Raymond Pettibon: Here's Your Irony Back Political Works 1975-2013 - Tapa dura

RAYMOND PETTIBON: HERE'S YOUR IRONY BACK, POLITICAL WORKS 1975-2013 is superior in its design and reproduction, on uncoated paper stock appropriate to the art, but is also unavoidably reductive. A glance at the dates of Pettibon's notionally topical drawings shows that his targets are often long past their sell-by dates as subjects for satire-like his early-'80s works sending up hippies and Vietnam protesters. He has a larger goal: to create a commedia dell'America whose stock characters, such as the Artist (Krazy Kat), the Politician (Reagan), the Movie Queen (Joan Crawford), and the Villain (Manson), pitilessly reflects the broken culture that produced them.--Christopher Lyon "Bookforum "

A pioneer of Southern California underground culture, Raymond Pettibon (*1957 in Tucson) has blurred the boundaries of “high” and “low“ since the late seventies―from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Rich in detail, his obsessively worked drawings draw freely on myriad sources spanning the cultural spectrum. The resulting highly poetic constructions function as acute and authentic reflections of contemporary society. Throughout the years, his subjects have included political figures and historical events, with particular intensity since the events of September 11, 2001. The volume features images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Bush senior and junior, the Kennedys, Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama, and Osama bin Laden alongside scenes from the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, and protest movements.