Bold Comic Art For Adults Explores Political Satire And Pop Culture Icons (Raymond Pettibon) | Art21

FATHER: He was in college when he was in fifteen.

LANDLADY: …he's different.

I've never known anybody like him ever.

And venture to say that I probably never will.

MOTHER: Most of his art is actually writing.

RAYMOND: I spend a lot more 
time writing than I do drawing -

I really wouldn't want to make that distinction

or feel the need to separate the two.

The fact is I make work that, that requires both.

FATHER: all those books downstairs, 
and the thousands we have,

he reads those all the time.

LANDLADY: he loved to find books that are,

that they are underlined or highlighted

because especially those people 
might not even be alive any more,

so it's like he gets to kind of shadow

and find out what was interesting to 
the people that have gone before him…

RAYMOND: My writing is associational.

You don't necessarily know where it's 
going to go while you're doing it.

Sometimes people, ah, comment that the,

that there's such a disparity 
between the image and the words…

It mirrors the way I work overall quite a bit…

LANDLADY: I'm not trying to 
say he's a slob, it's just,

that's the way he works and I believe 
that he has to have his stuff around him,

all around him like that to be able to work.

That looks normal for him.

But it’s just hysterical to me that in his mind,

he felt that he would not make a mess at all.

He’s eccentric at times, I would have to say.

I have a special place in my heart for 
him, I just think he’s a great guy.

RAYMOND: This is gonna be a 
coup, actually, seeing me…

first, first known record or case of me

actually arranging or kind 
of cleaning up the place.

It can't be a documentary though,

because no one would believe it.

LANDLADY: He just has a really broad 
range of things that interest him,

and it can be erotic to a bowl of fruit,

A mind that can do that…

that kind of broad spectrum 
artistically has to be pretty busy

with a lot of different things.

MOTHER: It's a thinking 
persons art, isn't it true?

It's not just drawing pretty pictures,

and he has all these ideas.

RAYMOND: The way I think and the 
way I talk and the way I write,

it’s not very direct always.

It can lead anywhere.

I want it to be as fluent as possible.

I mean, that’s a major part of my work.

Almost like an athlete would exercise his muscles

and do the same moves and get to a point

where it becomes almost instinctive.

Even though my work is usually 
just, just one drawing,

it is more of a narrative than 
it is a cartoon with a punch line

and a resolution and a laugh at the end.

There still is an element of caricature 
and cartoons that my work retains.

Gumby represents an alter-ego 
for my work as an artist.

There’s actually a lot more 
to that figure than just

ninety-eight ounces of clay or whatever.

In some of his cartoons he goes 
into a biography or historical book

and he interacts with real figures from the past.

And I tend to do that in my 
work and in my videos as well.

You know, who for me, does more 
than Gumby would be Vavoom.

When I'm doing drawings of Vavoom, 
putting him in this kind of

epic, sublime, romantic 
landscape and he is this little,

little guy with a booming voice…

I consider characters like Gumby or Vavoom,

Felix the Cat, with respect, compared 
to the President of the United States…

this one or any or them, you know, really.

And those are the real cartoon figures,

and those are the real ridiculous figures.

RAYMOND: There’s a very direct 
kind of anger in some of my work.

The pretentious, the powerful, decadent, corrupt.

Those would tend to be people 
who I don’t respect at all.

It's a way of trying to 
break down this natural awe

with those heroes that comes 
out of a sort of fear and envy…

I've never considered myself 
much of a political artist.

And most of my art doesn't really deal 
in like explicitly political issues.

But you know, I'm not going to 
apologize or shy away from it any,

any more than I would any other subject.

(Patty) Daddy, you never 
taught me the facts of life.

You never read me Marx.

I grew up not knowing what 
a worker is or what they do.

Look at me now Daddy.

Look at your little daughter.

I’m out of the closet for good.

The blindfold’s peeled off 
for the first time in my life.

RAYMOND: Patty Hearst and the SLA…

it would really be impossible 
I would think, for me anyway,

to not treat it with broad comic aspect to it

because the whole situation 
was such a broad burlesque.

And like a lot of the best humor,

whether it's the Three Stooges or Molière,

it's about someone who is 
really strident or pretentious,

and a lot of political groups from the sixties,

seventies were so full of their own righteousness.

It's hard to take that sort of thing seriously.

If you can see it from any historical distance…

If I'm going to be 
condemned for broaching that subject

from a comic angle that is, 
that's completely absurd…

to demonize them in particular when

you had a war going on that was killing millions,

I mean it's a way for me to 
objectify the lines there.

To even the playing field a little bit,

rather than picking one enemy and demonizing them

to basically cover your own ass.

RAYMOND: Now if you could get me 
on camera doing a straight line

that would also be a historic shot.

That's not going to happen here.

If you do look at my, my 
works, baseball for instance,

there is a kind of larger than 
life attitude to a lot of it.

Not all the works are pure 
adulation of the ball players.

Baseball has probably been my 
favorite since I was a child.

The reason why I keep coming 
back to certain images

is probably most often that there's 
a visual quality that works for me,

whether you are throwing the 
pitch or batting the ball

you do have that sense of movement 
and for an artist like myself,

whose work is that one 
moment, that can be important.

My work on the subject does say a lot about

what goes on off the field 
as well about the society–

it's kind of a microcosm 
of the society as a whole.

MOTHER: He draws a train and it can give you maybe hundred stories just looking at the train.

RAYMOND: I think trains in my 
work are particularly American.

In this country, we still had vast frontiers left.

It was about bringing the shores 
together, about going west.

Even when I was a kid, when 
I heard the train at night

it was like the equivalent of running 
off and joining the circus, I guess.

Every American kid kind of had that 
somewhere in his mind and kind of embedded.

Beyond that, it’s an image that works 
well for the kind of drawings I do.

RAYMOND: What you see is these motifs 
that keep reoccurring in my work.

They started as one image and for whatever reason,

they did have this kind of resonance to 
me and that brought them back and some of,

some of them, you know, 
have had a fairly long life.

There is a kind of a strain in my work that 
is usually described as like a film noir.

There probably is more failure depicted 
in my work then there is success.

(Landlady) I find a lot of humor in his work,

because the world’s kind of scary sometimes,

and he tends to be able to make some 
of the most horrible things funny.

He’ll just flat out put it down on paper

and then write something about 
it and you can’t help but laugh.

Ray: I don't like my humor to be in 
the service of making fun of people

based on superficialities just for the 
sake of going for some cheap laugh.

I won’t do that if it will hurt someone,

if it’s based on things that 
people have no control over.

We as humans still so oftentimes feel the need to

have someone to pick on, you know.

RAYMOND: Art can be a kind of 
therapeutic or kind of a fantasy life or,

or wish fulfillment or creating 
this alternate universe.

Art to me is, gives me the freedom

to do that.

I don’t feel constrained by

the subject matter…

I welcome practically anything

into the drawing.

I think it’s work that is best when 
there isn’t any final resolution.

When you don't arrive.