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QUiRKbigger than jesus. MAY 2009 www.quirkmag.com QUiRK 1 Coloring Ou tside the Lines Henry Darger never asked anybody for permission. Decades after his death, his art still messes up. By Jennifer Ward :: 24 QUiRK MAY 2009 OF KEIZO KITAJIMA COURTESY PHOTO QUiRK 25 Lausanne, Switzerland, to become the first permanent Motherless, fatherless, exhibition of outsider art in the world. and possibly loveless, Back in the US, American outsider Darger lived Darger may have invented and died. Stacked and draped over decrepit furniture, characters to love and the panoramas that would greet me 28 years later places to live when reality blanketed his world. Save for a few tattered possessions, was cruelest. over 30,000 pages of writing and almost innumerable In his book Inventing illustrations were all the 81-year-old would leave behind. the Feeble Mind, None of it would see the world outside his Lilliputian historian James W. Chicago apartment until years later. To him, though, the Trent exposes the manuscript and pictures were everything: walls, ceiling, infamous abuse and sky. neglect scandals Since his death in 1973, Darger’s work has been perpetrated by the heaped with superlatives by an establishment that Lincoln facility in he had no idea existed, and yet today, his pieces sell the early 1900s — for thousands of dollars. Not long after his work was during Darger’s discovered, Darger quickly became the posthumous time there. Though American poster child of the emerging fringe art Darger often wrote about the category across the pond. Darger, though he would asylum with cordiality, when his father never know it, joined the family of artists that Thomas died he sank into depression and tried multiple Germano, a professor of art and art history at SUNY times to escape. After numerous failed attempts, the Farmingdale, calls “outside the mainstream of society, 16-year-old was successful, finding his way back to whether geographical or mental.” In his Lincoln Park Chicago by train and foot. The 170 miles were nothing apartment, cloistered and absorbed in psychological compared to the distances his mind would later scout. ruminations, Darger was twice an outsider. Alone in the city, Darger got a place of his own and embarked upon his life’s work: as a janitor and bandage- Outsider at the Outset wrapper in various city hospitals. He spent a brief stint in the U.S. Army, but upon returning to Chicago, moved veryone has their token artist, someone most potent I’d ever seen. Etched on crackled scrolls arger presents a tangled ball of artistry, from one rooming house to another before finally settling whose work they can toss around at a party and hanging from a low wooden roof in a museum in biography, and authorship. Many come to him in the North Side apartment where his work was later full of art snobs. A few months ago I heard Switzerland, I became engrossed in a world I couldn’t as I did, vîs a vîs the alternate world he left discovered. He would someone unveil hers — only we were in a leave. Maybe it was the works’ kitschy brutality. Maybe for us to explore. But Darger’s life seems to quickly acquire a Where the Outsiders Are Syracuse basement, not a Manhattan gallery, my guard was down, stumbling, like Alice down the Dpulse through his canvases, jagged and poignant as his number of habits: Edlin Gallery. 529 W 20th Street, 6th Eand the company was straight up nerd, not art school rabbit hole, into the collection of art by convicts, social pictures. wearing work clothes Floor, New York. www.edlingallery.com until they fell apart, geek. They sat hunched in the corner, at the edge of the pariahs, the mentally challenged, and Darger. That’s what first attracted Marie Caponi Schram, The National Institute for Art and jostling crowd, decidedly lacking in thick-framed glasses The room-length illustrations were life-sized DARGER © 2001 HENRY administrator of the Henry Darger group on Facebook. eating breakfast at Disabilities. 551 23rd Street, and vintage cowboy shirts. illustrations of an epic story I could not understand but One morning she was so struck by hearing an NPR story the same cafeteria Richmond, Calif. www.niadart.org “That guy was fucked up,” she said. was compelled to: vicious battles marked with crosses on his life that she sat, transfixed, in her car, and was every day, attending Mass up to seven Creative Growth Art Center. 355 24th I listened in as she went on to describe the exhibit and tornadoes, blood spilling from children who belonged actually late for work. She says the myth of the artist’s St., Oakland, Calif. www.creativegrowth.org she’d recently seen. Her words seemed to wipe across a in Golden Books, torture scenes splashed across Easter life gave her an uneasy feeling, the same one she has times a day, and dusty pane in the attic of my memory. I became egg skies and dotted with flowers. I felt like I was about Anne Frank’s diary: “It was secret, it was private, finding treasures in The American Folk Art Museum. trash bins. 45 West 53rd St., New York. www. frantic to recover the rest before looking at something I wasn’t supposed to. now it’s for the world.” folkartmuseum.org it disappeared like the photos in Tacked on the wall, a short description of Chicago- Most of what’s known about Darger has trickled out The balding, 5-foot- Back to the Future. born artist Henry Darger (pronounced with a hard “g,” of his 5,000 autobiography, The History of My Life. It was 3-inch man passed his Collection de l’Art Brut. 11, av. des days in mechanical Bergières, Lausanne, Switzerland. “Wha — who did you say he as in tiger) added a name and a face to the art. Here was never published, but lives in bits and pieces scattered www.artbrut.ch was?” I stumbled, practically the Willy Wonka of this bittersweet world. through books on Darger and outsider art more broadly. solitude. He claimed spilling my beer. This wasn’t a Later I learned that the museum where I’d discovered Darger’s early life laid the template for what would only one friend: a American Visionary Art Museum. 800 feigned “Oh yes, of course I’ve Darger was the mother ship of this stuff — art created follow. When he was only three, his mother died giving man named Whilliam Key Highway, Baltimore. www.avam.org heard of Ms.-Brilliant-But- in innocent disregard for tradition; rough, raw, self- birth to his sister, who was later put up for adoption. Schloeder, with Obscure-Genius-from-Tiny- taught. The Collection de l’art Brut was where the Darger wrote favorably of his time with his father, but whom he formed the Creativity Explored. 3245 16th St. San French-Village”- nod. I knew quixotic Frenchman Jean Dubuffet had dumped his Darger Sr., a tailor with physical disabilities, eventually two-member-strong Francisco. www.creativityexplored.org I’d seen these paintings collection of what he called “the embryonic, the badly became too weak to care for his son. At eight years old, Children’s Protective Society. After The Anthony Petullo Collection before. Could these two be made, the imperfect, [and] the mixed up” forms of Darger was moved to a Catholic home for boys. There of Self-Taught and Outsider Art. talking about the same art — after it failed to dazzle America. Dubuffet had he developed tendencies that earned him the nickname Schloeder’s death, Milwaukee, WI. 219 N. Milwaukee guy? traveled the world to find this “art brut,” uncultured or “Crazy,” but it was “self-abuse” — that era’s term for Darger wrote that he Street. www.petulloartcollection.com felt even more “lost in Only a handful of raw art, simply because he saw something more pure in masturbation — that got him moved to the Asylum for Raw Vision Magazine. www.rawvision. artist experiences have their work than in his contemporaries’. “Outsider art” Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Ill. empty space.” Other com true sticking power; became the English equivalent for art brut after the Critics who’ve spent too much time reading Freud journal excerpts from Michael Bonesteel’s Outsider Magazine. http://www.art.org/ Henry Darger’s British critic Roger Cardinal’s book of the same title was speculate endlessly about how Darger’s childhood theOutsiderMag/current.htm was among the released in 1972. Four years later the museum opened in stunted his development and precipitated his art. book Henry Darger: 26 QUiRK :: MAY 2009 QUiRK 27 Art and Selected Writings also betray his habitual and mainstream artists’, Stechschulte works hard to close again. writing and then re-typing the entire thing — word by pious mind: what he calls the “otherness gap.” He says that outsider Flowers and fantastical creatures are one thing, made-up word. art is particularly prone to being over categorized. “A lot but when marred with atrocity and gory religiosity, Darger gave his saga a title with a length to match: of the art can hold its own without the viewer having anguishing questions rush in. Mythic pictures and The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the March 29, 1968 – Tantrums over tangles, and tied to know that someone painted it with their mouth or scenes of little girls with tiny penises propel scholars Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War knots slipping in twine. Threaten to throw ball at whatever,” he says. and psychologists to prod deeper into what made Darger Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.