by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Blog
We get off the tube at Warren Street, and make our way down and around the backroads of Oxford Street, whose presence tentacles about us. We walk a while. The streets take on a glowing, white quality. We’re entering into the peripheries of Mayfair, our destination.
We arrive at Marylebone highstreet, and go into a charity shop. My friend needs an overcoat for work. It’s heaving in there. I find a coat, but it’s three-hundred pounds. I scoff, loudly. My friend motions the door with his chin, and we worm our way through the hoards and back out into the open.
Everything is so clean here. Everything and everyone. I wonder what I look like. I have a green coat on, an old Welsh wool number, and a red tassled scarf. I catch myself in the window of a Bentley. I look like a Christmas tree.
We turn off onto the street where the Mayfair Curzon Cinema is. My friend stops outside of a rare bookshop. There is an old copy of Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea in the display. It is a lovely thing. We wander away from the shop, and I step in dog poo. I try my best to scrape off the stuff onto some woodchips surrounding a quaint collection of flowering plants.
A few steps away is the Robert Zwirner gallery. Robert Crumb – There’s No End to the Nonsense is written on a fold-out sign standing on the pavement outside. Grey columns. Grey sky. We walk in, and are greeted warmly by the two people behind the desk. The exhibition, they say, is to the left, and then continues upstairs. We thank them, my friend and I, then wander into the first room of the gallery.
Crumb is crass, I knew that already. It comes with the territory; his family was plagued with hastily-concealed incest, a violent and absent father figure, and a mentally-unstable, drug-addicted mother. Crumb and his five other siblings relied on each other for comfort and entertainment, an entertainment mostly reliant on the world of cartoons, but it didn’t save them all, as it eventually did Robert. Charles, Robert’s eldest brother, was a closeted paedophile who shut himself in at home with his parents until his suicide in 1992, and his sisters, Carol and Sandra, both suffered from alcoholism.
Crumb managed to escape in 1962, aged 19, to start his own life as an artist. He was quickly catapulted into fame through the subversive, unapologetic, and deeply graphic nature of his comics, which appealed to the growing youth market. He and his first wife, Dana Morgan, began taking psychedelics in 1965, which birthed Crumb’s character ‘Fritz the Cat’, a larger-than-life, adult take on a Disney cartoon cat. Later, Crumb’s conservativism made itself known through overtly racist cartoons aimed at challenging long-held racist beliefs in America, but ending up as appearing to represent Crumb’s own problematic views. His underground comic, Zap Comix (1968), propounded a strong belief in the dilapidation of the United States, and later issues featured extensive depictions of child abuse, sexual assault, and incest.
Crumb was massively successful. There had been no-one like him before, no-one with his sheer gall, no-one so ready to make the intimately private so massively public. He collaborated through the latter half of the 20th century with various authors to make cartoon versions of novels by Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, and others. He designed an album cover for a compilation album by The Grateful Dead. And he’s still going.
In the gallery, I am surrounded by oversized penises and giantesses with sturdy quadriceps and pert breasts. There’s a picture that I stand by for a moment, a self-portrait of Crumb crouching, his back to a brick wall, shivering as faceless bodies stride about him. I stop by another image, a portrait of Crumb with a gun to his neck. The pen is so delicate it looks almost like an etching. My grandfather used to do etchings, of women’s bodies and industrial landscapes. He stopped doing them one day. He told me it just wasn’t fun anymore. So it goes.
The gallery is warm, and my face is flushed. I hold onto my friend’s arm. I’m still in love with him. Together, we read a cartoon, which continues over several frames, detailing Crumb’s troublesome experience with an experimental psychedelic drug. It makes me shiver. In it, Crumb laments his loss of memory of the events which happened between him taking the drug and later leaving the house where he’d taken it. Something about grasping at a memory. Something about the pockets of blindness in your head. Maybe if I could remember then I’d know why I’m like this. Maybe not.
We go up the staircase. I’ve gone all hollow. I’ve got ants in my sleeves. I don’t want to see any more.
Upstairs, there are some older drawings of Crumb’s. Some racist stuff, and a drawing of a girl receiving felatio from a cow. I get it, it’s bullish and taboo and all the rest. I’m not a prude, rather the opposite – I just don’t like it. My legs are tired. We walked a long way to get here. Mayfair is a strange place. Cashmere skin and truffle eyes.
I skim a few walls of Crumb’s work. I’m fed up of seeing his scrawny body latched onto the legs of various blonde giantesses. Silences moves about this place like fog. It doesn’t fit with the work. Feels stupid to see people nodding quietly before a drawing of Crumb with his head between a woman’s legs. It’s the kind of stuff you look at when you’re tucked up in bed, alone, getting titillated by Crumb’s busty women with their melon-crushing thighs.
I stop in front of a drawing which is mainly writing. Some sentences spring out at me. Stuff about ‘doing your own research’ and vaccines not being safe and Joe Rogan having good talking points and not trusting doctors and so on and so forth and I’m pissed off now, but I’m not surprised. Crumb is a beacon for the alternative right, somehow mixed up in racism whilst being anti-war, strange contradictions that these people justify. It’s how it goes. Joe Rogan has chewed up another brain, and we could all smell it coming, all this vulgarity, pushing buttons, another white man with too much money and too much time went a little too far into the internet and got the idea he knows better, rest of us are just sheeple, ha, ain’t that the truth. What do these people say when their kids contract polio, or mumps, or whooping cough? How did we get to be so self-centered?
Funny how subversion goes so far that it becomes the norm. Funny how someone like Crumb could suddenly seem so similar to a guy in his twenties with dark blue bedsheets and a pair of headphones blasting out Rogan and Jordan Peterson waxing lyrical on women’s submissiveness, while he looks for a porn video to watch.
My friend and I leave the gallery. We end up at a high-street. High-fashion shops with security guards outside. The streets are wide as the ones in Rome. I’m hungry.
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include A Year in Books, Otherworld, and VE Day.
Carl Kruse is also on Tumblr.