To hazards like icecap cracks, nuclear leaks and rising seas, add another environmental threat: language fallout. Never has verbiage, generated by advertising, the entertainment industry and mouthy politicians, been so present and pervasive in everyday life, seeping from smartphones, spewing from flat screens. And few artists have more cannily predicted and reflected, not to mention contributed to, this phenomenon than Raymond Pettibon, whose career retrospective, with more than 700 annotated drawings and paintings, fills three floors and the lobby of the New Museum.
Nearly every piece in "Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work" is dominated by an image. Most are done in pen and ink, and sometimes paint, on notebook-size sheets of paper in a wired, graphic style. But many of the images–of Joan Crawford, or Jesus, or a surfer, or an explosion–are unremarkable in themselves, and made interesting primarily by the presence of handwritten phrases and sentences above, below and around them.
Some of these texts seem to be lifted from B-movie scripts, others from classical literature, still others from the sort of reactive interior rants that some of us drop into unguarded subway moments. Over all, Mr. Pettibon's art has the prickly, manic feel of such rants, and like them, it rarely achieves smooth resolution. Words and pictures are often out of logical sync. He titles many pieces "No Title," followed by a bit of quoted text. Only in his most overtly political work do all components align and fuse, defining and sharpening one another.
And Mr. Pettibon is, with gratifying regularity, a sharp political critic. It is the most interesting thing about him. His targets can be quite specific: the drug-wrecked hippie movement of the 1960s, the American war in Iraq. Yet his entire output, despite interludes of lyricism and nostalgia, and a running strain of stand-up humor, is a steady indictment of American culture as he has lived it over the past 60 years.