Known for his poetic collisions of "high" and "low" cultural forms, Raymond Pettibon first launched his career as an artist making zines, fliers, and other ephemera within the SoCal punk scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, published by his brother's record label SST Publications. The New Museum noted upon its 2017 retrospective, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work: "His work became identified with a brash and iconoclastic visual style that would influence and speak for an entire generation of disaffected youth … He stands alongside a generation of Los Angeles artists who have tackled the dissolution of American idealism head-on using fragments of its own visual culture." Pettibon's first zine was Captive Chains, released in 1978, and he would go on to produce hundreds more that gained a following far beyond his immediate community.
The choice of the fanzine as a medium of distribution immediately points also to the artist’s desire to exist beyond the confines of the art world and their wish to create a system of information, or counter-information one could say, that would run parallel against that of mainstream media.
The New Museum audio guide for Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Works, 2017
Raymond Pettibon b. 1957
The younger brother of a guitarist and songwriter for legendary punk band Black Flag, Raymond Pettibon's early history is grounded in the Los Angeles underground music scene. As part of this subculture, Pettibon began to draw graphic, comic-inspired imagery for zines, band fliers, and album artwork.
Pettibon's distinct style combines drawing and text for poetic — and often acerbic — commentary on American pop culture writ large, striking a chord in particular with counterculturally minded youth of the era. Among the impressive roster of bands that have commissioned the artist for album covers are Sonic Youth, Black Flag, and the Minutemen.
After his first gallery show in 1984, Pettibon continued to gain recognition beyond the locus of the SoCal punk scene. He was notably included in Paul Schimmel's 1992 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s. Just one year later, Pettibon's work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
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