Word: pettibon
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...time comics were genuinely a mass medium," Spiegelman said, "and didn't have to seek approval form the cultural institutions that exist. As that has changed, comics have had to reinvent themselves or die." Reinvent they did, and in the process reinvented the publishing business. As artist Raymond Pettibon puts in in the exhibition catalog: "Comics, the jilted suitor of the high airs art world, come back as the savior of the book industry in the form of the graphic novel...
...mainly, something in me is suspicious about using this show to elevate the pedigree of comics. It's the venue as much as the works that compels visitors to think that a comic strip can be taken as seriously as a Lichtenstein. I agree with Pettibon, who writes, "For fans of comics the Museum of Art is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art." As fascinating and as vindicating as it is to see all this wonderful material on museum walls, the enterprise speaks to two slightly neurotic trends in our culture...
...Anyway, as Pettibon notes, "Comics are a book medium. Comic Books on the wall don't pass as comic books. You couldn't flip through one if you tried -- and that's a shame." That's exactly right: the way to appreciate comic book art is by reading them, in book form...
Recent group shows, including that landmark dud, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, have been full of this stuff -- by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon and others. Its tacky sub-pop imagery, its dazed passive-aggressive stance, its fixation on teenage weltschmerz, all entitle it to be seen as a mini-trend, linking up with the wider American cult of dumb popular therapeutics. In the 1980s, American neo-Expressionist artists shoved their excremental clods of paint at us with the self-evident pleasure that eight-year-olds take in dirty words. Patheticism is the conceptual version of this: no paint, just the words...
...more or less given that painting is a form of white male domination, implying "mastery." Indeed, the catalog presents quite a riff on this subject when it reflects on what might strike the unprepared visitor as the wretched pictorial ineptitude of such artists as Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Karen Kilimnik. (Williams can't draw at all, although her installation The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success includes a dandy splotch of plastic vomit.) Their work, says the catalog, "deliberately renounces success and power in favor of the degraded and dysfunctional, transforming deficiencies into something positive in true...