R. Crumb = artistic genius

This summer I visited the Art Institute in Chicago and I'm gonna lie, large parts of it were extremely boring. However I think it was on the first floor in the same section that contained much of the surrealist and dadaist works I've grown to love over the years that I encountered a couple R. Crumb works. I got extremely excited - HEAD CULTURE HAS INFILTRATED THE ART INSTITUTE! Even funnier is that I joked about Crumb being in the art institute before we left. You can only imagine how much my mind had been blown after walking around for two hours looking at pictures of Jesus and Mary. So Crumb went from being the kind of artist you could only buy in head shops to being worthy of taking up space in the Art Institute of Chicago. It was great.

Above is one of the pieces I saw at the art institute. His fascination with the grotesque and the perverse overtaking American culture is evident as he makes jabs at the whole idea of fashion. He also takes a stab that whole self absorbed and 'decant' punk-rock style of dress that was popular at the time (you know, all that bondage gear and mohawk bullshit!) . 

Crumb was very popular with drug taking hippies in the 60's. Crumb himself took many drugs during his period in the 60's where he wrote in Zap Comix!, an important part of the counterculture of it's time. Often Crumb would simply get as high as possible on lsd and marijuana and just draw and draw, often resulting in pure genius. However when Crumb quit getting stoned in the 70's he found "a certain clarity of thought I'd never known before". However his creativity did not suffer at all, proving that he was not reliant on drugs to create his masterworks. 

Crumb was often accused of being racist, unafraid to explore african american stereotypes in his work. However it's obvious he wasn't a true racist from his massive amount of respect towards  black blues and jazz musicians that he often expresses. Rather than simply condemning racism or pretending it didn't exist, Crumb dealt with the issue in a hillarious and transgressive way. 

Bad Trips are just as interesting and the good ones. The side of head culture that was burned out, fried in the brain and bummed out were some of Crumb's favorite topics. Asshole cops, white corporate men and crushing come-downs showed us the darker side of mankinds inner-space. 

While often sick and perverted, depressed and bleak his work could often raise a smile of zen-like wonder. Stoned revelations about the universe were as common as fucking in the 60's, and Crumb expressed them perfectly. 

Here's Mr. Natural, our guru and god, dispensing the kind of casual nihilism that makes me laugh with glee. Mr. Natural was the true guru of the 60's, who parodied the whole concept of hippy spirituality while embracing it at the same time. Mr. Natural was a perfect human being though - as often as he spoke words of love and peace he would end up in jail for molesting children or creating headless female robots. Maybe Crumb was attacking the whole idea of the guru by creating this kind of genius who would speak words of wisdom that his wide eyed hippy audience would glaze over one issue, only to turn him into a pervert next, just to fuck with their heads? 

SEXISM. "The only burning passion I'm sure I have is the passion for sex." When it came to sex this man was certainly a creep. Be blamed the sexism in his work on a fear of women rather than a hate and said the only way he deal with his problems was through his drawings. It seems like Crumbs most perverted works are a type of therapy, which isn't far from the truth. While I'm never one to condone any type of sexism, it seems like Crumbs solution to his innermost subconscious problems is a lot more moral and honest about the sick and depraved things we all think but keep bottled up. Note that he basically went from being the most pathetic nerd ever in High School who couldn't get a girl to even look at him to a famous underground artist that was craved by women - maybe that's part of his complex? 

I really like Phillip K. Dick so seeing Crumb do a strip on his imfamous 'religious experience' really made me feel good. 

His most acid fried moments are probably my favorite. I love the way he draws the aliens and the overall feeling of confusion this one relays. 

Crumb was a very tortured individual, which should be evident by now. "I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist." he said. Much of Crumbs work is just as a much a product of an overactive imagination as it is a tortured soul. However out of all his pain and suffering essentially came the invention of Alternative Comix - comics that dealt with anti-heroes rather than superheroes, where everyday can be torture rather than adventure, where acid induced visions replace traditional American values of justice and sexually explicit content is a hallmark rather than a reason for censorship. Because of his brutal honesty, his twisted mind and his limitless creativity Crumb is an artist that need to be explored by all.