RAYMOND PETTIBON / At First Watching

Raymond Pettibon
At First Watching  1989
Offset print of ink on paper, 28 pages
22 x 14cm, 1st edition
SST Pubs

Condition: Used, very good. Mild toning due to age.

Edition: #32 of 70, noted in black ink in Pettibon's hand on the front cover 

Known for his poetic collisions of "high" and "low" cultural forms, Raymond Pettibon first launched his career as an artist making zines, fliers, and other ephemera within the SoCal punk scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, published by his brother's record label SST Publications. "His work became identified with a brash and iconoclastic visual style that would influence and speak for an entire generation of disaffected youth … He stands alongside a generation of Los Angeles artists who have tackled the dissolution of American idealism head-on using fragments of its own visual culture."

These early zines were at first mimeographed and later offset printed or photocopied. The drawings often express disillusionment with the utopian 1960s, a common punk sentiment at the time. One zine in particular, Tripping Corpse, which was serialised, tends to focus on hippie culture gone terribly wrong. Charles Manson is a favourite subject, and even in drawings where he’s not explicitly portrayed, his presence is felt. Far from purely reactionary, though, Pettibon’s work from this time targets the underlying violence of American culture at large, with portrayals of corrupt police officers, classic teen angst, drug addiction, self-loathing, marital dissatisfaction, and the private lives of celebrities and politicians such as Joan Crawford and J. Edgar Hoover.