Between the Lines

It wasn't your canon?

It wasn't a hierarchy, yeah, it wasn't my canon. It was a collaborative thing. Actually, it was a real down. The end result really didn't have much jell, inner coherence, as a record. It's just an anthology.

What would be the ideal response to your work? I mean if a kid says, "Oh my God, I love these drawings. They're so fucking cool. They're the best art in the world!" Or someone has a very erudite analysis of your work based on an informed idea of its relationship to art history. Is one or the other of those responses more pleasing to you?

It's not something I dwell on. There's not so much of this common response-feedback relationship in the first place. But, yeah, of course there is an ideal response, but I don't know if I can nail it down exactly.

It seems to me that it would be entirely possible for someone who knows nothing about contemporary art to have a really profound response to your work that would not be an inaccurate response. Say someone who might respond to it viscerally, as a kind of poetry.

Yeah. But I think if someone is completely illiterate, then obviously he's going to be missing something. An absolute moron is going to be getting a little bit more out of it maybe. I'm not above making what I guess we'd call in-jokes or allusions to art or literature in my work, and knowing those references might add something. There are a lot of things going on in one drawing, at times. Obviously, everyone is not going to get everything. I don't expect them to, and sometimes there might be a personal allusion that I'm not expecting anyone to understand. A lot of times I think my work's getting across when I know someone's laughing. That's something that's nice. Maybe that's my ideal response.

Extracted from the interview section of Raymond Pettibon published by Phaidon Press Limited. © 2001 Phaidon Press Limited. ISBN 0 7148 3919 1. RRP $29.95. (WWW.phaidon.com). All images except the Circle Jerks flier are provided courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles