Word: pettibone
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...