rexphantom

I went to the Henry Darger exhibit at the Intuit yesterday (that's the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, for you kids keeping score). A friend of mine hipped me to Darger last summer (hereafter referred to as Last Summer) and I was drawn to him for the same reason she was--this was a guy who spent all of his free time (meaning the time spent not attending mass) sketching, tracing, penciling, drawing, painting, and writing what was to be his . . . I don't know what. I can't call Darger's body of work his "masterpiece" because I don't know how to separate one piece from another. Everything he did was centered around the fictitious Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, a battle fought between the Christian Abbiennians and child-enslaving foes, the Glandelinians. The principle characters in Darger's tale were the Vivian sisters, little girls who were sometimes depicted as hermaphrodites. All I can call it is his art. Darger's work was unknown to anyone until his landlord discovered the debris of his belongings following Darger's death. He had no family and no friends. The only audience for his novel, paintings, and drawings was Darger himself.

Then me be perfectly clear: when I say body of work, and when I say all of Darger's free time, I'm talking about a 15,000 page, 12-volume, typewritten single-spaced novel and hundreds of watercolor paintings that were sometimes done on scrolls that were four feet high and ten feet long, all done in a period beginning in 1909 and continuing until shortly before his death in 1973. Think about that the next time you decide not to write, paint, or draw in favor of watching a Simpsons rerun. I know I do.

The pieces on display at the Intuit are mostly tracings and pencil drawings of flowers, trees, and the Vivian sisters. Darger got a lot of practice drawing his heroines by tracing the figures from advertisements and comic strips, and some of his source material is on display as well. The flowers and palm trees as drawn by Darger look subtly sexual in themselves, but the work on display grows even more alarming as you peruse the exhibit. Toward the end are a number of pencil drawings of little girls being choked and strangled by grown men. Accompanying some of the drawings are word balloons with amateurish "I am being choked!" exclamations.

Individual pieces of his work are undoubtedly disturbing, especially when seen in the context of Darger's life as a lonely hermit, an old man who dug through the trash for advertisments featuring little girls, a man with no friends or social interaction. There is no evidence that Darger ever acted on any sexual desire for children, and in fact his frequent habit of drawing nude girls with male sexual organs may suggest he had little knowledge of the anatomy of the opposite sex. But it is the very existence of his work that continues to interest me, the fact that he created for only himself, only for the sake of art and for the story that needed to be told. It had nothing to do with marketablitly or pandering to an audience or deadlines that needed to be kept. His vision was one that would undoubtedly disturb many who would see it and perhaps even paint its creator in a negative light, but it was a vision he remained true to nonetheless. It's Darger's process that I find most intriguing, and in a sense admirable. It was unconventional, and therefore his art is unconventional. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be so single-minded.

Information on and artwork by Henry Darger is at http://henrydarger.tripod.com/index.htm

If you're in Chicago, check out Darger's work on display at the Intuit. It's there until June 1st and their website can be found at
http://outsider.art.org/