CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/26/2015

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015

"No title (I work upstairs…)" (2011) is reproduced from Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015, one of our favorite books for summer. In his thoroughly interesting essay, Carlo McCormick writes, "Raymond Pettibon is the veteran of many wars, few that people would have heard of, most so abstract, waged in such godforsaken corners of our cultural neglect and without the illusion of decisive victory, that they have been forgotten. Grizzled and hardened past his years, combat has also made him younger than all the rest, and deep inside the pit of our collective cynicism and rage, somehow soft with a humanism that can only be born of having seen the very worst our human condition offers. A warrior who has fought against so much and for no one in particular, who has seen all the battles as Pyrrhic victories waged for the empiric causes of doomed empires, Pettibon is an uncanny correspondent to venture out onto these last shores of a feral nature that thrashes about in its global death rattle."