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About the Light
The Uncomfortable
Worlds of Gregory Crewdson and
Raymond Pettibon
by Paul Allen Anderson
ãAs artists we walk around with
a single story to tell,ä the photographer Gregory Crewdson once
proposed, perhaps a little too forthrightly. There is always
ãsome kind of central narrative. And I think the struggle is to
attempt to reinvent that story over and over again in different
forms...ä Crewdson, for example, is not shy about his work's
psychological probing being grounded in his father's profession
as a psychoanalyst in Brooklyn. Twilight (Abrams, 2002), the
book of reproductions that accompanies the 2002 shows of Crewdson's recent large format (48 by 60 inches) exhibition
prints, is dedicated to Dr. Frank Crewdson, presumably a
therapist committed to illuminating the crepuscular world of his
patientsâ unconsciouses.
The intricately staged suburban
images in Twilight are not necessarily set at the hour of
nightfall, but rather at the hour of therapy in upstate New
York. Often manifesting the charactersâ condition of
sleepwalking or uncanny automatism, the highly cinematic
pictures share the ãcentral narrativeä of Crewdsonâs unearthly
suburbs. In particular, one imagines many of the adult
characters noting to themselves or their therapists that ãnot
only is my life all wrong, itâs not even mine.ä Civilization, or
at least Crewdsonâs meticulous, beautifully lit rendering of a
certain middle-class American suburban slice of it, is largely a
drag. This world's repressed adults look ill at ease with one
another while their healthy-looking children appear withdrawn
and isolated. Taken as a whole, the pictures in Twilight depict
the hinge between the empty routines of their days and nights
and the puzzlingly familiar dreamworlds marked by floral
monoliths and inexplicable beams of light. The regressive
impulse captured in the uncanny, Freud wrote, ãis in reality
nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and
old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the
process of repression.ä One imagines John Cheeverâs tight-lipped
suburbanites suffering a decline in their class status and
salving their ennui in the kitschy neo-pastoral dreams captured
by Steven Spielbergâs blockbuster fantasies E.T: The
Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Typical outdoor dream scenes in
Twilight include expressionless neighborhood youths gently
tending a monolith of flowers in the middle of the street or
younger children observing their school bus turned on its side
and smoking. Older characters dream more desperately: a man in
underwear has crashed his car and fled by foot up a beanstalk to
paradise, or at least another zip code. Crewdsonâs evening
images offer assorted characters transfixed by mysterious rays
shining from the heavens, from a houseâs foundation or from
backyard outbuildings. In a benevolent echo of an early scene
from Spielbergâs Poltergeist, a young girl stares at the light
and the colorful butterflies emanating mysteriously from a
toolshed. The pastoral fantasies of regression in Twilight
imply
a dream of freedom from deracinated authority figures, internal
(in the case of Crewdsonâs repressed, ashamed adults) or
external (in the case of his children). The spaceships of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, we recall, project mysterious
spotlights upon selected humans below: at first, the light is
terrifying and physically damaging. By the filmâs end, however,
the Mothership's warm bath of light enshrouds a crew of
pint-sized extraterrestrials as benign as the Christ-like lost
lamb of E.T. The child-like aliens offer to take Richard
Dreyfuss back to their gentle world as a visitor. Crewdson
constructs iconic images of suburban life that hope to be full
of narrative possibility. Too often, however, the pictures
retrace the same claustrophobic notes of familial tension and
psychic determination with slight variations of the dreamworld
reaching beyond.
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Raymond
Pettibon, No Title (I Grew Up...), 1985, pen and ink on
paper, 12 by 9 inches (all photos courtesy Regen Projects,
Los Angeles). |
The images and texts in
Phaidonâs Raymond Pettibon (2001) from their Contemporary
Artists series of large-format paperbacks promise one kind of
antidote to Twilight's cinematic claustrophobia and thematic
legibility. While Crewdson stages meticulous scenes full of
narrative possibilities but ultimately powered by the same
ãcentral narrative,ä the survey in Raymond Pettibon does not
even try to exert narrative control over Pettibonâs vast output
from the past few decades, most especially of drawings. These
works number in the thousands, and the ones sampled here
demonstrate an exotically prolific artist eagerly throwing
narrative coherence into a centrifuge. Similarly, his gallery
and museum exhibitions can stage what seems to be a riot of
drawings and huge wall paintings. One imagines Pettibon
following the advice on montage given by Sergei Eisenstein and
excerpted in the fascinating Raymond Pettibon: A Reader (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1998). Eisenstein ranks there as a
writer who engages Pettibon ãto be a part of their life.ä ãLet
the dark, gloomy air,ã Eisenstein wrote, äbe seen beaten by the
rush of opposing winds wreathed in perpetual rain mingled with
hail, and bearing hither and thither a vast network of the torn
branches of trees mixed together with an infinite number of
leaves.ä Pettibonâs nearly infinite number of drawings amount to
very collectible and expensive leaves.
Pettibon came to prominence in
the late 1970s and early 1980s for his iconic graphic designs
for Californiaâs SST record label (started by the punk band
Black Flag). His subjects since then, however, have ranged
widely. ãEveryone wants to talk about rock ânâ roll,ä he notes
in an interview with Dennis Cooper. "Iâll do that if I donât
have to bring my art into it. It just shows the obsession that
society has with rock music and rock culture, nowhere more so
than in art.ä In response to those restrictive obsessions,
Raymond Pettibon surveys a major artist whose art fuses a
disaffected noir vision of the Sixties counterculture and
post-Sixties America to a literary aesthete's old-fashioned
Bildung and bibliophilia.
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Raymond Pettibon,
Untitled (Self Portrait on LSD), 1990, pen and ink on paper,
8 by 11 inches. |
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Pettibonâs ink drawings don't
illustrate or externalize states of tension and narrative
ambiguity so much as capture the signature acts or motivations
of his countless characters. Sparks fly when the anarchic punk
detachment of a ãblank generationä of California hardcore rubs
against hand-lettered texts suggesting Wildean cool and literary
refinement. In an informative essay for the volume, Robert Storr
approaches the antinomies of Pettibonâs wayward art through the
artistâs biography as a white male Californian born in 1957.
ãPettibon is the exemplary artist of the morning after, the
picture-making poet of disasters that stalk abandon who
nevertheless wants more than anything to disappear into his
imagination.ä Since the mid-1980s, the unparalleled graphic poet
of post-Sixties disaster and punk attitude÷whom the critic
Benjamin Buchloh has applauded for avant-gardist images of
negation through ãidentificatory realismä÷has taken up a far
broader variety of moods and topics.
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Raymond
Pettibon, No Title (He had seen as much), 1998, pen and ink
on paper, 16 by 22 inches. |
Some of Twilight's more effective pictures reach for
enchantment through the glow of a mysterious, otherworldly light
suggestive of fantastical transfiguration and pastoral
regression. Pettibon's illumination, though, is less kind. His
1981 drawing Untitled (You Didnât Love) depicts a glare from
Elvisâs crucified body: the accompanying text reads ãYou Didnât
Love Him Enough!ä Despite the air of punk sacrilege, the image
and text both suggest a ironic light of judgment and
self-judgment in the act of unmasking. Similarly, Untitled (He
had seen) (1988) captures the tragic side of Supermanâs x-ray
vision. The muscular hero stands in costume next to a naked
Superwoman. Beside the golden beams shooting toward the sky from
these heroesâ eyes Pettibon writes, ãHe had seen as much as heâd
wanted of real life·. He couldnât stop staring through
everything as if he were a god, or were blind.ä In the years
since, some of Pettibonâs largest images have depicted solitary
surfers, baseball players and other white men on the American
scene who have dreamt of self-contained athletic asceticism and
mastery. The aesthete is not as isolated as he thinks.
PAUL ALLEN ANDERSON is assistant professor of American
culture and African American Studies at the University of
Michigan, and author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem
Renaissance Thought (Duke U.P., 2001).
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