives go, I have enough to keep me going forever, pretty much, but I also like to improvise, to be spontaneous, so it’s a mixture of both. Of course, I borrow a lot, but I think every serious artist or writer is buttressed by the shoulders of others. To start from zero or scratch is unlikely to result in an original work, in the wider sense of extending your mind. What I do is a physical ordeal as well, after all these years, it takes its toll on the body. I’m always in danger of depression or exhaustion: putting my body on the line.
Originally, the archive was largely assignment sheets from your father’s literary classes, wasn’t it? And quotations that he would throw at his students, wanting them to identify and discuss. like an expli
cation de texte in French. Not so much the notes; that goes back to when I was four or five, six years old. My father used to teach and I ‘d do drawings on the back of his students’ assignments, amazingly, my mother saved the drawings. At times I added words to them and put myself back in the picture.
In one drawing, you may have a text that sounds like a metaphysical poem from 17th or 18th-century England, and in another you’ll have a Mickey-Spillane-like line (1), and they’re juxtaposed in ways or they clash, but they also harmonize in some very strange ways. That ability to mix registers is one of the things that makes your work so mind-blowing, because it reminds the reader that they actually have that range and that their separation of those things in their mind is artificial in some fundamental way. Are you consciously doing that? Yes, but it’s not consciously, as in looking at you or from above. It’s internalized. As many years as I’ve been in the game, any individual piece isn’t necessarily done one time; if you go through my studio, there’s a lot of unfinished work, both visually and verbally.You can see that in the most obvious way in the difference in type, cursive. You can tell it’s been done at a different period. The drawings aren’t finished until they leave the studio and even when they go to the gallery, sometimes they’re not finished because of the voracious appetite of galleries for new work, even if it’s unfinished.
If in the literary mode, these things are collages and dialogues and internal dialectics of language, then in terms of imagery, your imagery is likewise all over the place: we have references to classical sculpture, references to the 1940s, references to film noir and so on. How did those different modes come into play, where did you begin, what was the most stripped-down version of
your work? The challenge to me has largely been to make sense of nature or visual imagery, information. So it’s a challenge for me to have the most ridiculous images and to make sense of them, to be all over the place with associations and then to reel it in with words and sweet talk. So you have the most incongruous imageries, whether it’s Vavoom (2) or whatever, which take on a life of their own. Once I did one, I had more to say on the subject, until there were files this thick. Even though Vavoom started as a minor character in Felix the Cat animations, he speaks to me because he represents speech and power, the throat; even though he only says his own name, he gets it across.
Walt Whitman talks about a primitive yell, a scream, a basic utterance of freedom. There’s also of course Artaud who grum
bled and growled, and who basically tried to establish the futility of language, its inability to contain thought as successfully, so the eruption of language makes sense. In a way it seems Vavoom is a surrogate for
both those things, simultaneously. I don’t know if Whitman screamed in pain or joy when he witnessed union limbs cut off. And if you ever quit morphine cold turkey like Artaud that’s plenty of reason to scream. It’s tracing the word back to its source, pure utterance, which in itself can be communicative and meaningful.
In terms of other characters, you have historical characters, political characters, cartoon characters. As you begin your drawings, do you think about who these characters are going to be, or do you chose your characters in accordance with what
you want to say? Sometimes I’ll just start with an image, which can be anything. Of course I have notes for a lot of subject matter, whether it’s baseball, surfing, Superman or Vavoom. I like to challenge myself, I like to extend myself and do something that at best surprises me, that I am able to look at, and have a sense of extending myself beyond the bounds of what I assume to be my talent. That’s what makes art worthwhile for me. Like in baseball or football, you can grind out 4 yards a carry, but then there are cases where you can run down the field for 80 yards and break a number of tackles, like the great O.J. Simpson.
He was a great football player. Art and life are separate; I don’t think art gives any excuse to misbehave in life. My father would
say different, though. He was a Catholic. You can do the most horrible things, sins, and redeem yourself.
Were you raised Catholic, and did you actively have to battle with the influence of your father, of the church? Is that one of the framing factors? It’s certainly true for Mike Kelley, with whom you were very friendly. There’s a whole group of Catholic artists who were triggered by post-moder
nist references. I grew up a Christian Scientist (3), but that was after a huge battle between my grandmother, father, and mother... However, over time, my mother was my grandmother’s best friend, a most helpful person. So if there’s any redemption, it’s there. But that was an Irish-Catholic family that actually believed that it’s a mortal sin not to abide by the ceremonies and the restrictions of the church, that you’ll burn in hell forever.
BASEBALL You’ve done many drawings of churches, that’s one kind of exaltation. Actually, the baseball drawings are also a kind of celebration of going beyond normal human capacities – although a few of them talk about being stuck in the low numbers. So there is this constant pull between being nearly human and being spectacular. Is that one of the meditations that’s on your
mind all the time? I haven’t kept up with baseball for a while. When you can hit 400… the last person to do that was Ted Williams. As a person, he was kind of an asshole, but he could hit. So was Joe DiMaggio, for that matter. Sandy Koufax was an insanely good pitcher and a great person. I named my son after Bo Belinsky, he pitched with the Los Angeles Angels in the ‘60s; he kind of dissipated his on-the-field life by being a playboy, doing drugs and alcohol and marrying a Playmate. Preferred lounging in PCL Hawaii to being called up to the Majors.
In baseball, if you do that kind of thing
once, you’re in the books forever. This was in their early years, I think it was 1962, and the Angels were close to Hollywood. He probably only won thirty games or less in major leagues, but for a time he was the golden boy. That’s not exactly the example I want to set for my son. Who thinks he’s the next Steph Curry (4).
There are quite a lot of villains in your work. I’d say J. Edgar Hoover is one, Charles Manson is another. How do you relate to these really sinister characters, and
why do you bring them back so often? I don’t like to dwell on the negative, but when I was a kid, growing up, my idol was John Dillinger, who was public enemy number one. When he was fifteen years old, he robbed a gas station. So he got serious time. He never killed anyone, so maybe that was because he pulled a Tommy gun, maybe he was the average Crip or Blood who can’t shoot straight. He was what he was, a product of his environment. J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed by him, he wanted to go into his past and his personal life. The FBI had a huge influence on public opinion. If you gossiped on J. Edgar Hoover, you’d have all these FBI agents raining down on you, stemming the flow of information. He controlled the news, he blackmailed every president. He died in office, he never retired, not to get into the sordid details of his personal life, like Clyde Tolson (5). DARK AMERICA So what you’re dealing with here is the deep state, dark America, the kind of America people in public positions never want
to discuss. I should have been a journalist. Nevertheless, if the New York Times and the Washington Post aren’t doing their job, like that show I did at David [Zwirner]’s about the Iraq war… (6) No one was talking about that, not in the art world, not in the news media, it was a complete vacuum. I don’t delve into politics, not on that level; it really diminishes me to have to stoop to that level. You were pretty adamant that what you do isn’t caricature. We’re in France, where caricature has been dominant in the culture for a very long time, and yet you see yourself as apart from that. You showed me that Charlie Hebdo comic, that was shocking to me. I thought it was some marginalized, Internet thing or whatever, but it sold out the newsstands in the airport. That’s amazing. FLIERS AND FANZINES It’s about cockroaches inheriting the world, and they are rejoicing at the fact that there’s been 100% success rate for the Baccalauréat. Was the caricature style
shocking to you? Yes, it was. I did a show with Daumier, who was one my primary influences when I was fifteen.The pear-shaped body of the King… Well, that isn’t caricature, that’s realism. For that matter, I’m a realist. In baseball, it started with Bill James and analytics. Teams are using mathematicians, statisticians, economists to analyse what works best on the field or the court. To me, the symbolic or comic parts of politics have lesser meaning than what actually happens on the ground. The body count, how many people are dead, killed, refugees, homeless, in poverty.
There is a decidedly lyrical quality in many drawings. And then there’s a very harsh quality that is often coextensive, so that’s an unusual combination. There are passages that read like novels, and passages that talk about the violence and cruelty of American life, and others which seem to offer not so much hope as a beauty of lan
guage that is self-justified. At one point, I said I loved Mickey Spillane, and that’s kind of what followed me. And I do, in a sense. At UCLA I had this popular literature course, it was Horatio Alger, Mickey Spillane, Harold Robbins and Shane (7). He’s not my standard approval of a writer, or even of that genre. Cornell Woolrich or Chandler, or many others. That’s not a model at all for my writing, black and white.
Audience Question: Raymond’s brother was involved in a band called Black Flag. Raymond did covers for the Black Flag albums and was part of the music scene in southern California in the early punk days. Is there a relationship between your drawing and music now, as there was then? There really wasn’t one then, either. Because my brother was in a band and he wanted to do fliers, that’s how I started, fliers and fanzines. I’m not complaining, but that had extremely detrimental effects on my work being seen. It kept me out of the museum and gallery world for many years; why that follows me like shadows is beyond me.
Audience Question: From what you were saying about politics and authority, there’s a sense of disillusion with authority, a kind of hyperawareness of that. Do you think the essential thing your work does is pose that question of morality, authority and power? It’s not as simple as that, you know, the good guy, the bad guy. There are nuances, there’s long-term, there’s short term. I don’t mean to evade the question, it’s easy to say that things are just complicated. With my typical means, one frame or one drawing, you can’t go into everything. Foremost, there is respect for the audience, which you don’t get with simpleminded political cartoons with a punchline. So I’m not putting words or ideas into them. There’s a suggestion, and some lyrical distance, even if it applies to politics.
(1) Author of crime novels (1918-2006), whose recurring character, Mike Hammer, is the archetype of the reactionary, misogynist and brutal man. (2) Minor character from the animated series FelixThe
Cat, created by Otto Messmer in 1919. Vavoom is a harmless little Inuit, whose only defense is to scream his name at earth-shattering volume. (3) Christian Church founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, claiming to deduce medical principles from the teachings of Christ. It now has some 400,000 followers worldwide. (4) Stephen Curry II, basketball player born in 1988, considered one of the best shooters in NBA history. (5) ClydeTolson (1900-1975), deputy director of the FBI from 1936 to 1972, close friend and protégé of J. Edgar Hoover, and perhaps his lover. (6) Raymond Pettibon. Here'sYour Irony Back (The Big Picture), from September 11 to October 20, 2007. (7) Horatio Alger (1832-1899), Harold Robbins (19161997). Shane (1949), a novel by Jack Schaefer (19071991), upon which George Stevens' eponymous film (1953) is based.