Museum And Gallery

Wrestlemania

By GREG COOK | May 18, 2007

Ruscha came to fame in the ’60s with iconic paintings of floating words and serial photographs of gas stations and parking lots. Pettibon attracted notice in the ’80s with pulpy cartoons to which he appended cryptic texts — you may remember his Sonic Youth and Minutemen album covers. Although the two are often called pop artists, their real subject is the slipperiness of words and symbols.

Here, Ruscha provides the main image for their tag-team 2003 lithographs, a realistically depicted Bible or the phrase “The End” broken in two as if in skipping film frames. Below Pettibon scrawls slightly altered versions of found texts (the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.) that read like death-bed confessions, bland facts, lunatic ravings, or the voice of God: “By chapter and verse I may have said a great deal, but loose lips must be sealed with loose threads.”

Ruscha circled the subject in paintings and prints of the phrase “The End” in the 1990s. Pettibon followed their collaboration with Bible drawing. The charge in their collaboration comes from the contrast of Ruscha’s Apollonian precision with Pettibon’s diaristic messiness, but the Bible-endtimes semantics feel tired and forced.

‘Cameron Jamie’ MIT List Visual Art Center, 20 Ames St, Cambridge | Through July 8

‘Ed Ruscha/Raymond Pettibon: The Holy Bible and THE END’ Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury St, Worcester | Through May 27

JO + Keiji Haino | Bartos Theater at MIT, 20 Ames St, Building E15, Cambridge | 9 pm | 617.253.4680

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