His work is one of the most representative on the contemporary scene, starting from the mid ‘80s. Through the use of the quick traits used in cartoons, usually precise black strokes on a white background, he creates pictures accompanied by unrelated quotes, akin to the work of R. Crumb or Roy Lichtenstein, but with a more distinctly intellectual orientation - and often with unexpectedly revealing details of character. His is a work showing a principle of casualty or an associative principle, which could also be depicted as a disassociation within the single piece. These long rows of images are not a story, nor does a paper narrate a story. Even if in each single frame there are infinite stories. Worlds and worlds.

This interview was conducted while Pettibon was present for the first time in an Italian Institution, Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano (http://www.museion.it/) - which is hosting 230 works of Raymond Pettibon, from 1978 to 1997; plus an enormous canvas (about 15x3 m). The artist was painting for several days on site.

Tall, a little limping since he had broken his foot because the scaffolding wasn’t well assembled in one of his previous interventions, and his foot was a bit swollen after this day of work, but still leading when walking, curly hair, shy as sensitive people can be, a visionary who lets you see instead of talking but still explaining with kindness and looking for words - those words that other people will be writing on newspapers, on the net, relating to an audience in lectures - improvising answers which are anyhow answers he knows he has always known.

So here we were, Raymond Pettibon, Letizia Ragaglia - curator of the Museum of modern and contemporary art in Bolzano - and me, at eight p.m. in front of Pettibon’s blue and blue and black and green and red waves which will continue tomorrow and be finished in a couple of days because of the premiere taking place the day before the grand opening.

AB - You insert in your works quotes taken from the many books you are reading.

RP - Certain writers tend to work well for references, usually when it is not an elaborate lyrical style like Elizabethan English or authors belonging to the Victorian period; here I have some notes from Finnegan’s Wake; George Santayana’s Literary Philosopher; Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy.

AB - This canvas is enormous, I am wondering, I would be anguished if I had to finish it within two days.

RP - Work, it can be neurotic, a lot of energy is drawn in, physical, mental, and emotional. It is on a big scale, the endurance required relies on a physical context but you also have to live up to people’s expectations. I tend to internalize more than I should, there is a lot of responsibility involved.

AB - European or American art, what are the differences you notice? What does it mean to you to be here working?

RP - Art is becoming international and besides that anything is accepted. There are regional differences, nuances, location matters, but they do not weigh that much. I do not get much of a change of my work, which is small, closed but at the same time very international. I don’t usually have time to see much around, like in this case the schedule is tight, I am leaving the day following the opening, which is quite typical.

LR - But I can still notice that yours is a strong American work.

RP - I work with the subject matter I have at hand and it is going to reflect where I live. The reflection of America can be more universal than what I do, America is so overwhelmingly different. And you get the imprint from the place you grow.

AB - Among the many videos you produced both as a screenwriter and director, I was asking myself why you chose Charles Manson.

RP - Charles Manson is an important figure, he symbolically represents some of the ‘60s. It was in ’69 when it happened. My approach to video is to review history through people like Patty Hearst, Jim Morrison. They are not faithful documentaries, and it is anyway impossible to do them. You just rely on the facts that there are. I do not feel constrained to fit to what history has been, I rely on witness by other people, what I read about.

AB - And your interest in music?

RP - I write the lyrics of songs. I will be performing the night of the opening with Hans Weigand who is still in New York, we will have to rehearse as soon as he gets here.

AB - Any books?

RP - A lot of writing, mostly for my art and for the scripts of my videos, which I usually direct.

AB - I was thinking before of Salvador Dali when, by revising René Thom and his Theory of Catastrophes, he identified the Station of Perpignan as a place center of energies.

RP - Anything influences me, but from a materialistic way; I wouldn’t say metaphysical or other.

LR - It reminds me of what Riegl (the first historian of art in a modern meaning of the term) says, that artists can be influenced by anything, if they are seated or lying, in any moment or every work there is a different mood, feeling, and work is seen as a metaphor.

RP - Almost anything can be like that while processing the amount of information you get. History is a baggage that goes with you. Five years later you have completely changed. It is like a work of poetry, you keep on going back to the same poem and there are so different readings, when one little part of a text out of the context can be read as foreign to the Author’s intentions. Then there is the socializing aspect, every one is adding to it and you will have to work with it in one way or the other. Practically any artist has to deal with consent, and you forget, get through and you are aware of that. There are many different inputs. There is a tendency to the reductive, to taking away as much as possible, I am not necessarily against it, I have no qualms of living up to it.

LR - Your work means much to me, each piece is a metaphor and when I go back to see them, here is something new I didn’t notice before. People come and visit the show and they want to go away with one key, then they are satisfied, they want you to say: “Look, you have to read it like that!”

AB - Oh yes, all well defined in movements.

RP - They do tours in my exhibitions. Museums and galleries have become a footrace - go by as quickly as possible. My work is meant for different attention spans, reading literature is different from art. The shows I have done, there is so much work exhibited, there are no expectations or demands, my work is there, it is not trying to convert.

Anny Ballardini, Italo-American poet, journalist, translator and artist, lives in Bolzano, Italy. After translating into Italian “swimming through water,” a collection of 181 poems by George Wallace, on the market through La Finestre Editrice (introduction by Paolo Ruffilli; David Amram; Marco Albertazzi, editor; comment by Mary de Rachewiltz; note of the translator and interview by Ballardini with Wallace; pages 481), she has undertaken the task of presenting to the American audience the poetry and essays of Arturo Onofri, work she is carrying out with assistance in revision from George Wallace.

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