Raymond Pettibon Retrospective at Kunsthalle Wien

Wednesday, 18 October 2006 08:36

Vienna, Austria - California is the embodiment of America’s two faces: one, the sunshine state and the zone of boundless optimism (“Go West!”); the other, setting for film noir tales and that dark place that drew in obscure occultists and Satanist devotees, where the Manson murders occurred and shook the nation at the end of the 1960’s.

The graphic artist Raymond Pettibon, born 1957 in Tucson/Arizona, at home in the Los Angeles area since childhood, could not have created his monumental work, which meanwhile comprises several thousand sheets, anywhere but here—in this Manichaeist realm.

Pettibon, who was originally influenced by the comic style of, for example, Milton Caniff and John Kirby, first became well-known outside of the art scene for creating flyers, concert posters, and album covers for the independent record label SST, owned by his brother Greg Ginn.

But he soon distanced himself from the Californian hardcore punk scene and developed, sometimes in books, sometimes on single sheets, his “Tragédie humaine”, which chipped away at America’s understanding of itself and deconstructed popular myths in a disturbing connection of image and text.  Pettibon found his inspiration equally in the 1930’s and 1940’s design of the U.S. and the flower-power dreams of the hippies, which he gleefully transformed into bloody massacre scenes.  Surfacing in his works are superheroes and super-villains (Batman, Superman, Jesus, Stalin, Charles Manson) as well as several key motifs (train, penis, surfer, baseball player), which are played through again and again in endless variations, “remixed” as it were.

Kunsthalle Wien is showing the first major retrospective of the Californian artist in Austria.  Curated by Thomas Mießgang.  Cloud-like concentrations (also a motif from Pettibon’s varied repertoire) are metaphoric fields that unite more than 500 drawings—the formal counterpoint is a fifteen-meter-long mural.  Along with original books and masses of self-published fanzines, parallel, documentary worlds will illuminate the musical and literary cosmos.  On exhibit October 13, 2006 – February 25, 2007.

Raymond Pettibon, whose work also includes several feature films and animation works (a selection will be shown in the exhibition), is perhaps the most precise artistic observer of American popular culture milieus.  In his black and white drawings, which occasionally use red bullet wounds to provide for contrast and a later, color-intensive, shrill sequel, he discovers a cannibalistic enigmatic world, which in its grotesque distortion reveals hidden truths about the U.S., without completely exposing its secret.

Visit Kunsthalle Wien at : www.kunsthallewien.at