Punk at auction: Pettibon's collection is worth $100,000
More than 200 lots designed by the artist between 1978 and 1986 for music groups in Southern California awarded
3' min read
3' min read
Raymond Pettibon, born in 1957, is one of California's most recognised artists, known for his depictions of surfers riding the waves of the Pacific Ocean, which fetched more than EUR 3 million at auction (a record set by Phillips in New York in 2021). Represented by powerful galleries such as David Zwirner and Regen Projects, he has been able to incorporate elements of American iconography in his works, mixing the visual language of pop culture and mass media with texts derived from writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin and Walt Wihtman.
But even before he became famous and exhibited in commercial galleries, Raymond Pettibon, trained as an economist, began his career as an artist by designing the record covers and concert flyers of the Californian punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "It's going to happen like the psychedelic posters of the 1960s," predicted Pettibon himself, then 27 years old, 40 years ago, in an article byJeff Spurrier that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 1 July 1984. "Once those kids grow up and start making money, it will be a way of catching up with their past. But at that point the art dies. They just become artefacts."
The Platzker Collection
.And so it was. More than 200 lots including record covers, flyers, posters, artist books, and skate boards designed by Pettibon from that period went up for auction at Wright's Chicago on Thursday 22 August in a dedicated sale that realised more than $100,000, with 98 per cent sold by lot and 99 per cent by value. They came from the collection of David Platzker, the director of Specific Object, a gallery and bookshop that sells unique artworks, editions, artists' books, as well as alternative literature and music. Before founding the gallery, from 2013 to 2018, he was curator in the Drawings and Prints department at MoMA New York and, from 1998 to 2004, executive director of Printed Matter, a non-profit institution dedicated to promoting artists' books.
Pettibon started this production at the instigation of one of his brothers, Greg Ginn, guitarist of the famous punk band Black Flag and founder of the SST Records record label. It was he who commissioned him to design the record covers of the bands represented by SST Records, as well as flyers, T-shirts, stickers, skateboards. This gave rise not only to a new musical culture, reflecting youthful dissatisfaction in a climate of social and political malaise, but also to an aesthetic, which Pettibon helped to define with his decisive and disturbing graphic style.
"My drawings are violent," said Pettibon in the same Los Angeles Times article. "And this is dictated by the medium, in that I only use one frame. It is not possible to tell an entire story with all the details. It's like extrapolating a frame from a film or a crucial scene from a book at a critical point. You can't really go for subtlety.
