Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin Page B

a photo of a blur. I post it to Instagram anyway, marking for friends and the servers mainlined to the various agencies that might take note that, somewhere, I saw a horse, and that that horse was moving fast.

SIR DRONE
    Raymond Pettibon writes on Twitter: “Art will recover from its low self-esteem vis-à-vis other ‘disciplines’ when artists are recruited by the CIA—as they were in the 50’s(smile).” For a second I wonder if the parenthetical smile suggests Pettibon has secret information about artist spies or if he himself was an artist spy in the 1950s, but since he was born in 1957, I credit the tweet to the usual spooky disposition of his Twitter, where he often writes conspiratorially about GG Allin, sports, punk rock, art, violence, and politics, using a prose style notable for its confusing grammar, atypical punctuation, and eccentric choices in spelling— especially in his use of the letter Y, which manifests virally where it never belongs, populating words with an extra vowel/consonant that often confuses their sense-meaning. His father wrote spy novels and writing—a fundamental component to his work—“came natural” to him, as the Los Angeles Times wrote about the 33 year-old Pettibon in 1991. They described him as having a boxer’s nose, and if I were to describe him now I’d say the same thing. We both live in New York and sometimes I think I might run into him. I went to his 2013 show at David Zwirner in Chelsea with my friend Ed several weeks after it opened and impossibly expected him to be there, but of course there was no way he’d be at the gallery on that day—or on any day, for that matter. I can’t really place why seeing his work imposes his presence or the possibility of his presence on me. I suppose it’s the largeness of his personality, in his art and on Twitter, that makes me think he lives in every space where you find him, Y-like—edged with the sense that he could be there just as easily as he could not be there. Pettibon, in portraits of him then and now, looks a little wrecked by whatever world he does occupy, dreamless on the green lawns of a vague yesterday or, since he lives in New York, cast in the shadowy Real of the monumental skyline, each platform of being-there more confused than the next in the poignancy of its crumbling under certain inescapable brutalities like those he illustrates. In Pettibon’s drawings, there is defeat with no recourse to recovery of self-esteem. At his David Zwirner show, I thought about how his art stretches bodies thin, into a vocabulary of bodies that exposes an emotional interior usually secluded in the flesh, itself (the bodied body) a dominant narrative through which we discover their point, which is: we try to destroy ourselves but survive, as always, flatlined then brought back only to be measured for life by an entirely different system of measurement than one previously known. Like his Twitter, like the trippier poetry of a language constantly on the verge of discovering at its heart a vulnerability so substantial as to be meaningless, his art attempts to recover its low self-esteem vis-à-vis an engagement with fragility—with fragile bodies. Also with language itself, which stretches along the paper in Pettibon’s slanted sprawl, corrupted by misplaced Y’s, like in the line “WHAT WE CANN NOYT STOYP TO ILLUSTRATE WE MUST PASS OVER IN IGNORANCE,” a misquote of Wittgenstein, written in blue watercolor on toilet paper and pinned to the wall at David Zwirner. On the other side of the room, Ed looked at a large wave under which Pettibon had written: “TO BE WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH—NOT WITHOUT A PICTURE FIRST.” Two men lose their surfboards in the midst of the huge curve, and though they’ve been flattened into a stasis indispensible from the work’s effect I thought Ed seemed a little dizzy from the hugeness of the