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R. Crumb in Heaven

By Brendan Bernhard, LA Weekly. Posted May 12, 2005.


The quick-witted and articulate curmudgeon is facing his golden years -- but he's still got a few tricks up his sleeve.
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Looking at the photograph of the young Robert Crumb, together with three of his neatly dressed siblings, at Disneyland in 1955, I thought to myself, "What a sweet bunch of kids!" (On closer inspection, they appeared to be frowning, but still ... ) Reproduced in The R. Crumb Handbook, this sepia-tinged slice of 1950s Americana embodies something about the USA that the ornery cartoonist, who is prone to fits of nostalgia, appears to love. ("Disneyland," he gushes, "was a truly magical place. The rides were like a fantastic dream come true.") Nonetheless, 10 years later he joyfully laid waste to the Disney worldview with a series of amazingly imaginative, convulsively obscene and satirical cartoons that helped define the underground culture of the 1960s.

Almost 40 years after such riveting creations as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Whiteman and Angelfood McSpade sprang fully-formed from his drug-addled skull, Crumb is now in his second decade of cultural canonization. The process began in 1994 with Terry Zwigoff's wrenching documentary, Crumb, in which the former art critic for Time, Robert Hughes, compared him to Bruegel. It continued with The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book in 1997, and now gathers steam with The R. Crumb Handbook, in which multiple selections of Crumb's work are interspersed with his reflections on sex, death, the media, art-world phonies, 1950s America, the hippie era and the decline of just about everything. For Crumb, a born curmudgeon, the rot set in early.

"As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it," he tells co-author/amanuensis Peter Poplaski at the beginning of the first chapter. "I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them."

Like Bob Dylan, another '60s counterculture hero now climbing higher and higher in the establishment firmament, and to some extent Woody Allen, Crumb always had mixed feelings about modernity and even about the decade whose culture he brought to blazing fruition. Like Allen, he preferred the popular music of the 1920s to that of his own era, and like Dylan he had some decidedly reactionary tendencies, expressing a longing for an earlier, pre-corporate America.

Though he has now been invited into it, Crumb sees the world of contemporary "high" art, from the abstract expressionists on, as almost entirely spurious, an international con job populated with wall-to-wall charlatans and hacks. In what appears to be a nod to Tom Wolfe's immortal takedown of the 1970s New York art scene, The Painted Word, one Crumb drawing included in the Handbook shows a sculpture of a woman's legs with a lengthy "Explanation" pinned to the gallery wall.

Crumb loathes pretension, and part of his genius lies in the way he breaks down the barrier between reader and writer. The constant asides and self-deprecating jokes in his comics make you feel as if you're part of the game, in on the joke, wise to the secret of his success. In Crumb's hands, the comic strip is inherently democratic, the very opposite of the cold, snooty, poisonously aloof contemporary art-world experience. Even his obsession with ruggedly powerful girls with mighty derrières is as far from the slim Madison Avenue ideal as you can get, a twisted sexual mix of ghetto and hicksville.

"People are always telling me, 'I sure wish I had your talent, but I can't even draw a straight line!' " he notes in one cartoon. "This is just so much utter nonsense! NOBODY can draw a straight line, and any person who tells you he can is a liar, a cheat, and a fraud!!" In another (a poster for a museum show in Germany), we see Crumb folded up in an armchair, holding a cup of steaming coffee. "Yeah, but is it ART?" queries a giant thought-balloon above his head, referring to the poster. "You tell ME, I don't know ... " comes the reply in a smaller word-bubble from the worried-looking artist.


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Pop art is so...
Posted by: Sojourner on May 12, 2005 8:03 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
...Pop. I cannot get past the stunts and the celebrity, while I believe that art is what does manifest something more than entertainment.

I love to be entertained, so I do love R. Crumb. I was born to be audience. And I must agree that it is not clear where the line between art and artifice can be drawn.

When I begin and end with the work, however, I am more satisfied than the "People Magazine" approach to so-called art. I regularly read some of the critics and enjoy their struggles, so I have learned that "art for art's sake" reveals for us the innards of the work's creator. OK. Then what??????

R. Crumb has a surprising set of innards. But so many others, who are showing, do not. That shows me that we've lost our way somewhere.

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Hmmmm...
Posted by: CLB on May 13, 2005 7:57 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I remember the 60's Crumb as an unknown funky cartoon commentator. I wouldn't venture to call the work 'high' or fine in any way, but naive, yes. Nothing wrong with that.

There's always been some bitterness from nerds (victimization?) that they saw (see) the world in a way that is devoid of the filters of understanding of how or what makes something 'cool'. Nothing wrong with that, but that inability doesn't make them cool (although the term 'hip', allegedly coined by gays of the 40's as a reference to those of them who could take a beating or other abuse by straight men without showing emotion, is not far afield of the 'cool' attitude I'm suggesting).

Art critics need new dirt to till. When the art world's newcomers plateau before the next batch appears well, like the old cartonist in Crumb's own strip, they start reworking the 'old' stuff. It doesn't take a critic to recognize that someone's work has something to contribute to the discussion of culture--like other curmudgeonly cartoonists Crumb does that, but it isn't philosophy, it's observation and Crumb isn't creating anything new (as artists do) in architecture, design, music or the studio arts. He's observing and commenting on what exists through a graphic medium. Nothing wrong with that either, but it ain't "art".

Oh, and given these guys need for recognition (clearly illustrated in their neurotic self-commenting strips) do you really think that when the art world hoists them up to exhibit to the world as 'important' any one of them (or even you dear reader) would cry out 'Wait, I'm wearing no clothes'?

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» RE: Hmmmm... Posted by: Sojourner
Mmm...
Posted by: CLB on May 13, 2005 12:14 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"...does that correlate with style.."? Not in my opinion. Style can be assumed, affected or developed and it comes from a deeply internalized set of assumptions, so deep to be unconscious or appear to the one experiencing them as behavior that is 'natural' or 'common sense' (hence the sometimes diffident ease of one who others see as having style). Philosophy, as you point out, seems a conscious examination of assumptions; almost the opposite!

The 'philisophical' theory that "...each achieves to the degree he/she articulates their one, singular message," I would think is more about focus (like the adage that success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration) than about style. Additionally, sometimes that which ends up being touted as 'new' or 'style' is little more than half-baked skills wrapped in good marketing, like selling your 1920's dilapidated home to a new buyer as 'vintage'. Oh, and here we are, back at the Emporer homily!

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» RE: Mmm... Posted by: Sojourner
» RE: Mmm... Posted by: CLB
Art is a joke
Posted by: sterlingwisdom on May 17, 2005 5:29 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Art, it seems to me, is very similar to humor. If I tell you a joke and you laugh then it is funny. If I tell it to someone else and he does not has it ceased to be funny or is it just that this person has either a differing or nonexistent sense of humor?
In that vein I have always loved R. Crumb's work and have always believed it was (and is) art. I get the "joke." if someone else does not perhaps they have a differing sense or no sense of art. Conservative Republicans in particular seem to lack a sense of art. That has always fascinated me.

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Over Intellectualized Schmucks!
Posted by: Bearzbear on May 29, 2005 4:45 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Sorry kiddies, you just have no clue.

Art schmart... who cares?? Intellectual masturbation by people who never actually *do*.

R. Crumb's work is/was unique, groundbreaking, quintesential in it's commentary on the times and the society at large. And it was/is funny.

Speaking of his drawing style, it was quite unique and different than what came before - and *even if* he wasn't the very first to employ this style, well then neither was Edison the very first at so much. We remember the most sucessful and exemplars in most situations. Crumb was.

Beyond that it, along with a few other cartoonists of the time, created a depository of one of the best "sources" for people who were not there to get a genuine insight into the flavor and nature of the times.

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