CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/20/2016

Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus

"As Edmund Burke would originally have it, the sublime is nature at its, not necessarily most ferocious or… It can be the most beautiful that stops you in your tracks. There's been a few times where I've had to pull off the freeway, the cloud formations were so beautiful I had to look for a little bit. Going back to war, I'm sorry, they call it the 'shock and awe,' like a marvelous display of fireworks… Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 sublime or whatever. I don't blame him for that, he was making his point. That was the attacks' intention, actually, to show shock and awe to this country that's never experienced such a thing. I don't know if it's apocryphal or real, but there is this story of JMW Turner having himself lashed to the mast so he could experience the storm up close. And you can see that in his paintings. He wanted to be more than a witness. A part of it, kind of." Featured quote and Raymond Pettibon's 2003 watercolor, "No title (The bright flatness…)," are reproduced from Homo Americanus.