Pettibon Stakes His Fame on Drawing

The handsome and enjoyable survey of drawings by Raymond Pettibon at the Museum of Contemporary Art is notable on two curious counts. Together they locate the artist in a category all his own.

First, Pettibon appears to be the only artist around to have developed a sustained international reputation based solely on the medium of drawing. Since the Renaissance, drawing has usually been an adjunct to other artistic pursuits, undertaken by painters and sculptors.

Second, while the show begins in the 1980s and continues to the present, with five large-scale wall drawings executed specifically for MOCA, no discernible evolution occurs in Pettibon’s work. In the exhibition, one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between a drawing done last year and one done in, say, 1986.

Pettibon began in the late 1970s by drawing illustrations for the student newspaper at UCLA. He soon went on to publish punk-inspired zines, some of which are included in the show. The roughly 500 drawings gathered at MOCA are executed in pen and ink, sometimes graphite, occasionally watercolor or crayon and often a mix of these mediums. Black ink on white paper is Pettibon’s most common palette, sometimes with the addition of washes or accents of color--especially red, but also blue, green, brown and, in just a couple of cases, yellow. The result, even when chiaroscuro and other illusionistic devices are approached, is drawing with a strong graphic emphasis.

Usually Pettibon’s drawings incorporate text, while the image is typically contained within a linear frame. The format, which obviously relates to the panels found in comic books, signals that the drawings are fragmentary scenes plucked from a larger narrative flow. They feel like clues to a bigger, somewhat urgent, but never fully explained mystery.

When I first saw Pettibon’s work displayed in the 1980s, the drawings were typically pushpinned to the wall, as if the art gallery were a kind of metaphorical community bulletin board. (Many are shown that way in this exhibition, while others are more conventionally framed.) The five mural-size drawings he’s made for the MOCA show--which essentially do not differ from his drawings on the page, save for the dribbles of runny color that come from working large on a vertical surface--expand that public-minded impetus to the scale of the museum. Pettibon’s drawings are like messages in a bottle that have washed up on shore; exactly where they came from can’t be known, but they’re plainly gesturing in your direction.

Pettibon’s subject matter ranges far and wide, from God to Gumby. Recurrent themes, which are also writ large in the wall drawings, include baseball, religion, work, surfing and the romance of travel and mobility, here given nostalgic form in locomotive engines of a bygone era (or, perhaps, those in a child’s toy train set).

Murder and mayhem, sex and movie stars, sin and redemption, work and play, art and alienation--Pettibon covers lots of territory. Yet, these works are neither illustrated aphorisms nor descriptively captioned pictures. Rarely do the words impinge on the images--or vice versa. Instead, word and picture seem to run on parallel tracks, sparking off each other.

Clustered in groups on the wall, Pettibon’s drawings are episodic meditations on the slipperiness of life. They speak with the rare sensibility of a nominal outsider who has reached that place by going so deep inside the culture that he’s disappeared within the mass--Ted Kaczynski merged with painter Dubuffet, perhaps, or folk artist Howard Finster with a college degree. Part aimless rant and part open-ended visual poem, Pettibon’s work is suffused with an inescapable poignancy.

His work certainly has connections to that of other artists for whom graphic directness has been integral and important, such as Mike Kelley or Jonathan Borofsky. Yet, among contemporary artists, Pettibon is finally sui generis, having restricted his entire output to drawing.

Drawing is the most direct and immediate means for tracking artistic thought--from brain through hand to page, as it were. Five hundred years ago, at the service of Michelangelo and others, a new emphasis on drawing emerged as a way of signaling that artists were not only manual craftsmen executing ideas formulated by patrons, but were creative individuals with thoughts of their own.

Pettibon unyoked drawing once and for all from painting and sculpture. He began drawing in the wake of the prominence achieved in the 1970s by Conceptual art, which had its own particular emphasis to make on ideas over objects. His mature career coincides with Conceptualism’s establishment as art’s international lingua franca.

And what of the apparent constancy in his work over the last two decades, where change seems strangely absent? It’s among the more intriguing questions posed by the survey.

The show, which was jointly organized by the Renaissance Society in Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has been assembled in an odd way that might obscure any evolution in Pettibon’s art. Works are grouped according to the public and private collectors that have acquired them, rather than by subject, style, year or other intrinsic category.

This curatorial method seems an attempt to point toward the fluid context in which Pettibon’s art exists. Each grouping is a kind of “portrait” of the collector’s tastes, thoughts and interests, as filtered through the artist’s output--though the same might be said of any collection. Still, I suppose it’s as good a way as any for initially organizing an extensive body of work such as this.

What’s more interesting is the apparent absence of significant change in Pettibon’s abundant output. These drawings coincide with a collapse in modern faith in ideas of artistic progress. Pettibon’s art instead forms an obsessive, fragmented, relentless stream of consciousness, which poetically pictures the nature of thought in a glutted Information Age. As the torrent rages on, the artist treads water with his eyes wide open, keeping his head (and ours) just above the overwhelming deluge.

* “Raymond Pettibon,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 2. Closed Mondays.