Laurent Perbos

Awesome More Work Here

 

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

ART21 Teaser
 

Alec Soth’s Blog (Now Defunct)

Alec Soth’s Blog has a ton of amazing thought and dialogue in its archive, but alas he has moved on to other frontiers. Browsing through it I found a category titled “baseball” I leave it with this picture and excerpt of an excerpt:

Andrea Modica
 
“I’ve previous mentioned Andrea Modica twice (here and here), but failed to mention her terrific pictures of Minor League baseball players. Modica was interviewed about the work as part of the Smithsonian Photographers at Work series:

How did your series of pictures of baseball players come about?

I was on a date and we went to a baseball game. Now I had absolutely no interest in or knowledge of the game at that point, but I live in a tiny town and one thing you can do in the summer is go to a ball game. Although I wasn’t interested in the game, I could get a close look at these players, because in minor league baseball you can sit right near the field. They’re very close. So this pitcher walked in front of me and I noticed his cheekbones. I thought, “My, what fabulous cheekbones, and how that little cap sets them off.” While I watched the game, I wondered who on earth would choose this for a career. I mean, hitting this little ball around seemed so silly. These guys work very hard, they make very little money, and maybe two percent of minor league players go on to the major leagues. Knowing that, I was really curious about why they would do it, and I thought about this so much that it occurred to me, almost in a dream, to photograph these players. And I’ll tell you something, I woke up in a cold sweat. I was so scared of this particular project.

Why did you make portraits of the players rather than pictures of the game being played?

Because of my intense curiosity about them. After putting it off for a while, I contacted the team owner and asked if I could do this. He said yes, if I also got the team manager to agree. Sometimes when I was working with these guys they exhibited certain behavior that made me very uncomfortable, which was hard to deal with. But a certain discomfort was also a part of the family project.

You find this tension surrounding your differences with certain people stimulating?

I figure that if photographing a situation makes me this nervous there must be something for me to learn, and that makes it worth doing. It’s not only about taking good pictures.

I like that Modica is honest about her fears and her motivation. These pictures are as much about great cheekbones as they are about baseball. There is even a homoerotic quality to some of the pictures: ”

 

Paul Pfeiffer

Erasure, Camouflage, & “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”

ART:21: Can you talk about the photographic sequence “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”

PFEIFFER: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is the title of an ongoing series of photographs. It started with five images that were material drawn from publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe, with the central figure removed. And at this point it’s kind of morphed into something else. Now I’m raiding the archives of the NBA and finding photographs that I’m manipulating to, generally speaking, remove a lot of contextual detail to leave a kind of solitary figure in the setting of a crowd of people.

The series started with research that I was doing into, at the time, images of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? At that point I thought this has got to be one of the most famous human bodies in the archive. It conjures up so much, it’s such a legend. And so I went through these images and ended up selecting a few of them and then going in and erasing Marilyn Monroe from the image. One of the things that really interested me was that in the process, really what was going on was not so much erasure and it never really is. It’s actually more like camouflage in the sense that you are taking pieces of the background from around the image and very slowly applying these pieces over the body so that in the end you’re presenting the illusion that you are seeing through to the background. But in fact you are inventing background material that wasn’t there before.

What I found out or what I ended up with, which I didn’t really expect, was in some ways the most abstract images that I’ve made so far. Unless you know that Marilyn was there you wouldn’t otherwise know that there was a figure there, much less that it was specifically Marilyn. At the time I was really quite focused on the process itself and the historical resonance and the emotional resonance that I felt working on these images. I’ve been asked after the fact how I would describe that, and I’ve thought that it’s a bit like what people describe as far as ghost limbs among soldiers. In a war people lose a limb and will have this continuing feeling like they still have that limb. Like a ghost limb. Another kind of dramatic example is when the World Trade Center went down. For long afterwards you sort of looked up and expected to see something there. Although it’s literally taking the figure away, in some ways it’s also intensifying something about the figure that used to be there.

Now this year and late last year I’ve been continuing this series under the same title, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” but talking a very different approach. Now I’m starting from images that I’m drawing from the online archive of the NBA. These are images that you can pull up on your screen and then order for something like twenty or thirty bucks a pop, and some of them are quite amazing. They go back to the 1950s and are some of the most striking images of sports legends in the environment of the stadium or the arena with the crowds in the background. And so I’ve been selectively appropriating these images and manipulating them to remove all the contextual detail, so that what remains is not an absent figure but an intensified figure by virtue of the fact that you are lacking some aspects of a context to place it in.

In the last of these images that I completed, for example, I started from an image taken from a game in which Wilt Chamberlain is putting the ball in the basket and there’s three or four figures around him all trying to prevent him from doing that. And the figure that remains is not Wilt Chamberlain. It’s actually one of the minor figures from the margins of the image. All the others were removed and this sideline image was moved to the center. So for me it’s quite striking because, by virtue of being in the margins, I suppose the person who composed the shot wasn’t too concerned with what the figure on the side was doing. He’s reaching up to stop the ball and is in this position that’s so foreshortened that his shoulders almost completely cover his head. His head is thrown far back and his legs are extended out in a kind of extreme way.

Moving this figure to the center makes sense if you see him on the margins. It’s an odd contradiction that you’re left with because now it seems the shot was composed completely around him. And it’s breaking every rule of composition. It looks like his head is chopped off, all of his limbs look awkward. To me it almost resembles the figure in a photograph of a lynching. At any rate, there’s a strange kind of inconsistency to the composition of the image. At the same time this awkwardly composed person is standing dead center in an arena surrounded by thousand of people who are watching—and there is no ball, no basket, no reason for him to be jumping or floating in this way. It is the sense of not just a lack of context, but in a way it looks like this figure has somehow been frozen into this frame. It looks quite airless and almost like a stain on the image.

ART:21: Where does the title come from?

PFEIFFER: Well, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is an art historical reference in that it refers back to the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, who in some ways was really an innovator in the field of the representation of the figure and was a naturalist and sort of a scientist in himself. He was really involved in defining the building blocks of the figure study and the representation of people during his time. And simultaneously it’s a biblical reference, since the four horsemen of the apocalypse are precisely the figures that appear at the point when the world comes to the end at Armageddon. It’s very dramatic, none of which appears in any way in the photographs. There aren’t even four. At this point there’s eight of these figures in the series. But I really like the combination of a title that conjures up the history of the evolution of the figure study and at the same time a suggestion of a kind of larger epic occurring having to do with some kind of dramatic ending or shifting.

ART:21: How does the process of erasing or camouflaging the figure in photography translate into your video works? What is that process like?

PFEIFFER: The editing process that I use is very slow and ultimately very manual and requires going frame by frame, even though to a degree the process is somewhat automated through software tools. It’s like the computer can only think so much and then the human hand and eye really have to do the rest of the refining work. It’s partially because this kind of editing software is really meant to be used in tandem with other shooting techniques and framing techniques. So that, for example, if you really wanted to remove a figure in an efficient way you should start by shooting the figure against a blue background which is standard practice in the special effects world. Then it becomes very easy. But in my case I’m using found imagery and often archival imagery, which to begin with is not even very high quality. It’s already degraded from age. And I’m often taking an image that’s at it’s ninth or tenth generation by the time it reaches the shelf at a video store and I pull it of the shelf.

So what it means is when I get to the editing I have to go very slowly. A certain amount of the automated tools in the software I can’t use. I just simply have to go and do it manually. I’ve already started to work with other people and build a team to work with me on this. I’ve gone back to my oldest friends in art school who I know are amazing craftsmen because I hung out with people who had the same kind of love for doing this kind of work that I had. To edit a three minute piece like the “Long Count” pieces, it would take me and two or three other people roughly two or three months. And that’s now that we’ve gotten better at it, to do three minutes worth of finished footage.

And what’s curious to me is it’s actually a process that I enjoy. If I had my way and there were no other added complications to renting a studio, I would happily sit in my room and do this work all day. It’s a bit like meditation. I also feel like it’s a bit like painting or drawing in the sense that you leave your everyday consciousness of the world and achieve a certain focus. People would call it right brain focus, but at any rate, it draws you in and can be quite relaxing and enjoyable especially if you don’t have some horrendous deadline to meet. At the same time, this kind of process predates the computer and goes back to the way animation was done in Hollywood early on where you would find practically a room full of what amounts to animation factory workers overseen by a foreman who makes the important decisions about what the figures are doing. Ultimately you have a large team of people who are paid less! [LAUGHS]

ART:21: Let’s talk about the NBA in San Antonio where the process of obtaining your source material is quite different from dipping into an archive of images. The filming process with the Spurs—what were you trying to do there?

PFEIFFER: I started out in this process thinking, I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to accumulate footage from commercially available tapes and off the TV, and wouldn’t it be great to take it one step further, or one step closer to the source and try to get exactly the images I want on the spot? Especially because I’m working with special effects software to do a lot of the manipulations that I am doing. And what I have or what I can generally afford is a consumer level version of much more expensive machines and software that only Hollywood can use. So I’m really interested in trying to figure out how to move past the consumer level. Not necessarily to do something more Hollywood, but to my mind kind it’s a way of getting deeper into the material.

Ultimately, if you look at how the images are made that leads back to Hollywood and back to professional sports. It’s these places that the tools were really made for. The consumer tools are a secondary output. Everything is really tailored for a much bigger industry. I find it really an interesting possibility to work somehow closer to that, even though I know that with copyright issues and all the money that’s involved there’s plenty of reasons not to.

When I was developing a plan for the ArtPace residency in Texas, I found out that the Spurs—the basketball team in San Antonio—and the owners of the Spurs, are quite friendly to artists and they are patrons of the arts in Texas. So through ArtPace I approached them, and lo and behold they were like “Sure, you can come and shoot as much footage as you want at the game.” I approached it as kind of an experiment. Wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do and how I was going to do it but thought, let’s just go in there and try something out and discover a few things. One was that after a few days of shooting it became clear that what I could shoot—and actually they gave me a camera man to work with, they were so generous—what I could shoot and what I could tell the camera man to shoot, in the end wasn’t necessarily more interesting than the kind of stuff that I could pull of the television in a way. The television broadcast crew has ten cameras instead of just one, with fancy track systems that allow for really smooth motion shots.

The footage that I could get off the TV is of a much higher quality then what I could actually shoot myself on the court, without my duplicating the infrastructure and having ten cameras myself and doing what they were doing precisely. The other thing that I discovered is that there’s an enormous amount of activity happening in the stadium beyond the game itself, and that’s what I found myself really interested in and focusing on. At a certain point I just stopped filming the game and turned my camera around and started filming the crew. Season Three! [LAUGHS] I mean the camera crew in the arena, and watching how the whole spectacle worked. Which is quite amazing. The final effect is that it’s extremely difficult to sit in the arena as an artist with a camera and be dispassionate and be removed from the emotional intensity that’s going on. At a certain point, especially if it was a good game, I just wanted to put down the camera and just watch. How do they do that?

It’s a fascinating thing because I got to talk a bit with the people who produce the games, not the players, but the audio visual technicians who produce the games. And they are timing the bringing down of the lights and the bringing up of the lights at every moment. And where the camera men are standing. It’s interesting to watch the camera men because often times you’ll have a row of three or four camera men, and they are so well trained in terms of following the game that it’s like a ballet. Without even looking at each other they move perfectly in tandem. The sight of four cameras all moving…it’s almost like a chorus line.

ART:21: Do you think filming live events has generated a shift in your thinking?

PFEIFFER: Well I guess it relates to me to the idea of a reduction of things to images. We have great power today to make images that are truly spectacular and to achieve a kind of perfection, and there is something terrifying to me about it as well because maybe these images become so perfect that you forget everything else. So in a way there is like a shrinking possibility in the mind or in the imagination. It’s kind of like if you’re served literally five hundred channels on TV, why go out? There are obviously plenty of reasons to go out, but there’s something really seductive at the same time about the comfort of pre-digested images that are available. It makes me wonder if ultimately what we are talking about is not just the proliferation of images or a more distracted viewer or freedom of choice in terms of the consumption of images, but really a shrinking of the imagination.

Glasgow Diamonds and Super Bowl Shuffle

Tom Russotti of the Institute for Aesthletics suggested we post these two gems. Enjoy.

Leni Riefenstahl

Stills from Olympia

“Riefenstahl was put in charge of filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics, no minor undertaking. For Olympia she had to manage a total crew of 60 cinematographers. Three different types of black-and-white film stock—Agfa (architectural shots), Kodak (portraits), Perutz (fields, grass)—were used to shoot over 1.3 million feet of film (400,000 meters, over 248 miles). In the process, Riefenstahl invented or enhanced many of the sports photography techniques we now take for granted: slow motion, underwater diving shots, extremely high (from towers) and low shooting angles (from pits), panoramic aerial shots, and tracking systems for following fast action. The result is considered a classic cinematic masterpiece. Olympia premiered at Berlin’s UFA Palast am Zoo cinema on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1938.

…Following the war in 1945, Riefenstahl had to face Allied charges that she was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. Her close ties to Hitler and her propaganda films, most notably Triumph of the Will, made her an obvious target. She endured post-war chaos and was imprisoned (and escaped!) three times trying to get to her mother’s house in Austria where she was reunited with her husband and arrested again – not once but twice. This time she sat in a real prison as a guest the Seventh American Army, in the company of people like Hermann Göring and Sepp Dietrich (of the SS). But after her interrogation the Americans officially “denazified” Germany’s most notorious film director and released her “without prejudice” on June 3, 1945.

A relieved Riefenstahl returned to her film library and editing suite in Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol, where she had moved during the war to avoid Allied bombing in Germany and to continue her work on the long-delayed Tiefland, which she had begun in 1940.But she had not reckoned on the French. The Americans were leaving Tyrol, which was to become part of the new French occupation zone. Despite being advised to move to the American zone, Riefenstahl was reluctant to move her massive film library (including the Olympia negatives) and she believed that her American denazification was valid for all the Allied powers.

That soon proved to be a mistake. Before long Riefenstahl found herself under arrest once again, this time by the French. They decided to move Riefenstahl to the French zone in Germany, where she ended up in the bombed-out ruins of Breisach near Freiburg. Her old “friend” there, Dr. Fanck, refused to have anything to do with her, and she and her husband lived under house arrest in Breisach and later in Königsfeld in the Black Forest. Eventually Riefenstahl was placed in an insane asylum in Freiburg for three months before her release in August 1947. But it was not until July 1949 that she was officially denazified by a French tribunal. Even that “final” decision was appealed by the French military government and the matter was closed six months later when the Baden State Commissariat classified Riefenstahl in absentia as a “fellow traveler.”

But Riefenstahl was far from free. Freedom and partial denazification did not mean she could resume her career as a director, and she had more legal trials ahead of her. The French were still holding all the film material taken from her house in Austria. Even her marriage was falling apart. To top it all, her attempts to get her Tiefland film back from the French were now being hindered by the release of a so-called Eva Braun Diary (a fraudulent precursor of the later and equally bogus Hitler Diary), the work of Luis Trenker, a former co-star with Riefenstahl in several films, now turned director and con-artist. As is usually the case, a court ruling that the Eva Braun diary was a fabrication failed to stop the false rumours and innuendo the diary had produced. In a bizarre twist, Riefenstahl received an unsolicited affadavit of support from none other than her former foe Ernst Jäger.”

From Jewish Virtual Library

Mike Quinn

(Unfortunately this is a different Mike Quinn, but the contemporary artist one is even more amazing!)

See more of his work at Perry Rubenstein

 

Julie Henry

For Going Down, 2000 Julie Henry spent nine months at Crystal Palace during their last season in the Premiership. Her striking photographs show the full range of emotions (hope, euphoria, loss and eventual ‘death’) the fans experienced during the club’s dismal season. Presented as a kind of hymn, with accompanying song sheets, this work presents the extreme actions and reactions of supporters in a quasi-religious fashion.

 

James Deavin – The Games We Play

More at his website

Andreas Gursky

 F1 Boxenstopp I, C-print, 88 5/8 x 239 3/8 inches, 2007

 F1 Boxenstopp III, C-print, 88 5/8 x 239 3/8 inches, 2007

F1 Boxenstopp IV, C-print, 88 5/8 x 239 3/8 inches, 2007

Andreas Gursky’s hyper-real photographs combine epic scale with manic detail. By Lucy Davies

Seething mechanics and technicians in bright team colours surround two vehicles in the pit stop. Above them, ranks of spectators look down from the hospitality suite like the heavenly host in a medieval frieze. The precise, neutral style creates a hushed reality: the sweaty, dust-streaked racing drivers have been removed from their earsplitting tarmac battle and placed in a balletic, tiptoeing mime. This is Formula One with the sound off.

F1 Boxenstopp is by German artist Andreas Gursky, whose luminous prints are now on show at two London galleries. His bold, large-format colour photographs (this one is a whopping 222cmx608cm) are hot commodities. Last year, one of his works sold for $2.48m (£1.27m), the highest price ever paid for a work by a living photographer.

This image might seem like an exceptionally crafted composition by a well-placed photographer, but it is in fact a minutely manipulated shot made up of elements from Grand Prix races around the world – Monte Carlo, Istanbul, Shanghai, São Paulo. The picture calls to mind Courbet’s large-scale painting A Burial at Ornans, its twin in size. Both artists give a banal scene the ambitious dimensions usually reserved for grand history paintings.

In his early fifties, Gursky is candid about his use of image manipulation, spending months in his Düsseldorf studio looking through reels and reels of film, adjusting colour, light and shade, sometimes one pixel at a time. He calls it “assisted realism”. The illusion is masterful, and at first sight, every picture seems a glimpse of the real world. Even when you register the seams, this impression is hard to shake off. It’s a little disorienting.

One of Gursky’s favourite themes is the opposition of the crowd and the individual. Within the mass, the human becomes pattern. Among the new works on display in London is the Pyongyang series (2007), for which Gursky travelled to the Arirang Festival in North Korea, held in honour of the late Communist leader Kim Il Sung.

The festival’s games include more than 50,000 participants performing tightly choreographed acrobatics. Gursky’s photographs describe the brilliant colours of this totalitarian spectacle. Get closer, and you can see smiling faces. It’s a sort of hyper-reality, so manically detailed that it makes your eyeballs sweat.

From the London Telegraph