![]() ![]() He wasn’t ever the same after, a malice infected him. One of my friends, a 14-year- old black kid named Kevin had been shot in the head by the local police. I saw a skinhead give a Mexican teenager a curbie, open mouth placed on a concrete curb and a steel-toed boot knocked out all his teeth in a squelching crunch. I grew up like Pettibon, lower middle class in a SoCal beach suburb, barely enduring its sunstroked crypto-fascism. If my editor had chosen differently, I could have just as easily ended up with a tattoo of George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket as a back piece or black triangle over my shoulder and the words in German, “And the gods said paint the right corner black!” inked above my clavicle or Frans Snyder tongue-kissing death on my bicep. Our communion comes not from the shared affection for a single haunting picture, but for that shared experience that we’ve all seen a tear in the veil.īy the time you read this, I will likely have a picture by Raymond Pettibon tattooed on my body. ![]() ![]() The window is like Barthes’s photographic punctum, the puncture is personal, what reveals and frees each of us is individual. Art can reveal in a single frame some shackling fear, and the bravery of its creation both a liberation and revelation, a redemptive break in the hellish illusion that most people accept as reality. Each sighting, its own astonishment at the possibility in myself, in the world, measured against the passage of time. Some astonished moment of seeing, an epiphany, a portal. The imaginary specters of literature curse one with nostalgia before you have even finished their book.įor me, visual art haunts with glimpsed visions of what could be. They make me yearn for places that don’t exist, plumped with incidental symphonies and unusual aromas, fleshy textures and ornate flavors, characters more real than fiction should allow. Writers create atmospheres of sound, of scent, of taste, of sensation through the simple substance of words, each sentence an incantation that summons a whole world. The problem of haunting in art is a serious one. Raymond Pettibon with the sparest of lines and simplest of words made me unashamed to love odd beauty, to pass through struggle and embrace my own weird affections and subtle intuitions without self-consciousness. ![]()
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