As a person who loves me some Jane Austen BBC miniseries, hot mug of tea, cozy sweater action, I am not usually one to put a lot of stock in this whole “generation gap” theory. Obviously, certain age groups have cultural habits and preferences that are often inscrutable and irritating to older ones, especially to those of the rocking chair/shaking cane in angst variety. But I’ve sometimes felt that, in essence, younger generations just come up with new ways of doing the same old thing, which antagonizes their parents until a new generation comes along to innovate and swing it back around. Ironic. And here we thought Gen X came up with that one. For instance, my love of Jane Austen is up on my MySpace page (alongside the pics of that time my friends and I got, like, HELLA trashed over Spring Break, OMG LOL,) and I listen to Motown on my iPod.
But sometimes when it comes to cultural relevance, I wonder if young and old might truly be at an impasse. This was brought to my attention as I took in R. Crumb’s Underground, the Crumb retrospective currently up at Yerba Buena Galleries. I love comics, and I love underground comix — though nowadays they’re known as indie or alternative comics. I love many of the artists that followed in the footsteps of Crumb, and even some who were his contemporaries. But I just can’t bring myself to love R. Crumb. Actually, I can’t even bring myself to not hate his art. A lot.
On a visceral level, the racism and misogyny in Crumb’s work makes me a little nauseous. The ever-topless African temptress Angelfood McSpade cavorts around jungles wearing grass skirts and bones for jewelry. The only time she’s not looming through the panels like some sexual demon is when she’s horizontal for a sniveling white man, shamed by his desire for her primitive blackness. Black characters speak mostly in broken, poorly-spelled slang (with the notable exception of Crumb’s loving biographies of Blues musicians).
Crumb’s women are hyper-sexualized menaces who freak him out so much he has to debase and lampoon the very things he covets — colossal breasts protrude like weapons from skin-tight shirts, and Crumb humps and rides his tree-trunk-legged objects of desire in guilt-ridden glee. Giant penises walk, talk, and fight over diving into gaping wet holes, and a duo of fuzzy bear buddies start pimping out their shared girlfriend for cash as they relax in style.
In one page from the 1970s, Crumb narrates a kind of comics open letter to the numerous “Feminist women” who have taken issue with his work. Of course this opens with the classic cop out of claiming to have no problem with women’s rights or strong women. (“Many of my best friends are women/minorities/homosexuals/etc.!”) By the end of it, I couldn’t believe how his response never actually addressed the issue at hand beyond alarmist free speech fear-mongering. In an endless circle of “this is my right to speak,” no one bothers to take responsibility for what is actually being said. Crumb’s angry and resentful depiction of women and their sexuality was enough to make me uncomfortably aware of my skirt and heels in a gallery full of middle-aged men.