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Raymond Pettibon’s work Sunday Night and Saturday Morning surprises the viewer with its aesthetics, which are somewhat unconventional for video art. Pettibon arranges his watercolors and ink drawings into a dense collage of moving images with sequential animation, coloration and seemingly ephemeral lines that are reminiscent of comics.
The integration of text – usually provided in comics by speech bubbles – is replaced here by spoken text whose content often generates a discrepancy between text and image. Some motifs, such as the black sun and the baby on the rescue net, occur more frequently but are underlaid with different sound tracks so that the scenes can be interpreted differently. The result is that Pettibon’s work does not seem funny and light like most comics. Its heterogeneous links and associations raise serious questions about society in general.
Pettibon obtains his inspiration from American culture, including film stars and comic heroes, politicians, news events, scenes from television and “film noir” as well as from literature by Henry James and John Ruskin. Personal experiences also play a role, such as Pettibon’s observations of surfers on California beaches.
Sunday Night and Saturday Morning, 2005
1-channel video, colour, sound
Duration: 16’ 45’’
