Pettibon's Talking Pictures - artist Raymond Pettibon

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

at any time 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 upon the other's domain. In this hundred attempts to mix the sum of two units endeavors have resulted in similar eccentric projects as Gertrude Stein's associative word "portraits" and Frans Masereel's textles woodcut "novels." For the past sum of two units decades, seemingly from left field, beholds Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon has been melding the verbal and the visual in installations of centurys of pinned-up drawings, each work incorporating a hand-lettered body inspired by writers ranging from John Ruskin all the way to Mickey Spillane. alone occasionally appropriating directly from his sources, Pettibon instead answers in his own words to what he reads. Displaying verbal sophistication, sonority and rhetorical sway a Pettibon text combines with its plainspoken ink or watercolor design in outline to emulate the qualities of a compact poem

While moving above the years from a bad-boy esthetic to an increasingly compounded stance, Pettibon has developed a unique kind of "talking picture." A traveling exhibition of more than 500 of Pettibon's drawings and artist's works organized by Suzanne Ghez of the Renaissance Society and Ann Temkin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, provides an occasion for viewers to completely acquaint themselves with the work. Pettibon's output which has been estimated at more than 7000 drawings, presents a challenge to curators of a retrospective scan Here, rather than selecting individual drawings, the curators have chosen to not absent 21 existing groupings of works belonging to private collectors and institutions, with each cluster hung in its own salon-style cluster. According to the curators' catalogue introduction, Pettibon "provides collectors a way of reading their have 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 chunk they also ascertain somewhat distracting, at best providing uneven insights into the "obsessions and attitudes" of well-known dealer/collectors like Barbara Gladstone, Rudolf Zwirner and Tom Patchett. (It have the appearances 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 riddle for those trying to understand the unfolding 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 without the complicated distinctions between earlier and later work.(1) through eschewing chronology or even thematic organization, the curators clearly aimed to provide viewers with a kind of total immersion that they perceive suits the artist's freewheeling subdue matter.

Although the best of them stand upon their own, Pettibon's drawings generally rely upon the cumulative impact they acquire in his sprawling installations. These walls packed with drawings introduce a protean artistic sensibility unfazed through distinctions between high and depressed The broad range of this sensibility appears equally to reflect a wide reading of literature and visceral reactions to contemporary popular agriculture and politics. The installations thrust on viewers the task of scanning and selecting among centurys of disparate works, each providing its hold 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 true copys playing off a far-flung repertoire of images, Pettibon's installations present the appearance almost textbook-ready displays of a fragmented postmodern sensibility. Significantly, however, his approach appear to bes shaped less by the theories of Barthes, Deleuze or Foucault than by dint of the writings of literary figures similar 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, '60 children's television, incidents from American history, baseball trivia and left-wing politics.

The exhibition is accompanied by the agency of 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 selected passages conjure up an imaginative world precipitoused in the whimsy, vibrant rhetoric and poetic nuance of the classic Western literary tradition. Henry James's lists of efficacious character names, Jonathan Swift's fantasy battle between ancient and late books, Sir Richard Burton's categorization of pederastic bourns Robert Henri's psychoanalysis of the brushstroke, Arthur Symons's fetishistic appreciation for volume bindings and Samuel Coleridge's for special ink wells--all serve as dull complements to various aspects of Pettibon's contemplative, word-besotted esthetic.