The Infinite Series of the Sea: Raymond Pettibon, punk’s most celebrated artist, creates spellbinding works of surfers and waves
by Ryan McDonald In surf speak, a “line” is the path a surfer chooses to take on a wave. The decision is typically a strategic one. If a surfer knows the wave they are riding will soon move into deeper water, and become weaker as a result, they might position themselves higher on the face, so as to ride downward with gravity through the section, then cut back toward the curl to avoid getting too far out in front and losing momentum. But the choice of line is also aesthetic. Even the notoriously inane announcers for professional surfing contests refer to the lines surfers “draw.” If it seems wrong to call surfing an art, thinking of it as just a sport isn’t much better. Lines both physical and conceptual recur throughout the surf art of Raymond Pettibon, which has been collected in a dazzling new book from the publishing imprint of the David Zwirner Gallery. “Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves” contains lines taken by surfers, wakes of disturbed white amidst the greens and blues of the wave’s face, but also lines of text that are inserted in each work. And the word “line” appears in these dispatches too frequently, even for an illustrator, to be a coincidence: “The…
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