In recent years, erotica has slunk into ever-more-acceptable territory. At some point, it reached the coffee-table stage and big, glossy books with pictures of artfully shadowed buttocks became popular fare in many a living room. nEuROTIC is not one of those books.
That’s not to say that the book isn’t well made or skillfully done – rather, it is the work of a talented hand showcased in a finely crafted, full-color volume. But instead of being large and showy, it is tiny in a dirty, furtive kind of way. And like more traditional forms of smut, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d like your guests to peruse over a glass of wine.
Though not a familiar name, John Cuneo is a familiar hand with an oeuvre of magazine art that rivals that of Normal Rockwell in its abundance. Readers will recognize his elegant scrawlings from some of the biggest names in the business – The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and Rolling Stone to name a few.
A collection of ink and watercolor illustrations that Cuneo has been squirreling away for years, nEuROTIC is at turns amusing and horrifying. Some of the subject matter is spry and bawdy – a drawing of a furry man shaving his genitals is titled “Trailblazing,” and “Wool, Scarf” is attached to a picture of a man knitting one from a woman’s hairy nether regions – and others are even less palatable. As the name suggests, the book is more twisted than it is titillating.
Although the word neurotic has, in recent years, come to mean politely crazy more than anything else, it is the original and less attractive meaning that Cuneo channels for many of these illustrations, which feature castration, genital mutilation, and feces. The disgusting images are evenly mixed with the others, so that you can skip along for quite a few pages, chuckling before you hit one that turns your stomach.
Still, whatever the subject, Cuneo‘s work is always masterful; the looseness of his drawings give the pages they adorn vitality and spring. And, in a time when tastefulness trumps vulgarity in so much erotica, nEuROTIC restores some filth to the genre.
-Kim Velsey
nEuROTIC
Author: John Cuneo
Hardcover, 96 pages
$19.95, Fantagraphics
Release: March 12, 2007