The Whole World is Watching: Weatherman ‘69, 1989
122 min, Betacam SP, PAL, couleur, son
Since the late 1970s, Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn in 1957 in the United States) has created drawings accompanied by text based on images characteristic of American popular culture. Following the tradition of social satire and American comics of the 1940s and 50s—such as crime comics and pulp magazines—Pettibon began producing his own zines in the 1980s, adopting the reprographic techniques of the time, particularly Xerox art. His work combines visual arts and alternative music: he is associated with the American punk group Black Flag founded by his elder brother Greg Ginn, and he makes drawings for album covers. He is known in particular for the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album Goo. His works feature such contentious and even controversial figures as Ronald Reagan and Charles Manson [1] to expose the mechanisms of the American media system.
Pettibon also uses video, employing moving images to drive his satirical work. In The Whole World is Watching: Weatherman ’69, he questions the countercultural utopia of the 1960s and examines the connections between social struggle, political violence, and media imagery. The work drew on the American organization Weather Underground—originally known as Weatherman when it was founded in 1969—which advocated the use of violence to oppose U.S. imperialism and social injustice, particularly during the period of the war in Vietnam. The video’s title references a slogan emblematic of the anti-war protests of that era: “The Whole World Is Watching,” suggesting that the world was watching the conflicts caused by the United States. This slogan had already been used by sociologist Todd Gitlin for his book that analyzed how the American media covered the radical left—known as the New Left—during the 1960s and the impact of this coverage on the country's political life. [2] In the same line as his graphic work on the American punk scene, Pettibon created this video with Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Mike Watt of Sonic Youth, who play members of the Weather Underground. The video reports on the organization’s fictional activities—readings, music sessions, and the destruction of vinyl records—while juxtaposing them with actors playing other figures, such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, in a fragmented narrative.
Employing deliberately disorderly editing and the use of archive materials, Pettibon offers a rereading of the history of the New Left seen through a subversive aesthetic. By recycling extracts from revolutionary speeches and media recordings, the artist reflects on how events and ideologies are documented, disseminated, and sometimes manipulated. The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman ’69 invites viewers to revisit a period of political unrest while questioning our relationship with images and memory, with the purpose of highlighting the degree to which past struggles continue to resonate in the contemporary moment.
Nicolas Ballet, December 2024
Translated by Timothy Stroud
[1] On Charles Manson in Raymond Pettibon’s work, see Mark Goodall, “The ‘Book of Manson’: Raymond Pettibon and the killing of America”, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2012), pp. 159-70.
[2] See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
