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.