In the Interview, poet and novelist Dennis Cooper speaks with the artist about recurring his interests, among them baseball, literature and surfers. Curator Robert Storr discusses in his Survey the full scope of Pettibon's prolific career, examining the context of 1960s-80s California culture and the work's rich variety of visual and textual references. Ulrich Loock, who curated Pettibon's first retrospective in 1995, looks at a single image from Pettibon's oeuvre, a drawing of the loudmouth cartoon character Vavoom. The artist has selected extracts from Modern Painters (1843-60) by John Ruskin; The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne; and a poem from The Arte of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Puttenham, all of which echo the artist's use of text and image to form a complete whole. Raymond Pettibon's writings include early poetry; pages from his notebooks; and never-before-published song lyrics and scripts on subjects ranging from Jim Morrison to Hollywood seduction.
