Installation view, Richard Pettibone retrospective, ICA, University of Pennsylvania. Pettibone makes miniatures and mash-ups of works he admires; thus the tiny Warhol Brillo Boxes (foreground), which I saw several years ago in an expensive (hence unpurchased) Pop catalog at the Whitney. I apparently absorbed more from this terrific little painted sculpture than I thought I did at the time. Roberta Smith, writing in the NYT, correctly nails Pettibone as an exemplary minor artist, invoking almost the exact same criteria Greenberg used years ago to describe the significance of Paul Klee's practice. I don't think this judgement is as harsh as it first sounds; it indicates technical skill, perserverence, and conceptual originality, if not "reach." And Warhol Brillo Boxes is an excellent work, playful and modest in turn. In the imaginary collection I carry around in my head, it sits in the same room as Johns' Painted Bronze and Nauman's Pay Attention -- pretty good company for a "minor artist"!

Roberta Smith:

"Mr. Pettibone's work has always been vulnerable to some of contemporary art's most popular pejoratives: cute, twee, teensy and craftsy; minor; unoriginal. It is also called 'art about art,' which probably hasn't helped. It can't be said that these adjectives don't sometimes apply. But with large quantities of his work, something else prevails: formal rigor, the personalizing effects of scale and touch, faith in materials as carriers of artistic meaning and, above all, hard-nosed, even hypercritical reverence.

In addition, under cover of cuteness and pitch-perfect downsizing (note the infinitesimal nails on the plain wood strip frames), Mr. Pettibone has persistently asked some nagging questions. Who owns artistic ideas? And what have materials and craft got to do with them? What, really, is originality? Why does so much art have to be so big? And tangential to this: What is the essence of miniaturization? What happens to visual experience when previously large, famous paintings are reduced to the size of the viewer's face, while, at their best, looking mind-bogglingly like the real thing? An answer that touches on several of these questions is: A new, transformative, maybe original sense of intimacy and ownership that is unusually empowering. It is rather amazing to see art cut down to size with its integrity intact. In most cases cuteness gives way to an unsparing yet radiant sense of craft."
- posted by cjb @ 10:20 AM