To Wit: Raymond Pettibon

The absurdist, vaguely political artist Raymond Pettibon has an ongoing gallery show at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, and it is overwhelming. Rarely does one visit a solo artist show and feel the need to come back to make sure you not only have time to properly chew on all of the content, but to even absorb it at all in a cursory way. The main theme was an abrasive adolescent aesthetic paired with an equally aggressive earnest poetic sensibility. The result is a disorienting and memorable experience, kind of like reading some good David Foster Wallace pages.

A recurring technique in the show is to print sentences, using a highly idiosyncratic but still decipherable English dialect, along the surfaces of his drawings and paintings of genitals, insects, policemen, and lots of other things, saying intermittently absurd and profound, wise, resigned things: "The whole business of writing seems to demand a lot of verve, and I just don't seem to have it anymore. It doesn't seem to matter." Of course, the show where this sentiment is communicated is a resounding, overflowing example of verve.

Part of what makes the show so interesting is how raw and open Pettibon is, even about his own disillusionment with creativity itself. Still, he has chosen to be an artist, no matter what, and it is instructive as pertains to the business of being an artist that he was able to produce such an intricate, absorbing, detailed show despite being seemingly burdened down with the idea that none of what he was writing mattered.

And, to be sure, there are thousands of words on display here, sometimes in free-standing aphorisms unconnected to images, and sometimes filling in the space between images and figures in a painting. An example of such a free-standing aphorism is: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in the absence of natural writers. In a true time, I should never have written." Again, the idea of art being a natural, flowing process is important for Pettibon, and he is endlessly frustrated that our time seems, to him, so inhospitable to the kinds of natural, flowing processes that ought to characterize genuine human agency and humanity.

The sheer volume of work on display is a kind of political statement against the segmentation, plannedness, and lack of spontaneity of corporate capitalism, an enactment of how to retake sovereign personhood in the face of the enervating, dispiriting forces of capital's power over the person.

Of course, this political statement does sometimes grate against aesthetic accomplishments, as many of the paintings on display are, as generously as one may read them, purely adolescent scribblings of penises with little more than basic shock value, and the penile parade does get a bit tedious at times. But this is itself an admirable example of an artist's fidelity to his political mission--he is pushing himself, his frail, debilitated, decadent industrialized and corporatized mental and bodily resources, beyond their capacity, to try to reclaim some of the grandeur and flow rightfully befitting a human being, in a 'true time.'

The final message of To Wit is just this--we are so removed from genuine humanity in our decaying capitalist culture, that the attempt to reclaim humanity is not just exhausting, but will necessarily result in grotesque, tasteless productions, simply for the fact that we have no idea what genuine humanity is in our time. All we have, if we are strict political moralists like Pettibon, is the unwavering conviction that we are missing it and creativity is the way to get it back.

On Gravity and the Role of Movies

Movies have long been our most important popular cultural artifact—the unifying element between people, the thing that we can most readily point to as representing our shared taste. Bringing up a line or a scene connects us instantly to another person, and someone without any such points of reference will be at a significant remove from us.

Still, despite the obvious importance of movies, there is something oddly dismissible about them. Try to think about the most important, formative, touchstone movies of the past twenty years or so—what comes to mind? The Departed? The Dark Knight? Pulp Fiction? None of these shed real light on who or what we are, and none of them remain with us in a meaningful way. The recent film Gravity has captured the public mind in a more dramatic way than any film in recent memory, and it is interesting to look at it deeply as a way to find out what exactly it is we get from movies.
            Gravity is a remarkably simple story, sort of like The Old Man and the Sea in space (and with a rather hot woman instead of than an old man, obviously). It is purely a depiction of the various and maddeningly minor tasks necessary to secure basic existence in an unforgivingly harsh climate. It is a straightforward representation of how the human spirit can triumph against forbidding odds and circumstances. A fire extinguisher is perhaps the central plot device in the film.

This is all to say that there may not be even a single real idea in the film—it is the ideal of self-evidence, of there being nothing under the surface, beyond the easy metaphor of transplanting Sandra Bullock’s atmospheric struggle onto terra firma. The fact that it has been hailed as a “near perfect movie” by critics is telling—movies aren’t really supposed to have ideas in them. The ideal movie can be totally devoid of ideas.

So what then does a movie do? It communicates physical reality in a heightened, distilled way. And this is supposed to be the most important means of transferring cultural information. It is a natural extension of the importance of realism in all art—presenting ourselves with a more controlled and stylized version of ourselves, prizing fidelity to sensation and experience over intellective accomplishment. It is a surefire path toward sociocultural stasis at best, and general narcissism at worst.