Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon raises dogs. Pitbulls and mastiffs mostly. They live in breeding sheds and kennels in his backyard. Some are “sporting” dogs that he trains and fights in and around Southern California and Mexico. One is a full brother to Bain, a former Yojimbo in the world of dog fighting, the sport of kings. Mention Bain to anyone in the dog-fighting business, Pettibon tells me, and, well, you get this certain look.
Pettibon unloads all of this in the middle of a conversation ranging from punk-rock history to horse pedigrees to comic books to art criticism. On the subject of dogs he suddenly seems to feel like he’s revealed way more than he intended. So he drops it. This is the way with Pettibon. In his pogo-ing from topic to topic he is both excessively careful with his words and bluntly indiscreet. It’s a quality that also comes across in his drawings.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, and raised in Hermosa Beach, California, Pettibon sacrificed a career as a public-school math teacher for a desperate, thankless existence as an internationally exhibited artist and dog fighter. His art career began in the mid-1970s when his brother Greg, a guitarist for the seminal punk band Black Flag, founded SST Records. Pettibon became the label’s unofficial artist, creating album covers and concert flyers for Black Flag, the Minutemen, and others. His style—a pairing of figurative drawings and text done in black ink on paper—is often associated with the seventies punk counterculture of his youth. But Pettibon will tell you that’s a brainless oversimplification.

Though he vigorously resists attempts to categorize his art, Pettibon acknowledges a debt to various sources of inspiration: comics, noir films, books, television, pop icons. His work can sometimes seem like a cataloging of pop-cultural moments. Charles Manson, Ronald Reagan, and other broken, twisted speed freaks figure prominently, as do punks, surfers, hippies, baseball players, locomotives, and Gumby. Whole phrases are lifted directly from books—Henry James, Fernando Pessoa, William Blake, the Bible—or are reshaped and given new meaning by the artist.

Despite this, Pettibon’s art is also deeply personal. Each drawing seems oddly idiosyncratic, almost painfully revealing. Individually, each is like a snapshot of a larger narrative.

The following interview was culled from a couple of marathon phone conversations with Pettibon from his home in Long Beach.

—John O’Connor

III. “I DO ACTUALLY LIKE BASEBALL
AND SURFING AND GUMBY.”

BLVR: The reoccurring subjects in your work—surfers, trains, ships, baseball players, people like Charles Manson and Elvis—what do some of these represent to you?

RP: I don’t think I’ve ever done an image that was meant to be reoccurring in the beginning. What happens is that after drawing one you can’t leave them. They have more to say to you. In a way it can take on a life of its own. I guess people probably think that these are images that only an excessive relationship leads one to doing, like fifty Gumby or Manson drawings. But it’s not like that. I do actually like baseball and surfing and Gumby. Manson, I’m not a big fan of some things about him, but there are some other things that are interesting. I’m not making a case for anything he did. But as a subject matter, on paper, there’s something to it, there’s something to write about there. There are certain figures, without even my meaning to do it, that become subjects. Whether it’s people or trains. Sometimes it’s more the visual nature of the subject that leads me to it. Visually they can be obstacles to try to overcome. But for whatever reason, they don’t start as serial projects. Otherwise I would have done them from the beginning. It’s always been after the fact.

BLVR: With writing and drawing, does one bring out the other for you?

RP: It’s not that exact, as if I dream in images and my waking thoughts are in text, or as if my daydreams become my captions and illustrations. I don’t know if it’s good to separate the two too much actually. But yeah, one depends on the other. There’s always a latent or inferred image in my writing. And I can almost always assume if I do a drawing that it will eventually have text. Now, I can only take this so far, because it’s almost starting to sound like an apology for writing, as if it’s this impurity imposed on the visual image. In art, impurity is not a mortal sin. You have to navigate through it. I say that only because there’s not too many of my drawings that don’t have text. There are some, but not many. If I were doing cartoons it would be a lot easier.

BLVR: You won the Bucksbaum Award this year at the Whitney Biennial, which is “awarded to an artist who possesses the potential to have a lasting effect on the history of American art.” Do you consider yourself a representative figure in American art?

RP: Is there a developing consensus that I’m not? That the award was unjustified? [Laughing] I know they want me to return it. I’ve heard rumors that they made a mistake and the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding. They’re apologetic about it. But I told them the money’s gone. I spent it all at the track.

BLVR: Dogs or horses?

RP: We don’t have dogs in California anymore. It’s a licensing thing, government payoffs, special interests. It’s just horses now. But I raise dogs for fighting.

BLVR: Isn’t that illegal?

RP: Yeah, but in L.A. everything’s illegal. Even breathing.

BLVR: We’re talking blood sport, right?

RP: Well, listen, I train them and I fight them. It’s not a big deal, and it’s not something I like to talk about, really. I also have a charity where I give dogs to underprivileged kids. Not everyone can afford to buy a dog, and it gives kids the opportunity to attain a certain level of responsibility.

Excerpt from an interview in Believer Magazine

Raymond Pettibon, Venice Beach, CA 2006

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