Interview

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Artist Raymond Pettibon is as hard to pin down as one of the laconic characters who populate his drawings. He lives at an undisclosed address in Southern California, prefers walking to driving, and, despite his international art stardom, doesn't seem to have a reliable phone. It took several false starts and two interviews-the first of which was later found to be completely inaudible-to get Pettibon on the page. But when he finally called me on a Sunday night from a pay phone near the Pacific Ocean, he was soft-spoken and gracious, ready to discuss everything from Gumby to Charles Manson to moose hunting in Alaska.

MAX BLAGG: I was thinking if I couldn't get in touch with you, maybe I could make up your answers from some of the captions in your works. Do you think that would be true to you?

RAYMOND PETTIBON: I don't see why not. It would certainly represent something that is a big part of my work. There is a very fractured personality or multiple personalities there. So I could sign off on that.

MB: You mix your own writing with quotes that you lift from various texts. It's sometimes hard to tell if you wrote the lines or if you just pulled a quote from somewhere.

RP: A lot of times the actual line is changed.

MB: Do the quotes that you use tend to come from what you're reading at the moment, or do you gather things, make notes in books you're reading, and double back later?

RP: They're not always from what I'm reading at the moment, but they can be. I don't seem to have enough time to read, like I used to.

MB: We'll keep that in mind. Your real name is Ray Ginn, pronounced like [President] Reagan. Did this cause some attachment to Ronald and Nancy in your often unflattering depictions of them?

RP: Yeah, I was called that sometimes as a kid. But I don't know that it had any influence on Reagan appearing in my work. He was around, though-he was governor of California before he became president. I show at Regen Projects, too . . .

MB: A lot of your work has this very nostalgic feeling to it-the baseball players and the noir characters, all those square-chinned guys that look like they stepped out of a Chandler novel-but it's also incredibly modern. How do you combine the two elements?

RP: Part of that probably goes back to the source of a lot of my drawings. Back in the '80s, a lot of the images I used were from TV or from films on TV.

MB: So you would draw directly from the TV?

RP: Yes. There are lots of guns and action in my drawings, and part of that is just to make them more interesting. Because you can go through a whole film and it's mostly talking heads and little else until the action scenes, and they're usually violence or physical stuff. Same with baseball, or any sport. Except I find pitching and batting are visually very striking.

MB: The baseball players are usually in these old-time Babe Ruth-type outfits.

RP: It's better for movement. It's like drawing drapery for the old masters, more than, say, with drawing a superhero, where it's all tight-it may as well have been painted on. That becomes anatomy, and that's never been one of my strong points.

MB: I guess that's why you like Gumby, right? How did Gumby slide into your work?

RP: I saw him on TV. The appeal was that he could go into books and become part of the story.

MB: I just saw a documentary, Gumby Dharma [2006], about Gumby's creator, Art Clokey. He was talking about how he had to change Gumby's head shape so Gumby didn't look like a penis.

RP: Well, TV executives . . . there's always going to be someone reacting like that.