Exhibitions 1
Hero of the counter-culture
Andrew Lambirth
Robert Crumb — A Chronicle of Modern Times Cummings and Lewandowska — Enthusiasm Whitechapel Art Gallery, until 22 May Robert Crumb (born Philadelphia 1943) is variously hailed as a ‘virtuoso weirdo’, the ‘father of underground comics’ and ‘the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century’. Robert Hughes is responsible for that final appellation and one can see his point, though Nicholas Garland has called this assessment ‘just silly’, and Crumb himself has refuted it in a cartoon ‘Broigul I ain’t ... ’ What he is, indisputably, is a draughtsman touched by genius and a no-holds-barred autobiographer of such whackiness as to require the invention of a new category. (Crumby? Crumbist? Crumbonic?) A hero of the counter-culture, he is self-taught, an obses sive cartoonist who began to draw his own home comics (at the instigation of his intimidating elder brother Charles) before he was ten. He is responsible for such unforgettable creations as Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat, Schuman the Human and Angelfood McSpade. Rather to his irritation, his ‘Keep on Truckin’ image/slogan hit a nerve, which has kept jerking ever since. Like it or not, his work has left a mark on the public consciousness.
Should rebel icons allow themselves to be courted, coralled and eventually controlled by the establishment? Probably not. By exhibiting in museums and being fêted around the world as a Fine Artist (he was recently given the works at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, for instance), Crumb has in a real sense sold out. Will this jeopardise his identity as a subversive? Inevitably, it will ameliorate it. The man whose role was like the woodworm in the Sheraton sideboard has been wooed and won, his abrasiveness relegated to history. Instead we have a retrospective exhibition and a chunky little heavily illustrated volume, The R. Crumb Handbook (MQP £14.99), detailing ‘the life, trials and ideas’ of the ‘bad boy cartoonist of the 1960s hippie culture’. On the cover is a desperatelooking deskbound Crumb, pen in hand, with a speech-bubble reading, ‘I’m not here to be polite!’ And, thankfully, he isn’t. The book at least packs a punch or two.
His show, however, is surprisingly bland, with much of his filthiest X-rated imagery edited out. I suspect that many of the visitors have come along in the first place to see how far he will go — or be allowed to go. In which case, they may be disappointed. The exhibition is introduced by a decorous reading room (where you can sketch your own Crumbs or crumbs), before the ‘art’ starts. A horizontal daffodil-yellow strip or stripe traverses the walls, highlighting the exhibits. It is a broad band to focus upon for those with concentration difficulties. It perhaps also symbolises the Yellow Brick Road, but perhaps not. Individual drawings (such as the charming ‘Fritz with Ice Cream’, in coloured pencil from around 1959) are hung with pages in pencil or ink. Cartoon strips abound. There are some late meditations on waffle-texture paper before the minatory ‘Self-Portrait with Third Eye’ sees you out. It’s a small, crowded, jumpy exhibition.
In the body of the gallery space, two separate mini-auditoria have been built, so that a pair of films may be shown. You can see the curatorial thought behind this films are obviously needed to supplement the bowdlerised art work. And they’ll distract the audience from the difficulty of looking at the exhibits. (Time and space to read the strips is really necessary, which is simply impossible in a crush of constantly moving and grazing people.) On offer are the 1994 David Lynch-produced film Crumb, which deals movingly with the cartoonist’s dysfunctional family, and Arena: The Confessions of Robert Crumb (1987), written by the man himself. In addition to the wall-mounted drawings there are flat cabinets of covers. This is not the easiest or most comfortable way to read comics. From viewing the original drawings (rather than their mass-produced reproductions) we have confirmed for us what we already knew — that Crumb is a stupendous draughtsman with a crazy but compelling sense of humour. We also learn that he occasionally uses Tippex, or its equivalent.
By mining the unconscious, he gives vent to his distaste and disillusion. He hates the modern world (too many people) and doesn’t have a very high opinion of its inmates: ‘To me, human society appears mostly to be a living nightmare of ignorant, depraved behaviour. We’re all depraved, me included.’ The Handbook is bracing in its opinions. ‘Almost all our mass culture is “mouth feel”, a calculated manipulation of the pleasure impulse, and if it has any real nutritional, authentic value, that’s mere happenstance, a side effect.’ As Crumb concludes: ‘The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It’s hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn’t be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It’s best to be on the fringe of them.’ Perhaps Crumb always intended to sell out. An early cartoon is captioned ‘I’ll become a great artist ... then they’ll be sorry they rejected me’, in response to his manifest failure with girls. Given his fondness for women with big, shelf-like bottoms, strong legs and thick ankles, and his confident habit of jumping on their backs and riding his willing victims, it seems that some measure of success has come to Crumb. Certainly, the self-confessed ‘loser schmuck’ has turned into the impresario of a substantial business empire, with thousands of merchandising deals, and scarcely a moment to himself at the drawing board. A serious artist? Well, it all depends on what you mean ...
I must say, if I’d sold out to the art establishment and was offered a show at the Whitechapel, I’d feel distinctly shortchanged if relegated to the upstairs gallery, while some modish theorist mounted a dreary installation in the far more commodious galleries on the ground floor. But this is here the case. Various themed areas (titled ‘Longing’, ‘Labour’ and, surprise, surprise, ‘Love’) are curtained off for the watching of Polish home-movies from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Yes, indeed. You can watch Polish adolescents searching their souls or Polish workers dredging sludge. Not much to choose between them really in terms of five-star entertainment. The whole installation looks like a series of sets for an Am-Dram workshop. While the Crumb exhibition was packed, the ironically named Enthusiasm, a ‘work’ celebrating the ‘theories’ of Neil Cummings and his ‘partner’ Marysia Lewandowska, was empty (bar the odd anorak) aside from those making for the stairs. It was no mistake that this incorrectly tiered exhibition opened on 1 April.
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