NEWS/ARTS ARTS/VISUAL R AYM OND PETTIB ON “S IX PAC K ”
PAINT IT BLACK Artist Rachel Teannalach shrugs off Invierno to celebrate Primavera.
WINTER/SPRING SWING The first day of March in Boise was nothing like Disney’s dewy depiction of spring: wobbly fawns, budding branches and hungry hatchlings. We got a big, slushy, sideways dump of snow. But a few flakes won’t put the brakes on Primavera, a new, one-nightonly group art exhibition. Featured artists Rachel Teannalach, Amy Westover, Christine Raymond, Pat Kilby, Olive Wicherski and Susan Valiquette will congregate along with Castlerock Strings Quartet at Beside Bardenay on Friday, March 9, from 7-9 p.m. for a show exploring the central theme of spring. Artists will utilize a variety of mediums—drawing, painting, photography, sculpture—to “celebrate the fresh perspective that the spring season brings.” But for those of us not ready to bid the barren trees and frosted windshields goodbye, Enso Artspace will provide a respite with Anna Ura’s new show, Winter, which opens on Friday, March 16, from 5-8 p.m. at 120 East 38th Street, Unit 105 in Garden City. The San Francisco transplant will explore Idaho landscapes utilizing paintings, photography and video in this new series that examines “winter as nature’s time for catharsis: the shedding of the old, needless aspects of itself.” Speaking of shedding the old, the Eighth Street Marketplace Artist in Residence program is prepping for a new crop of greenhorns. These newbies will occupy their downtown studios from March through September, with the inaugural First Thursday studio tours Thursday, April 5, from 5-8 p.m. Without further ado, here’s the list: Star Moxley, installation artist and costume designer, Mercantile Ste. 201; Seth Randal, documentarian, Mercantile Ste. L138; Kate and Sarah Masterson, visual artists, Northrup Ste. 295; Cassandra Schiffler, abstract painter, Northrup Ste. 295; Theresa Burkes, printmaker, Northrup Ste. 295; Idaho Book Arts Guild, a collaborative of 10 artist book makers, Northrup Ste. 295; Adrian Kershaw, mixed-media sculptor, Renewal Underground. And speaking of open studios, Boise Open Studios Collective Organization is currently accepting applications for membership. BOSCO artists will participate in one open-studio weekend in October, with an opening at Boise Art Museum. New BOSCO members are juried in annually, and this year’s professional artist juror will be Zella Bardsley. Applications must be submitted electronically and are due by Sunday, April 1. For info, visit boiseopenstudios.com or email bosco.membership@gmail.com. —Tara Morgan
26 | MARCH 7–13, 2012 | BOISEweekly
Raymond Pettibon’s punk period CHRISTOPHER SCHNOOR Raymond Pettibon is a legend in his own time. Not with the general public but certainly with fans and aficionados of the punk-rock scene centered in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and ’80s. His graphic, low-life vignettes were reproduced in zines and on fliers, promotional posters, stickers and album covers for Los Angeles punk bands of the period—most conspicuously his brother’s group, Black Flag. Pettibon’s creative activities from those years made him a cult figure in the underground music scene, a status he holds to this day despite spending the last 25 years building an international reputation as a respected contemporary artist. Beginning Wednesday, March 7, Boise State’s Visual Arts Center will present RayRaymond Pettibon illustrated iconic punk album covers like Black Flag’s Six Pack. mond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86, an exhibit featuring some 200 examples of basics. Even so, the introduction of more color Pettibon’s graphic output during those prolific, design skills and a sharp, subversive mind— was a harbinger of the changes in his work he came up with the Black Flag name and subversive years that preceded his career as a that came after he began showing in galleries. designed its four-bar logo. recognized artist. Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, Working with offset and screen printThe exhibit is curated by David Platzker 1978-86, is touring under the auspices of ing techniques on behalf of bands like the of Specific Object, a New York clearinghouse Independent Curators International. It is the Circle Jerks, Subhumans, Dead Kennedys, the for visual, literary and outsider art that, in first of the Exhibitions in a Box series, which Ramones, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Killer, his words, “has fallen through the cracks of the Minutemen and, of course, Black Flag, Pet- over the last two years has sponsored 12 such mainstream culture.” The show represents events, conceived and developed by artists, eight years of Platzker collecting a sizable stash tibon produced a stream of raw, edgy imagery curators and art historians providing what it oozing attitude with an assortment of erotic of Pettibon punk paraphernalia. Although calls “high-content, low-cost exhibitions” for (homo and hetero), sacrilegious and political his curatorial interests focus mainly on pop venues of varying size and resources. A kit, if themes. Spiced with macabre humor, sordid art, minimalism and conceptual art, Platzker you will, for creating an art show on the spot. characters, a heavy dose of cynicism and the has an active interest in any “transformative clamor of competing fonts, his style was noted It is unlikely that we have seen anything like work that affects how we look at art today,” The Punk Years at Boise State’s Visual Arts for its total lack of taste. For example, in one whether high-brow or low. Center before. of Pettibon’s artist books in the collection, The 1960s were transformative culturPettibon was unable to be reached for an entitled “Just Happy to Be Working,” the ally in many ways, not least of which was interview, which is unfortunate but not out of frontispiece features a the evolving rapport character. Some critics have said, in retrospect, shirtless, shoeless male between rock and the Exhibition opens Wednesday, March 7, and that Pettibon was actually contemptuous of the hanging by his neck. visual arts. Around runs through Wednesday, March 28. Opening whole Los Angeles punk scene, as evidenced Black print and dark 1966, album covers reception Friday, March 9, 6-8 p.m. by the fact he peopled his imagery with “such shadows dominate and concert posters VISUAL ARTS CENTER pathetic losers,” as one commentator put it. Pettibon’s early work, became, for a time, Gallery One, Liberal Arts Building, Boise State But was he really the misanthrope he seemed with fliers and posters increasingly more 1910 University Drive to be in his base portrayal of humanity? And often printed on colinventive and bold artdept.boisestate.edu/vac ored paper. To find any how does he look at this work in hindsight? in design, color and Platzker is of the opinion that Pettibon’s historical precedent, demeanor. California personal take on the subjects of women, sex one has to go back to the photomontages of led the way with psychedelia, day-glo effects and religion was more edgy than dark. He cites the Dada artist John Heartfield (nee Helmut and R. Crumb. But Platzker is right when he says, “every 10 years or so, a small revolution Herzfelde) in the 1920s, whose photomontages Pettibon’s 1984 comment that “all this stuff savaged the Nazi thugs, corrupt politicians and will be collectibles someday” as evidence of his in visual art takes place.” cynical mindset. lords of industry in Weimar Germany. Nothing had prepared us for the advent of Yet there is no denying that darkness has Pettibon’s covers for 7-inch and 12-inch punk in the late ’70s. long had enormous aesthetic appeal to him, vinyl records in the Boise State exhibit include In 1977, Pettibon’s guitarist brother Greg an aspect of his art that he still returns to—as a number of classics, like Black Flag’s albums Ginn founded the band Black Flag—a tribute to Black Sabbath and the insecticide—and SST Six Pack, The Process of Weeding Out, and the in his 2009 series of lithographs entitled The Black Album. The ICI survey of Pettibon’s soft-porn The Blasting Concept compilation Records, which recorded the leading punk formative years as a punk evangelist gives us album jacket, all in black and white. Though bands in Los Angeles. At this point, Pettibon Pettibon would often use color for the records, the opportunity to consider these questions was not a represented artist but a subculture firsthand. with Black Flag particularly, he preferred the denizen with aggressive, comic-style graphic WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M