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LOT 29

RAYMOND PETTIBON, (b. 1957)

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23 Works from the Installation A Yarn Spun to No Mend, 1990-1991

23 Works from the Installation A Yarn Spun to No Mend, 1990-1991

Each: signed and dated (on the reverse)
ink on paper; ink, watercolor and acrylic on paper and ink and color pencil on paper

various sizes
Smallest: 9 3/8 x 7 3/8 in. (23.8 x 18.7 cm.)
Largest: 24 1/2 x 17 7/8 in. (62.2 x 45.4 cm.)

Provenance
The artist
Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, 26 January-26 April 1992
The Hague, GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, Raymond Pettibon: Hellbent 'n Hardbound, 14 December 2002-16 March 2003 (10 of the 23 works were included in this exhibition)
New York, The New Museum, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, 8 February-9 April 2017

Literature
Paul Schimmel, Norman M. Klein, and Lane Reylea, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Thames and Hudson, Inc., 1992, pp. 123-124, 126-128
Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, eds., Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, New York: Phaidon Press Limited and New Museum, 2017, pp. 126-127

Born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon was raised in Hermosa Beach, California, and has become one of the most quintessential and influential artists to emerge from Southern California. The fourth of five children, the artist's father nicknamed him "Petit Bon," which he adopted as his surname at the age of twenty-one. Pettibon earned an economics degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977 and worked as a high school mathematics teacher in the Los Angeles public school system for a short period. He then plunged into artmaking while living in his parents' basement; even then as compulsively productive as he would remain throughout his career. The bookish surfer gained a growing audience when he made flyers and album covers for the punk band Black Flag (his older brother Greg Ginn was the founder and guitarist) as well as numerous zines. (P. Schjeldahl, "The Enigmatic Art of Raymond Pettibon", The New Yorker, 6 February 2017).

Pettibon's work embraces a wide spectrum of American "high" and "low" culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the anti-establishment aesthetic of home-made album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary. His wide range of drawings and collages are unified by their bold, vivid lines and striking compositions.

In the late 1970s, Pettibon had already developed his easily recognizable visual style and while it could be said that his subject matter has become increasingly politically inspired, his approach and technique have remained constant for several decades. His obsessively worked drawings often incorporate text mined from literature and other media, as well as his own original writing. Pettibon has said he considers text as vital to his process as the drawn image. There is frequently a sarcastic and humorous element to his narratives, whereby the text lends a staccato voice to his various subjects, whether sport stars, celebrities, politicians, policemen, or anonymous American citizens. Barry Blinderman, who gave Pettibon his first solo exhibition at the Semaphore Gallery in New York in 1986, equated the artist's use of text as imagery to music, reflecting that from the start Pettibon used words in his drawings to hijack our minds' drive to find meaning in images, in something like the way lyrics hijack music. (N. Princenthal, "Raymond Pettibon: Pictures, Literary Voices and Surfers, Too", The New York Times, 1 January 2017, Sec. AR, p. 22)

The present lot is comprised of 23 framed works on paper from A Yarn Spun to No Mend, Pettibon's monumental contribution to Paul Schimmel's groundbreaking first exhibition as chief curator, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1992. Helter Skelter sought to reveal the noir hidden under the Light & Space and Finish Fetish with which Los Angeles art history was so solidly connected. "There was always this perception of Los Angeles being Venice, Santa Monica and the beach," said Schimmel, "It may never have been that, but that was a pervasive notion and a lot of the artists who are most internationally known from the '60s and '70s, be it David Hockney or Sam Francis, continued to support that in one way or another. And artists who didn't, left." (S. Muchnic, "Art in the City of Angels and Demons," The Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-01-26-ca-1080-story.html)

The works presented—many of which were newly completed projects or installations designed specifically to be sited at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA—share a common vision in which alienation, dispossession, perversity, sex, and violence either dominate the landscape or form disruptive undercurrents. Helter Skelter included works by ten writers and sixteen other notable visual artists from the Los Angeles area, such as Chris Burden, Llyn Foulkes, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray and Nancy Rubins. ("Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s." MOCA, Los Angeles, www.moca.org/exhibition/helter-skelter-la-art-in-the-1990s.) Also included in the exhibition were Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, both of whose work share a simmering anger, dark humor, formal aggression, and often youthful male angst with that of Raymond Pettibon. Many of the artists' works are connected by their interest in popular culture, cartoon-like images, adolescent anxieties, large-scale installations or performance art.

The original installation of A Yarn Spun to No Mend included hundreds of unique works on paper informally hung on the gallery walls with thumbtacks. This untraditional museum presentation was in keeping with Pettibon's preferred method but was also emblematic of the bold and immediate nature of the exhibition as a whole. The curatorial team created an exhibition catalogue that was in many ways a work of art in and of itself. With writings by the likes of Charles Bukowski and full-page images of many works from the exhibition. Even Paul Schimmel's essay had spacing between the letters that created a wholly unexpected visual dynamic. In this catalogue, which would mark a crossroads in Contemporary Art history, 24 works from Pettibon's installation were selected to illustrate the whole. The present lot consists of 23 of these specially selected, visually stunning works.

As Christopher Knight later wrote, "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...Part aimless rant and part open-ended visual poem, Pettibon's work is suffused with an inescapable poignancy. Pettibon's art ... 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." (C. Knight, "Pettibon Stakes His Fame on Drawing," The Los Angeles Times, 11 October 1999, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-11-ca-21075-story.html)

Paul Schimmel remarked that the works presented in Helter Skelter displayed the discontent and anxiety of Angelenos, in sharp defiance of prevailing notions of Los Angeles as nothing more than fun, sun and movie stars. The exhibition's title was an immediate double-barreled attack on a lethargic art scene. Helter Skelter brought back horrific memories of the murder and mayhem visited on Los Angeles by Charles Manson, who used the title of the Beatles song as the name of his radical philosophy, which envisioned his killings as the spark of a racial holocaust. (S. Muchnic, "ART: Public Warm, Critics Cool Toward 'Helter Skelter', The Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-26-ca-1293-story.html) In conjuring that association in the exhibition title, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s laid bare dark and dangerous societal issues and artists' remarkable creative reactions.

The popular and critical reaction to the exhibition came in stark contrast to Schimmel's expectations. Once the show opened, he remarked "I had it all wrong. I thought there would be a public outcry against the exhibition and a supportive critical response. Instead, the public has loved it. We have had about 100,000 visitors, a phenomenal number for a contemporary art show. They keep coming back and writing favorable comments. But at the same time, we have received some very strong critical opinions--some thoughtful, some outraged." (S. Muchnic)

None was more outraged than Time magazine critic Robert Hughes, who wrote: "If you thought new American art couldn't get much worse than it was by the end of the 1980s, visit MOCA and learn." He granted faint praise to works by Chris Burden, Victor Estrada and Manual Ocampo, but declared that Mike Kelley's installation is "visual zit popping" and pronounced Raymond Pettibon "the nadir of this Valley Girl Dada." (S. Muchnic) Ironically, it was this critical backlash that led to international recognition of the artists as well as further exploration of the many facets of Los Angeles art, including Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997, an exhibition organized by the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark which traveled to Italy, England, and Germany, as well as to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 1998. As Schimmel invited critics and museum visitors alike...

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23 Works from the Installation A Yarn Spun to No Mend, 1990-1991

23 Works from the Installation A Yarn Spun to No Mend, 1990-1991

Each: signed and dated (on the reverse)
ink on paper; ink, watercolor and acrylic on paper and ink and color pencil on paper

various sizes
Smallest: 9 3/8 x 7 3/8 in. (23.8 x 18.7 cm.)
Largest: 24 1/2 x 17 7/8 in. (62.2 x 45.4 cm.)

Provenance
The artist
Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, 26 January-26 April 1992
The Hague, GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, Raymond Pettibon: Hellbent 'n Hardbound, 14 December 2002-16 March 2003 (10 of the 23 works were included in this exhibition)
New York, The New Museum, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, 8 February-9 April 2017

Literature
Paul Schimmel, Norman M. Klein, and Lane Reylea, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Thames and Hudson, Inc., 1992, pp. 123-124, 126-128
Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, eds., Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, New York: Phaidon Press Limited and New Museum, 2017, pp. 126-127

Born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon was raised in Hermosa Beach, California, and has become one of the most quintessential and influential artists to emerge from Southern California. The fourth of five children, the artist's father nicknamed him "Petit Bon," which he adopted as his surname at the age of twenty-one. Pettibon earned an economics degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977 and worked as a high school mathematics teacher in the Los Angeles public school system for a short period. He then plunged into artmaking while living in his parents' basement; even then as compulsively productive as he would remain throughout his career. The bookish surfer gained a growing audience when he made flyers and album covers for the punk band Black Flag (his older brother Greg Ginn was the founder and guitarist) as well as numerous zines. (P. Schjeldahl, "The Enigmatic Art of Raymond Pettibon", The New Yorker, 6 February 2017).

Pettibon's work embraces a wide spectrum of American "high" and "low" culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the anti-establishment aesthetic of home-made album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary. His wide range of drawings and collages are unified by their bold, vivid lines and striking compositions.

In the late 1970s, Pettibon had already developed his easily recognizable visual style and while it could be said that his subject matter has become increasingly politically inspired, his approach and technique have remained constant for several decades. His obsessively worked drawings often incorporate text mined from literature and other media, as well as his own original writing. Pettibon has said he considers text as vital to his process as the drawn image. There is frequently a sarcastic and humorous element to his narratives, whereby the text lends a staccato voice to his various subjects, whether sport stars, celebrities, politicians, policemen, or anonymous American citizens. Barry Blinderman, who gave Pettibon his first solo exhibition at the Semaphore Gallery in New York in 1986, equated the artist's use of text as imagery to music, reflecting that from the start Pettibon used words in his drawings to hijack our minds' drive to find meaning in images, in something like the way lyrics hijack music. (N. Princenthal, "Raymond Pettibon: Pictures, Literary Voices and Surfers, Too", The New York Times, 1 January 2017, Sec. AR, p. 22)

The present lot is comprised of 23 framed works on paper from A Yarn Spun to No Mend, Pettibon's monumental contribution to Paul Schimmel's groundbreaking first exhibition as chief curator, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1992. Helter Skelter sought to reveal the noir hidden under the Light & Space and Finish Fetish with which Los Angeles art history was so solidly connected. "There was always this perception of Los Angeles being Venice, Santa Monica and the beach," said Schimmel, "It may never have been that, but that was a pervasive notion and a lot of the artists who are most internationally known from the '60s and '70s, be it David Hockney or Sam Francis, continued to support that in one way or another. And artists who didn't, left." (S. Muchnic, "Art in the City of Angels and Demons," The Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-01-26-ca-1080-story.html)

The works presented—many of which were newly completed projects or installations designed specifically to be sited at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA—share a common vision in which alienation, dispossession, perversity, sex, and violence either dominate the landscape or form disruptive undercurrents. Helter Skelter included works by ten writers and sixteen other notable visual artists from the Los Angeles area, such as Chris Burden, Llyn Foulkes, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray and Nancy Rubins. ("Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s." MOCA, Los Angeles, www.moca.org/exhibition/helter-skelter-la-art-in-the-1990s.) Also included in the exhibition were Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, both of whose work share a simmering anger, dark humor, formal aggression, and often youthful male angst with that of Raymond Pettibon. Many of the artists' works are connected by their interest in popular culture, cartoon-like images, adolescent anxieties, large-scale installations or performance art.

The original installation of A Yarn Spun to No Mend included hundreds of unique works on paper informally hung on the gallery walls with thumbtacks. This untraditional museum presentation was in keeping with Pettibon's preferred method but was also emblematic of the bold and immediate nature of the exhibition as a whole. The curatorial team created an exhibition catalogue that was in many ways a work of art in and of itself. With writings by the likes of Charles Bukowski and full-page images of many works from the exhibition. Even Paul Schimmel's essay had spacing between the letters that created a wholly unexpected visual dynamic. In this catalogue, which would mark a crossroads in Contemporary Art history, 24 works from Pettibon's installation were selected to illustrate the whole. The present lot consists of 23 of these specially selected, visually stunning works.

As Christopher Knight later wrote, "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...Part aimless rant and part open-ended visual poem, Pettibon's work is suffused with an inescapable poignancy. Pettibon's art ... 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." (C. Knight, "Pettibon Stakes His Fame on Drawing," The Los Angeles Times, 11 October 1999, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-11-ca-21075-story.html)

Paul Schimmel remarked that the works presented in Helter Skelter displayed the discontent and anxiety of Angelenos, in sharp defiance of prevailing notions of Los Angeles as nothing more than fun, sun and movie stars. The exhibition's title was an immediate double-barreled attack on a lethargic art scene. Helter Skelter brought back horrific memories of the murder and mayhem visited on Los Angeles by Charles Manson, who used the title of the Beatles song as the name of his radical philosophy, which envisioned his killings as the spark of a racial holocaust. (S. Muchnic, "ART: Public Warm, Critics Cool Toward 'Helter Skelter', The Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-26-ca-1293-story.html) In conjuring that association in the exhibition title, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s laid bare dark and dangerous societal issues and artists' remarkable creative reactions.

The popular and critical reaction to the exhibition came in stark contrast to Schimmel's expectations. Once the show opened, he remarked "I had it all wrong. I thought there would be a public outcry against the exhibition and a supportive critical response. Instead, the public has loved it. We have had about 100,000 visitors, a phenomenal number for a contemporary art show. They keep coming back and writing favorable comments. But at the same time, we have received some very strong critical opinions--some thoughtful, some outraged." (S. Muchnic)

None was more outraged than Time magazine critic Robert Hughes, who wrote: "If you thought new American art couldn't get much worse than it was by the end of the 1980s, visit MOCA and learn." He granted faint praise to works by Chris Burden, Victor Estrada and Manual Ocampo, but declared that Mike Kelley's installation is "visual zit popping" and pronounced Raymond Pettibon "the nadir of this Valley Girl Dada." (S. Muchnic) Ironically, it was this critical backlash that led to international recognition of the artists as well as further exploration of the many facets of Los Angeles art, including Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997, an exhibition organized by the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark which traveled to Italy, England, and Germany, as well as to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 1998. As Schimmel invited critics and museum visitors alike...

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Time, Location
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USA, Los Angeles, CA
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