1992

Untitled (Who Knows Whether)

American, born 1957

Raymond Pettibon combs a vast array of books, magazines, movies, and television sources for images and texts, producing ink and wash drawings of everyday things in a matter-of-fact style. These he combines with extremely literate and occasionally arcane quotations-out of context, incomplete, and sometimes altered. Certain subjects, such as surfers and baseball players, occur in a number of his drawings, as do waves and torrents. While the relationship between text and image are never completely clear in Pettibon's drawings, the roiling spiral of water in this work seems alien to the text's "great peaceful rivers," where one's soul may find harmony, and perhaps suggests the headache that such profound reflection might produce!