The film showed Crumb and his wife Aline, also a cartoonist and artist, preparing to leave America for France. The Crumbs must surely rank among the strangest families ever committed to celluloid. The film put Crumb's life in context - yes, his foot fetish, his piggyback fixations and his urge to dominate big, dominant women (in a pretty submissive way) were weird, but not half as weird as those of his two brothers. In the 1990s he became famous for a second time when the director Terry Zwigoff made a documentary about his life, Crumb. Some people call him a genius some call him a sexist and racist some say he is all of these things. He was never political in an overt sense, but he explored social and sexual politics and risked everything in his satire. In a way, his work represented the hopes and fears of that generation. He developed a cult following in the hippy-dippy 60s, and his influence spread to a number of different art forms (the comedian and actor Steve Martin, for example, says that he learned his comic walk from Crumb's characters). He says, with approval, that he was once described as a combination of the meek and the mean-spirited. What made his cartoons so powerful was their ambivalence - while embracing his fantasies, they also reflected a disgust and fear of what he exposed about himself.Ĭrumb also chronicled the life of the ultimate wimp (R Crumb), the misanthrope (R Crumb), the dysfunctional family (the Crumbs). He took LSD and pot, and celebrated the excesses of his imagination. He lusted after women with big butts and big muscles he showed his wise old Mr Natural, a man desperate for spiritual transcendence but thwarted by physical desire, having sex with overgrown babies he drew cartoons about incest in model nuclear families - "The Family That Lays Together Stays Together" he fantasised about sex with headless women he portrayed a black woman, Angelfood McSpade, the incarnation of pure lust, as the ultimate jigaboo jungle bunny. He is the professorial pervert, the shameless monster who let it all hang out in his cartoons. Crumbland is the inner head of the great American cartoonist Robert Crumb, where characters such as Devil Girl, Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat and, most importantly, R Crumb himself were devised.Ĭrumb has chronicled our basest desires for 40 years. We are in Crumbland.Ĭrumbland is a physical place - a huge house in a medieval village in the south of France. In the corner of the room stands a man - tall and thin and slightly stooped - with his back to us. Surrounding the latter are myriad other collections - bottle tops, toy cars, tiny musical instruments. They look more like an installation than a record collection. Cabinet after cabinet is filled with pedantically labelled 78rpm records in brown cardboard sleeves. We go up the first of a series of staircases, past guitar and banjo cases, and disturbing pictures of sexualised dolls and distressed cubist paintings. There are lights on but somehow they seem to emit darkness. It is dark and gloomy and not a little eerie. There is a tiny sign by the front door saying Crumb.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |