Up For Auction: Flyers from Black Flag and the California Punk Scene of the 80s

A new auc­tion unearths clas­sic works from Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon, fre­quent Black Flag col­lab­o­ra­tor and the fore­most artist of the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia hard­core punk scene of the 80s.

In 1982, Black Flag sang the words “I was a hip­pie, I was a burnout, I was a dropout, I was out of my head, I was a surfer, I had a skate­board, I was so heavy man, I lived on the strand, I was so wast­ed” If that does­n’t illus­trate a vivid pic­ture of the SoCal hard­core punk scene, noth­ing does—except maybe the actu­al illus­tra­tions.

Even if you don’t know any­thing about hard­core punk music from Cal­i­for­nia, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly heard of Black Flag. If so, you’re even more cer­tain to have seen the fly­ers for their shows back in the day, whose provoca­tive and crass style defined the 80’s south­ern Cal­i­for­nia scene back in the day. The man behind those fly­ers has a name, Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon, the broth­er of one of Black Flag’s mem­bers and the band’s qua­si-offi­cial artist from 1978 to 1986 (he even came up with the band’s name and dis­tinc­tive logo).

Today I found out there’s a major auc­tion going for some of the art from back in the day. Fly­ers and what­not that have laid undis­turbed for decades are now for sale and going for sur­pris­ing­ly very demo­c­ra­t­ic prices on the net (aver­age start­ing bid on a fly­er or zine is just $50), cour­tesy of Chicago’s Wright Auc­tion House and LA Mod­ern. And if you’re broke and can’t afford to bid on art, I’m right there with you, but it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for us to get a good look at some his­to­ry before some col­lec­tor reliv­ing his glo­ry days snags it all.

Despite hav­ing no art edu­ca­tion or real expe­ri­ence oth­er than draw­ing some polit­i­cal car­toons when he was much younger, Pet­ti­bon’s col­lab­o­ra­tions with Black Flag were incred­i­bly pro­lif­ic, hav­ing sprout­ed from the fer­tile soil of dis­af­fect­ed youth.

Each show’s fly­er was, they say, print­ed at least 500 times and dis­trib­uted in as many places around town as pos­si­ble. Despite all that, not a lot of them seemed to have sur­vived (80% are esti­mat­ed to have been destroyed), and a sin­gle one often goes for sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars at auc­tion, which is what makes this par­tic­u­lar event so inter­est­ing. Iron­i­cal­ly, Pet­ti­bon him­self was work­ing basi­cal­ly for free at the time.

Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon: The Punk Years, is curat­ed by Spe­cif­ic Object, a New York book­store and gallery run by for­mer MoMA cura­tor David Platzk­er, there are some­where around 300 items for sale, and not all of them are just fly­ers. Some are fanzines, shirts, tapes, records, and most inter­est­ing­ly, a cou­ple of well-used, thrashed boards signed by the artist him­self. All of it comes from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of Platzk­er, who col­lect­ed most of these things while he was grow­ing up in LA and going to high school in the late 70s and ear­ly 80s.

Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon, born in Ari­zona to Irish and Eston­ian immi­grants, quick­ly moved with his fam­i­ly to Her­mosa Beach, Cal­i­for­nia, and along with his broth­er, Greg, he quick­ly found a place in the bur­geon­ing hard­core punk rock scene of the time, although Pet­ti­bon says his posi­tion in the scene was total­ly by cir­cum­stance, a result of his artis­tic tal­ents and the local music scene meet­ing at the right time. “My work was just draw­ings, and basi­cal­ly draw­ings just as I would do now. They weren’t done with any aspi­ra­tions of becom­ing a part of that scene. They weren’t about punk. They were just col­lec­tions of draw­ings, some of which I xerox­ed and sold … I would sell them to any­one I could. But it was nev­er my goal to cap­i­tal­ize on punk. I could nev­er make it as a com­mer­cial artist.” he rem­i­nisced.

At the time these shows were hap­pen­ing, the aes­thet­ic of punk rock was­n’t as nailed down as it is now, and there was no mon­ey in it (mean­ing no one could co-opt it and sell $500 fac­to­ry-made bat­tle jack­ets to rich kids) so every­body involved was try­ing what­ev­er to see what would stick. Pet­ti­bon in par­tic­u­lar was doing every­thing from word col­lages to par­o­dies of adver­tis­ing and pop cul­ture at the time in his art, even­tu­al­ly zero­ing in on the one-punch gra­tu­itous graph­ic style in which a sto­ry is told using just one pan­el, sim­i­lar to the word­less nov­els cham­pi­oned by some­one like Frans Masereel in the 20s or Mar­tin Vaughn-James in the 70s.

Need­less to say, for a fly­er, there was only room for one pic­ture, and it had to encom­pass every­thing that the band want­ed to say, so as far as any punk band is con­cerned, they were always going to be as provoca­tive as pos­si­ble, with no room for nuance. In the artist’s own words, “You can’t tell a whole sto­ry with all kinds of expo­si­tion. It’s like tak­ing one frame out of a movie or one cru­cial scene out of a book at a crit­i­cal point. You can’t real­ly be sub­tle.” I would love to have seen these out in the wild and the reac­tions of passer­by who weren’t in the know.

Pet­ti­bon’s art often drew from Black Flag’s lyrics, but more fre­quent­ly, it was a snap­shot of his own cul­tur­al land­scape. A series of 47 zines cre­at­ed by Pet­ti­bon and pub­lished by his broth­er Greg Gin­n’s label SST Records, pro­vid­ed the raw mate­r­i­al for many of his fly­ers. These zines were “one of the best things about work­ing with SST,” he said. “It’s not some­thing that you can buy in a store or see on TV. You see it at a glance and you can’t switch it off.”

His technique—ink on paper, sin­gle panels—draws par­al­lels with comics and the blown-up sin­gle pan­els of Roy Licht­en­stein. Pettibon’s bru­tal depic­tions have been com­pared to George Grosz, Goya, and Dau­mi­er, who sim­i­lar­ly show­cased life in its rawest form dur­ing their time. Oth­er peo­ple have com­pared his stuff to the old pulp mag­a­zine draw­ings of the 30s and 40s, and even medieval man­u­script illu­mi­na­tions of tor­tured saints.

Some­times he includ­ed draw­ings by his kid nephew along­side his, or he taped movies or shows on VHS, paused the tape, and adapt­ed the frame for his draw­ings. But despite cre­at­ing his art from what he knew, there is no intro­spec­tion and none of the art is per­son­al. He’s no Robert Crumb, nor does he want to be, as Pet­ti­bon insists through­out his career that none of the art he makes is meant to be auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, mere­ly a reflec­tion of the milieu around him.

Black Flag’s iden­ti­ty, crass and sar­don­ic, is for­ev­er inter­twined with Pet­ti­bon’s art, and the inher­ent vul­gar­i­ty behind it echoed across the ages, influ­enc­ing punk and music in gen­er­al to this day. Take the fly­er fea­tur­ing an up-close dong with “love” scrawled on it–several decades lat­er, it served as the inspi­ra­tion for the band Death Grips’ infa­mous album cov­er for No Love Deep Web, the scene recre­at­ed IRL. In response to a time front­man Hen­ry Rollins tried ask­ing Pet­ti­bon for a spe­cif­ic illus­tra­tion from him, he real­ized one les­son: “Don’t tell Ray what to do … You’ll notice there’s a sol­id year of Black Flag fly­ers where it’s noth­ing but erect penis­es.”

Clear­ly, the art is sup­posed to be con­fronta­tion­al. The fly­ers were like a mid­dle fin­ger sta­pled to a tele­phone pole, dar­ing you to react. Some­times the fly­er is lit­er­al­ly a draw­ing of a mid­dle fin­ger. It’s the kind of thing where you were meant to be walk­ing around Tor­rance or Lawn­dale or wher­ev­er Black Flag was going to be and be stopped in your tracks by a crude draw­ing of Charles Man­son being cru­ci­fied or a cop with a gun in his mouth. Even Flea from Red Hot Chili Pep­pers recalls, “Before I knew what Black Flag was I remem­ber walk­ing around Hol­ly­wood and see­ing Ray­mond’s fly­ers and being like, ‘What the fuck is that?’… Those fly­ers made me feel like some­thing is going on and it’s roman­tic and it’s mys­te­ri­ous and it’s heavy and I don’t know what it is but I wan­na know.”

What­ev­er reac­tion peo­ple might have to the art, it was very much of the time. An amal­gam of the angst-rid­den youth zeit­geist in 70s and 80s SoCal. Pet­ti­bon’s art, and the punk peri­od in gen­er­al start­ed out play­ing on the famil­iar sub­ur­ban fears and pan­ic borne of sen­sa­tion­al­ized news reports and clas­sic movie arche­types, com­bined with the rest­less need for mind­less, igno­rant self-expres­sion. It’s as much about drug-crazed killer hip­pies as it is about low-life busi­ness­men and hys­ter­i­cal femme fatales from film noir.

Pet­ti­bon did­n’t stop at Black Flag either, his art made it on the fly­ers and albums of bands like Cir­cle Jerks, Min­ute­men, Throb­bing Gris­tle, Descen­dents, TSOL, and Hüsker Dü. And just two years before his falling out with Black Flag, he held his first gallery show at 27.

Four years after leav­ing the band behind, he got the oppor­tu­ni­ty to design the album art for Son­ic Youth’s ‘Goo’, for­mal­ly break­ing out of the local punk scene, which was more con­fined to the West Coast back then than it is now, and turn­ing him into a more wide­ly rec­og­nized artist.

Pet­ti­bon always sought to eschew his cult sta­tus as a “punk artist”, he is a more tra­di­tion­al artist now, and he’s every­where if you know how to look, doing every­thing from surf­ing paint­ings to large-scale base­ball murals in Brook­lyn, and for a while now he’s had the atten­tion of big gallery own­ers and muse­um cura­tors. He’s even col­lab­o­rat­ed with huge artists like Ed Ruscha. Per­son­al­ly, I’ve even seen his art hang­ing up in upscale sub­ur­ban restau­rant bath­rooms, which sure­ly nobody from the Black Flag days could have seen com­ing.

Although his ink-on-paper tech­nique has large­ly remained unchanged since his years in the punk scene, Pet­ti­bon has gone much deep­er with his sub­ject mat­ter, incor­po­rat­ing lit­er­ary ref­er­ences from writ­ers such as Samuel Beck­ett, Mar­cel Proust, Charles Baude­laire, Jorge Luis Borges, among oth­ers, no doubt an inter­est instilled or at least influ­enced by his father, who was an Eng­lish teacher. He even pub­lished a read­er of the works he was most influ­enced by so you can maybe catch up to his lev­el.

Yet the vio­lence and crude pop cul­ture ele­ments remain even now, and the con­tin­ued inter­est in Pet­ti­bon’s art is prob­a­bly in no small part due to his abil­i­ty to go high and low, bal­anc­ing an endur­ing appeal that applies to the art world as well as the street­wise.

As a per­son­al­i­ty, he’s no less capa­ble of range, and there are numer­ous inter­views where you can get very deep insights into what he thinks about his art and the world at large, such as a great con­ver­sa­tion with Kim Gor­don of Son­ic Youth in Inter­view Mag­a­zine. But he’s also got a very blunt, unem­bell­ished side to him, best exem­pli­fied in my per­son­al favorite, an inter­view he did in Berlin for Sleek, in which he got absolute­ly wastoid blitzed in the after­noon, had to be dri­ven there (was an hour late any­way), and most­ly only man­aged to shit-talk all of the most recent pres­i­dents of the US while prais­ing the assas­sins of the Kennedys as his heroes. The inter­view only last­ed four ques­tions before the jour­nal­ist pre­sum­ably tapped out. I love range.

His art is still going strong in the music scene, grac­ing the albums of new-ish bands like OFF! And Cere­bral Bal­lzy. Pet­ti­bon is a musi­cian him­self, briefly play­ing bass in rehearsals for Black Flag with his broth­er (before leav­ing to focus on school) and per­form­ing in a num­ber of per­son­al projects and col­lab­o­ra­tions in the years since, bands like Super Ses­sion, Sock-Tight, Psing Psong Psung, and Sür Drone.

These days, if he’s not busy mak­ing more art, you can find him on his Twitter/X, where he most­ly posts stan­dard Gen‑X polit­i­cal ban­ter, only tak­ing short moments to stop and write from the heart about his pas­sion for dog fight­ing and the pit bulls he breeds for it. Although he also claims he rais­es them for a char­i­ty that gives them to impov­er­ished kids who can’t afford dogs. It’s a run­ning joke of his, but still, no one can seem to tell if he’s seri­ous on either count or if there are even any dogs to begin with. You sel­dom know if he’s ever sin­cere and cer­tain­ly, that’s part of the charm with the art in this auc­tion.

All this art will scat­ter across the world in a few days’ time once the ham­mer drops, but it’s a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to see what these items look like and get a brief peek into an old music scene. And if you still want to see more, some of Pet­ti­bon’s zines are up in places like the Inter­net Archive if you’re curi­ous to read them.

Like the throw­away super­hero comics of old, Pet­ti­bon’s work was cre­at­ed for the time and place. Now a tes­ta­ment to a bygone era, they’ve sur­vived long enough to have become cher­ished artifacts—or maybe just pricey reminders of a time when punk was con­sid­ered some­thing raw and real.

Either way, Pet­ti­bon nev­er took any of it seri­ous­ly and seemed to know what was up in the moment, in a 1984 inter­view with the LA Times he pre­dict­ed auc­tions like these were going to hap­pen, say­ing “It’ll hap­pen like it did in the ‘60s with the psy­che­del­ic posters … Once these kids start grow­ing up and mak­ing mon­ey, it’ll be a way of recap­tur­ing their past. But at that point the art becomes dead. It’s just arti­facts.”

Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon: The Punk Years, curat­ed by Spe­cif­ic Object and David Pratzk­er, host­ed by Wright Auc­tion House and Los Ange­les Mod­ern Auc­tions, is open to online bid­ding until August 22, 2024.