Here's Your Irony Back: Political Works 1975-2013

Here’s Your Irony Back: Political Works 1975–2013 gathers Raymond Pettibon’s drawings on political subjects, from Ronald and Nancy Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover to Abu Ghraib and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hatje Cantz published the hardcover in 2013 with David Zwirner and Regen Projects. It runs to 212 pages with 122 color reproductions. The other figures and events in the plates include both Bush presidents, the Kennedys, Hitler, the Vietnam War and its protest movements, Obama and Osama bin Laden. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh contributes the essay, which reads the drawings through the recurring tropes of their moments: caricature, sleaze and pop, graffiti and patriotism.

Pettibon was born in 1957. His drawings take their starting point from the Southern California punk culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and its do-it-yourself forms: album covers, comics, concert flyers and fanzines. They combine image and text and draw on literature, art history, religion, sports and youth culture. The book notes that political subjects came up with growing intensity in his work after September 11, 2001. The New Museum gave him a survey of more than 700 drawings in 2017.