Finding the Sublime in Storage

When archivists step into one of the subterranean storage vaults at the Getty Research Institute, the first thing they see is a surfboard. Not a painting, print, or sketch, but nine feet six inches of shaped foam and fiberglass mounted to a rack.

A closer look reveals that the board doubles as a Raymond Pettibon canvas. Its deck depicts the interior churn of a mountainous wave, rendered in cascading brushstrokes of blue and black ink—the artist’s trademark. In the wave’s epicenter, a surfer is dwarfed by an impending oceanic vortex.

When the Research Institute acquired Pettibon’s archive in 2024, the disruptive nature of the object is precisely what made it appealing. Unlike many things in the Institute’s holdings, it cannot be boxed, filed, or stacked. For this reason, it perfectly represents Pettibon, an artist who has persistently subverted institutional restraints for more than 50 years.

A merger of local histories and universal themes

Growing up in Hermosa Beach, California—one in a string of beach towns situated along Santa Monica Bay—the artist, born Raymond Ginn in 1957, didn’t catch waves. His parents deemed surfing too dangerous and the equipment too expensive. Still, the sport’s culture permeated his landscape. Mythical heroes of the postwar surf scene populated the neighborhood, including Greg Noll, one of the first Californians to conquer the massive swells of Hawaii’s North Shore. “Raymond always wanted to be a surfer,” said the musician Mike Watt, one of Pettibon’s oldest friends, in an interview with surf journalist Jamie Brisick.

Ginn started his career as an artist in 1978, when he published Captive Chains, an underground zine full of pulpy pen-and-ink panels inspired by film noir and punk rock. Several additional zines followed, all under the name Raymond Pettibon, a pseudonym inspired by hard-boiled paperback writers like Mickey Spillane. (“Petit Bon,” French for “good little one,” was the childhood nickname given to Raymond by his father, Regis Ginn, a local college professor and aspiring novelist.)

Pettibon had just graduated from UCLA with a degree in economics and was teaching math in a Los Angeles public school when he became locally famous for the darkly comic pen-and-ink flyers he designed for Black Flag, the hardcore punk band founded by his older brother, Greg Ginn. (Hardcore punk is generally faster and more aggressive than other forms of punk rock.) In conjunction with Greg’s DIY record label, SST, Pettibon produced a multitude of flyers, album covers, t-shirts, and zines between 1978 and 1985. His sinister and unsettlingly literate pen-and-ink style became synonymous with a strain of West Coast hardcore punk as experimental as it was confrontational.

Then, in 1985, Pettibon abruptly stepped away from the music scene, giving his subject matter and mediums space to expand. He started exploring larger formats, a wider color palette, and more elaborate conjunctions of text and image. Alongside other reanimated icons of postwar California pop culture—among them the children’s Claymation character Gumby and the serial murderer Charles Manson—depictions of surfers riding colossal waves became a recurring motif in his drawings.

In waves, Pettibon found the ideal vehicle for the underlying themes of his art, bridging his personal Southern Californian cultural history with a tradition of Romantic landscape painting from the 19th century. “It has to do with what you call the sublime, going back to Edmund Burke,” Pettibon told Brisick in 2021. “It has to do with making artwork about nature at its most epic, its most ferocious. Caspar David Friedrich. Frederic Edwin Church. [J. M. W.] Turner.”

In the past four decades, Pettibon has used drawings to explore everything from baseball players to war criminals to Gothic cathedrals, but he has consistently returned to images of tiny surfers on mountainous waves. “Every surf drawing or painting of mine is different from the last,” he told Brisick. “I’m trying to find something new in it as I start it.… I’m still learning each time I pick up the brush or the pen.” In placing a surfer on each new wave, he reinhabits the ominous contradictions central to his practice: the standoff between humans and nature, smallness and immensity, solitude and communion, enlightenment and absurdity.

The artifact reshapes the archive

The 32 boxes the Institute acquired from Pettibon in 2024 include many of the canonical flyers and zines from his early punk period, along with a selection of rare prints, source materials, and a few skateboard decks printed with his drawings. The surfboard was leaning against a wall when Glenn Phillips, the Institute’s chief curator, and Lynda Bunting, managing editor in research services at the Getty Conservation Institute (who previously worked as a volunteer archivist in the artist’s studio), visited Pettibon’s storage space north of New York City, where he has lived and worked since 2011. Pettibon noticed Phillips looking at it and asked, “You want that?”

“To me,” says Phillips, “it almost makes more sense than the skate decks. The skate decks are much more accessible, but the surfboard is more surprising. As a formalist, Raymond can basically create an abstract painting and then recontextualize it, and now it’s a surfboard.”

Pettibon produced the board in the mid-2000s as part of Art for the Oceans, a biennial auction in which he—alongside a range of artists including Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Ed Ruscha—was invited to create a surf-related artwork to benefit the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting coastal ecosystems and beach access.

While the Institute’s holdings include a wide range of unusual works by notable artists—Claes Oldenburg’s collection of ray guns, for example, is shelved on an aisle right behind Pettibon’s materials–the archivists don’t typically deal with artifacts as unwieldy as the surfboard. To accommodate the large object, senior mountmakers Kevin Young and Barry Russakis strapped it to one of the sliding racks in the vault and designed a special foam mount so it wouldn’t get scratched. They sliced a hole through the metal wires of the rack, allowing the fin to protrude comfortably.

In the future, researchers will be able to sort through Pettibon’s old Xeroxes and witness how he developed his iconic zines and flyers. Anyone curious may examine loose piles of drawings and fragments of literature and retrace his unique juxtapositions of language and image. Conservators will cross-reference ink samples and study his methods the way they now study Turner. What will scholars a hundred years from now make of the surfboard?

There’s text on the board that’s hard to see; it’s written in lightly colored cursive brushstrokes that only become visible as you step closer. Pettibon has said that his drawings and writing are inextricable, the cryptic epigrams inspired by deep readings of poets, theologians, and philosophers from centuries past. The words are inscribed on the lower section of the deck, near where a rider would plant his back foot. The text, which cites a phrase from Horace’s Ars Poetica, reads, “The surfer is compelled to flow with the poet’s maxim: to plunge in media res.”

For the artist and archivist alike, stories are found the same way: by throwing oneself into the unknown, far from shore, again and again. Even the surfboard that never touches water can take you to the middle of things.