Raymond Pettibon

Sckonthis!! Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon's writing embraced the expanse of social-media digital technology for his art while allowing a more intimate glimpse at the artist. Between February 2011 and February 2021, Pettibon posted something in the region of eighteen thousand digital comments on Twitter. SCKONTHIS!! is based on the entire transcripts that appear here for the first time. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Pettibon's thinking as he embarks on an artistic enlightenment project. Pettibon's digital rants reveal the artist in a creative-informal rather than critical-formal mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his artworks, none of which are represented here. The twits cover topics as varied as golf, oral, life, and art history-subjects chosen at random for broad appeal and examined with passion and insight. Raymond Pettibon's (b. 1957) influential oeuvre engages a wide spectrum of American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture, among other sources. Intermixing image and text, his drawings engage the visual rhetorics of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media as well as classic texts by writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman. Through his exploration of the visual and critical potential of drawing, Pettibon's practice harkens back to the traditions of satire and social critique in the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and caricaturists such as William Hogarth, Gustave Doré, and Honoré Daumier, while reinforcing the importance of the medium within contemporary art and culture today. PCP Press has been a publisher of Avant-Garde art books and insurgent authors since '69.