Last month, Getty announced that the Getty Conservation Institute’s reference collection and the Getty Institute’s special collection acquired Raymond Pettibon’s archives. Whether you're a fan of Pettibon's premium art or his album cover for Sonic Youth and Black Flag, you can't say this archive can have a better home. Donations come from the most important institute in Southern California, where an artist is inseparably linked to the region. We met more about this important gift with Glenn Phillips, senior curator of the Modern and Modern Collection, exhibition director at the Getty Institute.
First of all, very much congratulations on obtaining this file. I can imagine there is no better place. How did these discussions begin?
We have a long relationship with Raymond, not only going back to the current person here, but also to former directors and curators. He was part of the 1992 GRI exhibition called Connections: Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith and Buzz Spector’s exploration in Getty Center Collections: He donated 43 drawings to us. We have long been building a collection of Raymond’s magazines and artist books, and overall Xerox Art is a big collection for us. Raymond became our residence artist in 2003-04 with our “Market and Value” year, partly because of his initial study of economics. The archive includes many studies on the art market he conducted while living in Getty. In 2010, Raymond also donated many original posters and concert flyers to us. So he has been our great friend for years and of course we were so excited when he wanted to discuss donating archives to the GRI and Getty Conservation Institute.
Can you give me a feeling about the number of archives? I remember Pettibon’s incredible performance at the New Museum in 2017, and he shocked me to the people who have made a lot of drawings over the years.
32 boxes and a surfboard! The archive includes a small portion of unfinished process drawings. Raymond is indeed prolific. The archive contains very nice print selections, but overall, it records his research, working methods and original materials. We then offer some examples of limited edition merchandise, including his images, including surfboards and several skateboard decks.
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This archive will be awesome in Los Angeles. How do you describe its relationship with the city?
It's the same relationship with Raymond, so I'd say it's very close! However, this also documented his international exhibitions and his research interests, which are extensive. Of course, Raymond learned art and interacted with artists from around the world.
What are the more unexpected objects in the archive?
Meetings about surfboards, but painting materials – paint tubes, ink tanks and reference surfer drawings he made with some donated paint, are a little rare for the artist's archives. Paint and ink include a range of manufacturers, while the reference image contains a small painting wave and surfer, Lorem Ipsum text, the color palette square used, and the color index code. Conservation scientists will use these materials in the future to conduct technical research on his materials and working methods.
To what extent will you work with artists to classify this material?
We came here to work carefully with him in the archives to make sure we understand the organization of the material and take notes when we are with him in person. So he has been helping us before the material arrives here and we always work as much as possible when we categorize the artists.
To some, this behemoth surfer material seems like an unexpected acquisition for an agency like Getty. What else could surprise some people in the Getty Institute’s special collection?
We have been collecting radical avant-garde since the earliest days of GRI, with a lot of wildness in our Dada and Surreal collections. But we also have Rodin's house keys, Claes Oldenburg's childhood drawings and his set of ray guns. There are many intersections with punk, the New Wave and early hip-hop in the kitchen archives. This fall, we will showcase the original gorilla mask for the guerrilla girl; we have the floor of the machine project, a permanent (hair curly) machine invented by Harald Szeemann's grandfather. We have Dieter Roth’s cheese and diaper book, which is the dead “flux” preserved in liquids.
How will history remember Raymond Pettibon?
We're glad people studied the entire sweep of his career, not just the early things of punk or the large-scale things the market likes, but the entire scan was wide and showed a lot of development over time.
