As a brief escape from the cold--and to further delay reading Bakhtin--I went to an afternoon screening of Jessica Yu's new documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, which is showing at Film Forum until January 4. The film explores the life and art of Henry Darger, a reclusive bachelor and long-time Chicago resident, who worked for most of his adult life as a janitor. Those who knew him assumed that his life exceeded no further than a five-block radius. But at the time of his death in 1973, he left behind an apartment brimming with fantastical stories and paintings that suggested a vast inner life. Sorting through this bewildering collection, his landlords stumbled upon a illustrated novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. At 15,000 pages, it is possibly one of the longest novels ever written. (Summaries and extracts of Darger's The Realms are readily available on-line and through your public library and won't be rehashed here.) Yu's documentary provides dramatizations of key episodes of this novel, and possible ways in which they correspond to events and people in Darger's life, through finely crafted animated sequences skillfully narrated by Dakota Fanning. Fanning, who starred next to Sean Penn in the 2001 film I am Sam, is a brilliant choice for a narrator. Her voice stumbles and slips occasionally through Darger's material but also has the assurance and precocity to read the story of the saintly but "cheeky" Vivian sisters with carefully-modulated passion.
The interweaving of Fanning's and "Darger's" voices (provided by an actor, of course) not only highlights the tension between adults and children (which lies at the heart of the war that Darger relates), but also reveals that the lines separating or distinguishing what we think of as adult and child worlds are not so clearly demarcated. But Darger's tale of children exploited and brutalized by the very people to whom they have been entrusted and its accompanying illustrations provide most of the film's unsettling moments. Darger's paintings of "naked girls with penises" (as Yu puts it) will disturb some viewers, but I was intrigued by the novel's gender play. Between the hyper-masculine enemy army and the "frills and laces" Vivian sisters lies a densely-populated world of abused children of ambiguous gender, not unlike Charles Kingsley's Water-Babies.
The eroticization of (female) children has proliferated in American consumer culture for decades--and I'm not referring here to child pornography (however that is defined) but rather to more "benign" forms of child eroticization like the Coppertone Girl and JonBenet Ramsey--but the moment it is "aestheticized," it becomes taboo and marginal. The furor over Sally Mann's Intimate Family comes to mind. Darger amassed an impressive cache of images culled from magazines, books and newspapers--of the Sears catalogue variety--showing children in various poses and states of undress, which he used to generate new ideas or incorporated directly into his illustrations. The seeming innocence of these children is then recast into the horrific and beguiling context of The Realms, a world where children are decidedly unsafe. The little biographical information that Yu provides (and this is also well-documented in other places) suggests that Darger, who spent most of his childhood in an asylum for "feeble-minded" children, was an extremely lonely and unloved child, but Yu wisely resists pat psychological assessments of her subject: "when it comes to Darger we're all guessing anyway." Or in the words of his landlord Nathan Lerner, "just because there are questions does not mean that there are answers." But what is clear is that for most of his life Darger observed and archived our culture's obsession with innocence in astounding detail and struggled to understand how a world that claims to love its children so miserably fails to protect them.
Darger's artwork is amazing. On a $25 a week salary, Darger would sometimes dish out $3 for one photo enlargement, but he also could be found scavenging trash cans for inspiration. His isolation from any art community, as well as his private devotion to his creative life, has positioned him prominently in discussions of "outsider art"; but the film also reveals that Darger, though he may have felt lonely, was not entirely alone. On the contrary, he was surrounded by a handful of people who discreetly kept tabs on his comings and goings and were there when he needed assistance, particularly in his final years. In one of the films more poignant moments, a neighbor recounts how he visited Darger in the hospital shorlty before his death and told him that he had seen his paintings and that "they were really beautiful." After a few seconds of shocked silence, Darger replied, "Oh well, it's too late now." As with Dickinson and other private artists, Darger's death offers a revelation, a true identity, but no answers.
Links:
* NYC's American Folk Art Museum has the most extensive collection of Darger's work on public display.
* G. Jurek Polanski's article on Darger explores the relation between psychology and art.
* Chicago's Carl Hammer Gallery will sell you a Darger painting--for, at least, $15,000.
* A Salon review of John MacGregor's massive monograph on Darger.
* Raw Vision's interview with Roger Cardinal, who coined the expression outsider art
*The Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-taught and Outsider Art (It's in Milwaukee, WI. Who wants to go with me?)
hi, as a occasional reader of your blog (my english is quite rusty) please allowe me to send you a pointer to an exeptional german writer and a real OUTSIDER ARTIST. In some publications he is discribed as the ‚most importand unknown german writer of the ‚Neuzeit’. Juergen von der Wense died 1966. He survived the Nazi years as a wanderer in the middle of Germany. He wrote an incredible poetic german - Sturm und Drang in the 20th century. Some translated splitters of his work I found here: http://blindpony.blogspot.com/2008/07/when-i-die-world-is-in-my-room.html
Let me say- the world WAS in his room with this oevre of more than 40000 pages.
Posted by: Peter Zillig | May 18, 2009 at 02:47 PM