In 1962, Richard Pettibone attended Andy Warhol’s first show at the Ferus Gallery in his hometown of Los Angeles. Just a year later, he visited Marcel Duchamp’s major retrospective curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. In the examples of these two pioneering artists, Pettibone found kindred spirits and began to develop his own artistic voice by way of a brilliant conceptual loop of appropriation. As he later explained, these examples suggested, “to me the possibility of using other people’s work as the subject matter for paintings and sculpture.”i
Approaching the artistic strategy of appropriation vis-à-vis his own penchant for model-making and the miniature, Pettibone initially created pocket-sized shadow box assemblages inspired by Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise before making small-scale “copies” of works by Warhol and Duchamp. These works impressed both Warhol and his gallerist Leo Castelli to such an extent during Pettibone’s visit to New York in early 1965 that he returned to Los Angeles to an offer for his first ever solo show from Irving Blum, the director of the famed Ferus Gallery where Pettibone admired Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans a few years prior.
Marcel Duchamp "Bicycle Wheel," 1913, was among the works included in this seminal exhibition that opened on December 14, 1965. For this show, Blum had suggested that Pettibone replicate artworks held in six important Southern California collections. In tongue-in-cheek homage to Duchamp, Pettibone adapted his forebear’s famous Wanted Poster of 1923 to advertise the show with his pseudonym “Lee Enrose.” In addition to works copied from originals of such collections as Frederick Weisman and Betty Asher, Pettibone developed five bicycle wheels for the storefront of the gallery in a masterful loop of appropriation of Duchamp’s iconic readymade. While the works would appear indistinguishable from Duchamp’s readymade in black and white reproductions, each fork was in fact painted in a different primary color in addition to a black and white example. Creating thought-provoking juxtaposition between the original and the variant, these works brilliantly expand upon Duchamp’s critique of the notions of originality and authorship.
The art critic Fidel Danieli astutely noted that, “From a devotion to Duchamp, Pettibone proceeds to the idea of the relatively non-visual, transmuted from and through reproduction and variation...the polarities—the similarities found in divergency and the differences observable in repetition—are contradictions kept in continuous tension. These reflecting dualities can be found in the modifiable verities of photo-reproduction and an increasing mechanical strictness of craft.”ii