WHOEVER SHOWS: STRIKE UYP TH’ BAND! / 2019

“Whoever Shows: Strike Uyp th’ Band!” is a staged reading at the New Museum of a collaged collection of excerpts from Raymond Pettibon’s scripts, including those originally produced for videos like The Whole World is Watching: Weatherman ’69 (1989–90), Sir Drone: A New Film About the New Beatles (1989–90), The Holes You Feel, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, and Batman. Beginning in the 1980s, Pettibon produced a series of low-fi videos made with friends and shot on commercial home video equipment. These feature-length works focus on radical subjects drawn from 1960s and ’70s American counterculture, including the Manson Family, the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the SLA, the Weather Underground, and the beginning of the American punk movement. Although some of these works like The Whole World is Watching and Sir Drone have become classic video works of the period and have been shown widely alongside Pettibon’s signature drawings, several other scripts like Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison have yet to be produced or, in the case of The Holes You Feel, were staged and shot but ultimately lost.
Reflecting upon the notion of collaborative work, this assemblage of Pettibon’s fragmentary scripts, scenes, and lyrics attempts to envision personal perspectives and imaginative approaches to the historical past and the edges of society. This event at the New Museum is one of only a handful of select public readings of his scripts that Pettibon has organized over the past several years. The continuous reading at the New Museum will feature an ensemble of artists, musicians, and Pettibon’s friends.
Participants include Oliver Augst, Mark Beasley, Veronique Bourgoin, Angela Choon, Jonny Cournoyer, Brian D’Amato, Pauline Daly, Marcel Dzama, Ray Farrell, Thomas Fehlmann, Kim Gordon, Sozita Goudouna, David Larsen, Young Kim, Spencer Leigh, Charles Louis-Aristide, David Rimanelli, Sven Sachsalber, Stella Schnabel, Ricky Sepulveda, Frances Stark, Robert Storr, Juli Susin, Dirk Vandenberg, Mitchell Watkins, Mike Watt, Hans Weigand, and Lauren Wolchik.
Directed by Raymond Pettibon and produced by Sozita Goudouna.
The project is dedicated to the memory of Kevin Killian.
Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957 in Tucson, Arizona) graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1998); the Drawing Center, New York (1999); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1999); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2002); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2003); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2006); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia (2015); Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2016); and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2016). Pettibon has also participated in a number of important group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1993, 1997, and 2004), the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), Documenta XI (2002), and SITE Santa Fe (2004 and 2010). In 2017, the New Museum organized a major exhibition Pettibon’s work title A Pen of All Work which travelled to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands. A related exhibition title The Cloud of Misreading travelled to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Pettibon currently lives and works in New York.
Sozita Goudouna is a curator, adjunct professor at CUNY, and the author of Beckett’s Breath (2018), published by Edinburgh University Press. She is head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio. Sozita has taught at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial fellow at Performa NY and has curated projects for documenta 14, Onassis Foundation NYC, EMST among other institutions and museums.

Sponsors
This event is copresented by Performa 19 and the New Museum.
This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

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