Crumb in Context at MassArt

The great themes of art from any period are all present in Crumb's vision, and his work is greatly rewarding on a number of levels as a deeply personal statement regarding our insane culture and how it is constantly feeding on itself, filtered through a demanding and highly critical intellectual and emotional self-reflection. Not to mention the fact that he's one of the greatest draftsmen of our time and greatest cartoonists of any time. His art addresses many personal and political issues and rewards not only multiple readings but also a broader understanding of the history of comics, caricature, and art as social critique. So he was long overdue for such an exhibition.

R. Crumb's work features images that are, to say the least, impolite. Were you compelled to censor some of his more outrageous or potentially offensive work, or, on the contrary, did you fight off the impulse to present work for its shock value?

The most important consideration for me in organizing the show was to present the full range of Crumb's art. This involved contextualizing his achievement within the larger culture of comics and art, and contextualizing specific, more explicit and controversial work within this overall aesthetic. I was proud that there has been no censorship by any of the host institutions of his work at all (other than some warning labels so parents are aware it's not a show for young children).

On a related note, Crumb's work, especially his early work, has been criticized for its negative and even spiteful portrayal of women, yet he has also been described as a feminist. As a curator, how do you illuminate these sorts of nuances that, on the surface, are contradictory?

Again, by showing the full range of his art and encouraging the viewer to decide how to suss all these thorny issues out for themselves. Such nuances in his work are very complex, and my role is not to decide the proper response, only to give fair play to his art's many facets.

Crumb's work will always remain problematic when looking to art for a definitive answer. This is actually a good thing and a strength of his art. His unflinching honesty and lack of easily pegged or marketable position are hallmarks of his aesthetic and are crucial to his output as a whole: to lay bare and eviscerate the tangled contradictions of our often hypocritical social fabric and continue to explore what it means to be a thinking, conflicted human being in this culture are his project—this doesn't lend itself to easy solutions.

Crumb's work has always been highly collaborative. In recent years, that has meant that his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, has depicted herself in Crumb's comics. How does the exhibition convey Crumb's collaboration with others?

This goes along with presenting his work in its proper context—in my original exhibition proposal, I stressed that the most insightful illumination of Crumb's wide-ranging achievement would come not through an isolated "solitary genius" narrative, but through examination of his art within its specific cultural and political moments, and crucially through his collaborations from an early age with his older brother Charles, within the San Francisco underground heyday, and up to his current work with Aline. So you'll see a lot of collaborative work by all the Zap cartoonists, Harvey Pekar, and Aline.