Raymond Pettibon is a surf-punk artist with a taste for the sloppy sublime and a shambling contempt for tidiness, preciousness, and hypocrisy. He was born in 1957, and, living in Hermosa Beach near Los Angeles, made Xeroxed flyers and album covers for his older brother Greg Ginn’s now-legendary band Black Flag, and lots and lots of zines. His jaunty, prophetic sense of the grotesque has translated particularly well to social media (you should follow him on Twitter, but not if you’re easily distracted by a certain Joyce-ian immediacy in spelling) and our current political era. You could say that Trump is the perfect embodiment of every suspicion any punk rocker ever had about the rotten truth at the core of our social order.
Today Pettibon’s scrawled revelations on scraps of paper are considered objets d’art: He’s represented by the big-shot gallerist David Zwirner, lauded by Peter Schjeldahl, and has an enormous retrospective at the New Museum, from which this slideshow is drawn.
