Raymond Pettibon, Whoever Shows: Strike Uyp th’ Band!
New Museum ~ 14 November 2019
Co-presentation with Performa 19 Biennial
Initiated and produced for Performa Biennial Consortium by Sozita Goudouna
A livestream of the performance is available here.
“Whoever Shows: Strike Uyp th’ Band!” is a staged reading at the New Museum of a collaged collection of excerpts from Raymond Pettibon’s scripts, including those originally produced for videos like The Whole World is Watching: Weatherman ’69 (1989–90), Sir Drone: A New Film About the New Beatles (1989–90), The Holes You Feel, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, and Batman.
Beginning in the 1980s, Pettibon produced a series of low-fi videos made with friends and shot on commercial home video equipment. These feature-length works focus on radical subjects drawn from 1960s and ’70s American counterculture, including the Manson Family, the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the SLA, the Weather Underground, and the beginning of the American punk movement.
Although some of these works like The Whole World is Watching and Sir Drone have become classic video works of the period and have been shown widely alongside Pettibon’s signature drawings, several other scripts like Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison have yet to be produced or, in the case of The Holes You Feel, were staged and shot but ultimately lost.
Reflecting upon the notion of collaborative work, this assemblage of Pettibon’s fragmentary scripts, scenes, and lyrics attempts to envision personal perspectives and imaginative approaches to the historical past and the edges of society. This event at the New Museum is one of only a handful of select public readings of his scripts that Pettibon has organized over the past several years. The continuous reading at the New Museum will feature an ensemble of artists, musicians, and Pettibon’s friends.
Participants include Oliver Augst, Mark Beasley, Veronique Bourgoin, Angela Choon, Brian D’Amato, Pauline Daly, Marcel Dzama, Ray Farrell, Thomas Fehlmann, Sequoiah Thomas — Fraser, Kim Gordon, Sozita Goudouna, David Larsen, Young Kim, Spencer Leigh, Charles Louis-Aristide, David Rimanelli, Sven Sachsalber, Stella Schnabel, Ricky Sepulveda, Frances Stark, Robert Storr, Juli Susin, Mitchell Watkins, Mike Watt, Hans Weigand, and Lauren Wolchik.
Directed by Raymond Pettibon
Curated and produced by Sozita Goudouna.
The project is dedicated to the memory of Kevin Killian.
Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957 in Tucson, Arizona) graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1998); the Drawing Center, New York (1999); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1999); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2002); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2003); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2006); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia (2015); Deichtorhallen Hamburg — Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2016); and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2016). Pettibon has also participated in a number of important group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1993, 1997, and 2004), the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), Documenta XI (2002), and SITE Santa Fe (2004 and 2010). In 2017, the New Museum organized a major exhibition Pettibon’s work title A Pen of All Work which travelled to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands. A related exhibition title The Cloud of Misreading travelled to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Pettibon currently lives and works in New York.
Sozita Goudouna is a curator, adjunct professor at CUNY, and the author of Beckett’s Breath (2018), published by Edinburgh & Oxford University Press. She is head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio. Sozita has taught at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial fellow at Performa NY and has curated and produced projects for documenta 14, New Museum, Onassis Foundation NYC, EMST, Hunterian Museum among other institutions and museums.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Performa 19 will examine the Bauhaus’ revolutionary approach to interdisciplinary experimentation. It will look to the intense social and political environment that encouraged the merging of art and life in events designed by the theater workshop in and around the Bauhaus school; it will examine the opportunities provided for students and faculty to explore the intersections of art, industrial production, and technology, revealed in a prescient exhibition “Art and Technology; The New Unity” organized at the school in 1923; and the Performa Institute will use this detailed exploration of the Bauhaus’s radical approach to education to ask the question, ‘what is the art school of the 21stcentury?’, considering how best to equip young artists with the ethical as well as aesthetic tools needed for our fast-paced future.
Research for each Performa Biennial begins with an examination of a critical moment in art history when performance was a powerful motor driving conceptual and artistic shifts of the time, using the earlier material as a point of departure to explore contemporary art and ideas. Previous history anchors have included Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism and the Renaissance.
About Performa
Founded in 2004 by RoseLee Goldberg, Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of 20thcentury art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the 21stcentury. Part of Performa’s mission is to present a biennial of visual art performance in New York City that illuminates the critical role of performance in the history of art as well as its enormous significance in the international world of contemporary art.
Since launching New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, the organization has solidified its identity as a commissioning and producing entity. As a “museum without walls”, Performa contributes important art historical heft to the field by showing the development of live art in all its forms from many different cultural perspectives, reaching back to the Renaissance. Celebrated worldwide as the first biennial to give special attention to this remarkable history, the Performa Biennial transforms the city of New York into the “world capital of artists’ performance” every other November, attracting a national and international audience of more than 50,000 for three-weeks of live performances. Performa has presented seven international biennials, commissioned and produced nearly 300 performances, worked with more than 700 artists, and toured commissioned performances and exhibitions in nearly 20 countries around the world.
For more on Performa and its programs including the Performa Biennial, please visit http://performa-arts.org/.
Join the conversation: @PerformaNYC #performa19 #livearthistory
