Baseball Art: Raymond Pettibon
Where punk rock and pastoral collide
When I discovered that Raymond Pettibon made baseball art, I was floored. He is THEE punk rock flyer and album cover artist. AND he’s a baseball junkie? Wait. What?
That’s why we do what we do here at Tinker Taylor Soler Spiezio. We love a mash-up. We love when a couple of our favorite things, like punk rock and baseball and art, surprisingly come together.
So what happens when an antagonistic music subculture and the wholesomeness of America’s Pastime commingle? Jocks and punks don’t mix. Sports and art don’t mix. These types of discordant juxtapositions are Pettibon’s artistic stock and trade.
With the research done for this post, and it’s another deep dive, I am reminded of just how much Raymond Pettibon’s art continues to fascinate. I can think of no other artist whose work is so compelling, yet makes me also so uncomfortable. There will be an image, or images, that will push your buttons. That’s what Pettibon does.
Being the baseball nerd that I am, it’s tricky writing about Art (with a capital A). The strike zone for nailing the proper tone is more Rafael Belliard than Elly De La Cruz. It’s a three-true-outcome scenario:
1) Lose the baseball folks by overdoing the academics.
2) Offend the art folks for being a relative novice.
3) Stay out of the fray as best I can.
Option 3 it is. Much like Pettibon himself, I’ll be borrowing and incorporating existing sources for our tour.
Thank you to all the more-informed and better-spoken writers from whom I crib (and credit).
Introduction
Pettibon’s punk rock roots are nicely presented by Piotr Orlov, from Victory Journal:
The single most popular piece of art Pettibon has ever produced— is, in fact, ever likely to produce— is the logo for his older brother Greg Ginn’s punk band, Black Flag. The four uneven, inky monoliths were an ’80s secret password, an entryway to the murky world of hardcore punk, a gateway to an oppositional way of thinking about the inner workings of the American Dream. In a 2013 documentary produced by MOCA about Pettibon and the Black Flag logo, Henry Rollins said that it became synonymous with ‘unrest, chaos, and disobeying anything you got.’
Beyond the logo, Black Flag was the first conduit toward Pettibon’s work being widely disseminated. The original pieces that he refashioned as flyers and posters for the band’s shows and record covers became the de facto visual language of Southern California punk and the Reagan decade, ominously referencing the country’s underbelly history: early realistic comic book-like panels full of perky cops, evil nuns, Nixon, and Jesus Christ nailing Charlie Manson to the cross.
“They’d go through two hundred drawings and take the worst one possible. The one I did as a joke or something,” Pettibon says in the book Homo Americanus. “But then, you know, punk rock is music, it’s not art.”
In The Art of Punk, Black Flag singer Henry Rollins offered a counterpoint, “He was such a manipulator. He knows what’s going to cause a ripple and cause unrest.... It’s not gonna bring people to the show. It’s gonna get us beat up.”
The pinnacle of Pettibon’s rock n roll art might be Sonic Youth’s major label debut. Brian Baynes, from the zine Bubbles remenices:
My first encounter with a Raymond Pettibon illustration was Sonic Youth's Goo album cover. I was probably 13 years old. I was struck by the dense blacks and thick brushstrokes that make up a single comic panel that tell just part of a story. Somewhere out there were three other panels that could surround this one that'd create a daily strip and make sense of such grim exploits. Those three panels were forced into creation by my own head. Pettibon's images tell just a snippet of the story, but always at a culminating moment… I think most punk art pays tribute to him in one way or another, be it on purpose, or subconsciously. His flyers were full of bold fonts, harsh contrasts, and eerie depictions of life.
The perpetual punk rock association seems to irk Pettibon, as expressed in this interview by Glenn O’Brien, Purple Magazine (2015):
INTERVIEWER You’re still thought of as the Punk Rock Artist?
RAYMOND PETTIBON Oh, yeah, definitely. In every reference to my work, that’s the starting point. It’s not just noted; it’s embodied in the whole description. Hell, I wasn’t thinking of punk rock then. Yeah, I had a popular literature course at UCLA, and I wrote a paper on the Ramones and the difference between a displaced and ironic version of something, and the wish fulfillment of the most popular literature. Okay, I was the only punk rocker at UCLA. I got my brother into punk rock, and I was already doing artwork… I was a fan, to some extent, of punk rock. How did it influence my art? What can I say? Motherfuckers put out 45-rpm singles. Right? Someone has to do the motherfucking drawings.
Illustration + Text
Pettibon accompanies his neutral perspective drawings of intensely emotional moments with text, sometimes terse, sometimes verbose. A MOMA Magazine article described it as “snippets of prose, broken aphorisms, oblique affirmations.” The art reads like a comic book written by a random quote generator. Except that Pettibon contends that every line put to paper is purposeful. His writing is inscrutable, dryly hilarious, and most often incendiary. The intentional ambiguity forces the viewer to impart the connective tissue. There’s meaning to be had, you figure it out.
In regard to his text, Pettibon said, “About some of my works, it would be a mistake to assume that this is my own voice. Because that would be the most simplistic and inefficient art you can do.”
Baseball
Surveying Pettibon’s baseball images, one finds certain consistencies. The time period is never modern: no stadiums, no advertisements, no encroaching civilization. It’s not that Pettibon stays away from architecture, he’s painted gothic churches, cityscapes, etc. It’s that with baseball, he’s more interested in the pastoral. It is a game played in a park. Then you read the text and the idyllic crashes back into harsh reality.
“The fruit of the foreign tree is shaken down there with a force that smothers everything else,” accompanies a portrait of Bob Gibson.
“Who wonders in the innocence of the morning: How could the night have come to grief?” shares the negative space of a pitcher.
Another pitcher, “The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. One needs both. But both delivered with utter control. With perfect pitch.”
Pettibon creates an incredible volume of work, generally ink on paper in fairly small scale. His Homo Americanus Collected Works exhibition and catalog (2016) contained over 700 pieces. Some exhibitions garner on-site murals from Pettibon, which further demonstrates his talent.
Pettibon is clearly a fan. He knows his baseball history. And he hates the Yankees. Illustrations from his earliest comics demonstrate his baseball bonafides.
Pettibon often talks about his love of the game and how the ugly side of baseball and life can’t be ignored, from Homo Americanus (2016):
PETTIBON There’s this book by an ex-pitcher for the Yankees, Jim Bouton, who had a few good years, but then his arm was sore. He wrote this book called Ball Four. It was was written in the late 1960s, I guess, when baseball was really square- like sports were in general…
The book exposed the myth of baseball. It was to some extent like a tell-all book.There's these complete idols, like Mickey Mantle. He could do everything. He had almost sixty home runs, he could run, he could field, he could do everything. He replaced Joe DiMaggio in center field for the Yankees, and that was before Bouton's time.
But Mantle died of alcoholism, he had a transplanted liver, he was drunk most of the time in his life and hungover when he was playing, but he was still a brilliant player. He had some injuries that were not related to that, which didn't do him good. But he had a string of some brilliant years, like Willie Mays. Bouton kind of humanized him. They would go under the bleachers and look up at the ladies' skirts, and if they didn't have anything on they'd go, "Hey!" It more or less showed them how they really were. Not these gods playing the outfield.
I know the sport from the inside out. I mean, Babe Ruth, for Christ's sakes… He didn't look like a streamlined baseball player. He had a fat gut, but he was an amazing athlete, even as a pitcher… In his real life he was human and he had his foibles. He grew up an orphan and went to this Catholic place for orphans, and there was speculation-back in those days, this is pre-Jackie Robinson, it was pre-integration in those days, there was speculation that he was part black. If you really wanted to rile him up you could say the “N” word to him. I don't know if this means anything, but I did one drawing based on Babe Ruth and it kind of toyed with the subject, I used The word "dusky” which is like when the sun is going down, and I don't know if it's actually completely factual either.
I think if you look at my baseball drawing it gives a pretty positive version of the game. The game as it existed was not so positive, actually. Black people couldn’t play, et cetera. Baseball’s such a beautiful sport that it doesn’t really need mythification. Some of my drawings do kind of mythify it.
Pettibon talks about how baseball and art are similar and how they contrast to one another. Interview by Grady Turner, Bomb Magazine (1999):
PETTIBON I did a drawing once about a baseball player at bat. I think his batting average was over .300, his home runs were probably 40 or more, the text an ‘absolute criteria.’ The drawing was a commentary about art. In baseball, you know how well you’re doing by your batting average. It’s not about how smoothly you ran the bases. Style doesn’t matter so much. In art, the aesthetics are at the forefront. So it was a kind of commentary about that.
INTERVIEWER A commentary about how art is more about aesthetics whereas style is less of an issue in sports?
PETTIBON When I was a kid, I memorized baseball cards. I knew so many players’ lifetime averages: Eddie Brinkman, Ernie Banks. A year ago, I had a show where some of the art had to do with portraiture. I pinned to the wall Mickey Mantle’s baseball card from the mid-‘50s, which is probably worth a couple of hundred dollars. But rather than show his face on the front of the card, I showed the back with his stats. In a sense, that was a more biographical picture of him than his physical portrait could be. Because in baseball, that’s how you’re judged. The bottom line is your batting average and how many home runs you hit.
I’m more interested in the aesthetic quality to baseball. In athletics, I don’t have favorite teams. I don’t really care. I haven’t since I was a kid. I just hate the Yankees. But I like to see certain players play, primarily for the quality of doing something well. For instance, the endgame of basketball is putting the ball in the hoop. That considered, there are a plethora of ways to accomplish it. That’s the ‘art.’
In a PBS interview from 2003, the subject was how his illustrated figures are presented, as heroes or villains:
INTERVIEWER Are any of the characters in your work ever heroes? Say, the baseball players…
PETTIBON I’m not in awe of what most people would consider heroes, which would be someone of stature and power. In fact, those would tend to be people who I don’t respect at all. The public has a kind of natural awe of them that tends to be a mixture of fear, control, and violence. You could say the loss of innocence in baseball began with the fixing of the games in 1919, with the Black Sox World Series scandal.
The heroic has an epic scale to it. If you look at my baseball works, for instance, there is a kind of larger than life attitude to a lot of it. But then, not all the works are a pure adulation of the ball players. I mean, they go into some pretty sordid avenues. My drawings dwell on that subject quite often as well.
INTERVIEWER You seem to like to mix the underbelly and the philosophy.
PETTIBON Not always, though, and not always in the same drawing. You can look at a lot of my baseball drawings, and they don’t have that kind of a resentment of most figures—that you just automatically want to take them down a notch. There are quite a few that aren’t like that…
But sports, and baseball in particular in America, there’s a lot more to it. There’s a lot more nuances, not just in the game itself, but that’s also important, too. My work on the subject does tap into some of the nuances of the game— the pitching of the baseball, for instance, or hitting a baseball— but also it says a lot about what goes on off the field as well about the society in general. It’s kind of a microcosm of the society as a whole.
One more where Pettibon talks about artists being the Mark Lemke of society. Interview by Aaron Rose, originally in ANP Quarterly (2005):
INTERVIEWER Let’s talk more about the artists' role in cultural evolution- in the role as a documenter or catalyst?
PETTIBON That's actually a really good question. It's, I mean, it's not usually put that way, but that's a way I would put it, that there is a role for the artist, in a sense, as a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, history's not always written on the spot…
Assuming that the artist is an agent for change, my approach is like an athletic, you're a utility fielder who chokes up on the bat, you swing through the fences, you might bunt, you might crouch, hug the plate and get hit even and have to take your base that way. So in other words, when you're able to acknowledge what power you have, what means you have, then that's going to help the big picture, the team…
Considering that this is the end times, I mean, your only best hope is that there's going to be another generation down the road, to survive to pick up the pieces… and the evidence, that's something art can do. That's something that I've done specifically with that in mind. Even if these people die fat and happy, you know, just to make record of a dissenting opinion.
Epilogue
Carlo McCormick from Juxtapoz Magazine (2017) sums him up:
It is hard… to know if we love Pettibon for his cynicism or his sincerity, for speaking the ugly truth to our lies, or for peddling the counterfeit currency of our greatest myths with the seductive grace and guile of a used car salesman. However we choose to love his work, we cannot help but know its importance. Funnier than most, scatterbrained to the limits of genius, and righteous in the sum of his discontent, Raymond is the last resonant voice of our punk provocations still echoing today, an epitome of the countercultural underground from the analog days of yore, before interconnectivity made subculture something of a quaint artifact, and a savage visual critic who got his chops skewering the hypocrisies and pathologies of our ‘exceptionalism’ back in the smiling face of fascism that was Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Never before has noir shown so brightly, and we need it now more than ever.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t. I’m sure we’ll get back to utter baseball silliness next time. Here are a few more Pettibon favorites.
Great piece! His baseball cards are so cool.
Would love to see a gallery show of just his baseball art!