While it may be less conspicuous than the expansive chair exhibition, "Something Completely Different: Raymond Pettibon's Repeater Pencil" packs a punch. The 14-minute video installation is composed of Pettibon's drawings and watercolors—animated and set to audio narration.
The drawings each communicate a particular message or theme that is repeated throughout the film. Certain drawing-narration combinations have a poetic, narrative nature, aided by the use of both his own writing and quotations from the works of Marcel Proust and Henry James.
Pettibon is best known for his collections of drawings, which initially caught the Museum's interest.
"Pettibon is a very well-known artist, some of whose drawings have been loaned to the Museum for an exhibition in the past," wrote Curatorial Fellow Diana Tuite in an e-mail to the Orient.
Pettibon does more drawing than multimedia work, being that his video work is more time-consuming and requires collaborations.
"Repeater Pencil" is somewhat of an extension of the drawings that were shown at the museum in the past, though it is an individual work in its own right.
"We wanted to introduce an audience to this body of work (the piece was included in this year's SITE Santa Fe exhibition), and in particular, had spoken with some of the studio department faculty about his appropriateness for their instruction," wrote Tuite. "Though the exhibit, located in the museum's Media Gallery space, did not have an individualized opening, it opened nearly in conjunction with the current exhibit 'Sit Down!'"
The Media Gallery space is a small black box-style gallery space in the museum where videos and projections are shown.
"Sometimes the selection relates to other work in the galleries," wrote Tuite. "In this case, it is a stand-alone choice since we wanted to have another contemporary project on view."
The piece does not tell a coherent narrative. Rather, it presents separate, static drawings with individualized narrative themes.
The captions and overlapping narrations on some of the drawings are often repeated and appear as motifs throughout the video.
For example, "Was he a cynic, an enthusiast, or merely an aesthete of the rough seas?" is constantly quoted throughout the film, paired with several different drawings. Another quotation that recurs, "You can make it still, but you can't make it stop."
According to Tuite, "the Media Gallery has shown all kinds of different work, from historic pieces of performance art originally on video and now transferred to DVD to contemporary projects with very involved installation instructions."
"My hope is that people realize that the space is there and feel comfortable coming and going often to see whatever is being shown several times," wrote Tuite. "It requires museum-goers to stop and slow down and experience something in the museum with a different kind of attention, but it is very rewarding."
The exhibition opened on October 21 and will be on view through January 2.