The American Henri Darger has become today’s most beloved outsider artist. His art is in the collections of top American museums. And his name is also popping up more and more frequently in European art institutes. What makes his work so attractive?
I
I once read somewhere that the volume of waste New York City produces each day is equal to that of the Empire State Building. I’ve never been on top (of the building, that is) but I imagine that you can clearly distinguish the blue, white and black splotches of garbage bags; the cardboard patches; and the occasional discarded mattress when looking down at the city from that vantage point. Back at street level, the splotches turn out to be piles and the patches rise to the height of the pedestrians passing by. There is an animate quality to this trash that accumulates on the sidewalks after each long day of consumption and hard work – and I’m not just referring to the actual life (rats/mice/ bugs/germs of various kinds) that hides in these heaps of rubbish. Trash also contains something else, something mysterious and appealing: it radiates the aura of the households that produced this litter, hinting at the private lives of anonymous people in nearby apartments. It reminds you of the fact that here, in street x or y, you are not alone. We are in this mess together, if only by our amorphous leftovers, wrapped up in bags and piled in collective heaps.
A city’s waste is the remainder of its buzz, a nation’s trash the residue of its culture. You could add that there is something fundamentally American about waste that is rooted in the Declaration of Independence. Intrinsic to Americans’ unalienable right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is a downright wishful thinking – a self-fulfilling prophecy of deceit – that the joy of life is something that is available, although no-one knows where, as if it were a product. Hence capitalism. (Hence contemporary pseudo-religious therapy cults and instant pharmaceutical relief that comes in pills of various kinds.) A characteristic of this naïve but admirable belief that happiness is out there somewhere, waiting to be pursued, is that people feel a moral obligation to dispose of everything that could possibly thwart this objective. A valuable American lesson: Happiness is not just the sum of things good and pleasant, but also the subtraction of everything – be it depression, a husband, an outdated version of an iPhone – that may work against our desire to live happily ever after, or rather, now. Pleasure becomes a purpose in itself. In a capitalist society that promotes this objective through that other important cultural and economic message of making and spending money, in a consumerist culture that produces more than it could ever consume, there is simply a lot that can go wasted.
II
Here is something Henry Darger (1892-1973, SWM, janitor, orphan and Chicago resident, compulsive obsessive writer/drawer) longed for in his pursuit of happiness. He wrote in his journal: ‘Must gain more talent and inspiration and to accomplish greater inspiration, must adopt children to inspire me.’[1] Note that the children are a means to an end – the supposed partners-in-pleasure of an American Dream. If you think this is a repulsive outcome of consumerism gone awfully wrong, may I remind you that, if you belong to my generation, you might have (like me) spent many a Christmas Eve in front of your TV-set, watching red-headed Orphan Annie singing her way into her adoptive father’s heart. (A memorable scene is Mr. Warbuck’s crew of servants engaging in a sing-and-dance-along of sheer – and somewhat anxious – bliss about ‘getting’ Annie, as if she were a present under the Christmas tree: ‘We’ve got Annie! We’ve got Annie! She’s like the shine on your shoes/ or hearing a blues that is great/… makes you relax, like a big tax/… repaid!’) Bottom line here is that it’s probably too easy to write off a lonely man’s longing for a living object of inspiration as the delusional desire of a sick or ‘feeble-minded’ person. (Darger spent a considerable amount of his childhood in the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, because, so he was told, ‘he did not have his heart in the right place’.)
A lot has been said in regard to the few things known about Henry Darger’s actual life. Synopsis: reclusive, troubled man spends life in obscurity; prepares to die an anonymous death in hospital at the age of 81; insignificant life turns significant when landlord discovers fifteen densely-typed volumes of a 15,145 page magnum opus (probably the longest novel in the world) in his tenant’s room, an epic fantasy of war between children and adults, called 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, accompanied by an additional three volumes of several hundred illustrations of the Vivian Girls et al. Add eccentric flavours, nuance and mental confusion and you have the story of the darling of outsider art, Henry Darger. If you look at his drawings, you understand why.
In order to understand what happiness, for Darger, could entail, we must go back to his childhood and adolescence. In his memoir (another posthumously discovered bulk of writing, called The History of My Life), he writes that as a young boy ‘I always had a very wilful nature and mean temper, I was very determined always that all things should come at my satisfaction or else…’ and to prove his point adds, ‘I cried once when the snow stopped falling’. What Darger describes here is no less a matter of feeble-mindedness than it is a manifestation of the truly selfish nature of a child (Freud’s idea, not mine). Again, we may wonder how much of that selfish nature gets cast off in the adolescence of American youngsters, who are taught the value of freedom of choice through commercials, pop culture and, yes, politics. Writer David Foster Wallace commented on this aptly in a TV interview on the German network ZDF in 2003: ‘American economic and cultural systems [may] work very well in terms of selling people products and in keeping the economy thriving, [but] do not work that well when it comes to educating children or helping us help each other know how to live, and to be happy [pauses, frowns] if that word means anything…. Clearly it means something different from whatever I want to do…. You know, we see it with children: that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery.’ [2]
Happiness, so it seems, is neither a basic human drive nor simply a state in which to live, once achieved. Rather, it seems to be the unsexy result (Wallace goes as far as to label it a by-product) of life-long behavioural conditioning and the controlling of our impulses and desires. That is not quite the message most of us (Americans, Europeans, consumers, targets of corporate capitalism) would like to hear, and certainly not a lesson picked up by Darger in his adult life.
III
According to his memoir, Henry’s life begins to make sense when, as a teenage orphan, he escapes the Lincoln Asylum and walks 162 miles back to his hometown of Chicago. On his way he witnesses a storm that, in his imaginative spin of real events and with a Dargerian morbid affection for all things destructive, he will come to refer to as ‘Sweetie Pie’. It is tempting to draw similarities here with the fantasyland of Oz that Dorothy is plummeted into by the violent swirl of a tornado – and why wouldn’t we, for Darger’s own fantasies are clearly set in the imagery of American pop culture. What Darger, like Dorothy, longs for is to return to a place of belonging, to that most comforting place called home. This basic ingredient of happiness is also Darger’s biggest obstacle. What does ‘home’ mean but an empty shell, four walls and a roof, to an orphan raised without any family?
In 1917, Darger petitions his local church to adopt a child, but is denied his wish to ‘pursue’ a family member. Darger is the kind of uncanny (unheimlich) figure that doesn’t belong to any home: unwanted as a child and unworthy of becoming a foster parent, he retreats into a fantasy world where, instead of raising real children, he adopts the images of young girls (Shirley Temple; Little Annie Rooney; the Dionne Quintuplets, to name a few) that entertain the masses in newspapers, advertisements, and comics – pictures that he unearths from recycle bins and trash cans and accumulates on his walls at home. With his trash collecting, Darger might not have managed to turn his room into a home, but did transform it into a Warholian factory of beautiful young girls at a time when Warhol himself wasn’t even born. Soon, these images would make their reappearance, carbon-copy traced and in various distortions and compromising situations, often portrayed naked, some with penises, in Darger’s illustrations of the Vivians.
The Story of the Vivian Girls… is set on another planet, where children battle against the Glandelinians, men in Confederate uniforms from the American Civil War who enslave and torture children. The battles often take place under extreme weather conditions (the weather and God were Darger’s only other passions) and seem to be a welcome excuse for Darger to play out his own macabre fantasies (if only on paper): ‘Little girls, from the ages of 9, 8 and even younger, were tied down stark naked and a spade full of red-hot live coals laid on their bellies. Scores upon scores of poor children were cut to pieces, after being strangled to death.… Children were forced to swallow the sliced fragments of dead children's hearts.… Their protruding tongues were extracted.’[3]
The war saga seems to serve as a mere backdrop for an ‘unreal realm’ of second chances for the orphaned images adopted by Darger. The Story of the Vivian Girls… was in fact inspired by (as in animated by the spirit of) the image of an actual murder victim, a five-year-old girl named Elsie Paroubek who was strangled to death in 1911. It’s not so much the loss of this girl’s life, but Henry’s loss of her portrait –a photo clipped from the Chicago Daily News, and apparently the darling of Darger’s picture collection – that sparks the frenzy of cruel combat in the story of the Vivian Girls. In an account of meta-fiction avant la lettre (the story is ‘post-‘ before it even knows it was modern in the first place) Darger’s characters speculate about their fictitious fate: ‘This is all in account of Darger and his old picture: how is it that the loss of a photograph is responsible for the situation of this war?’ asks one of the story’s characters. ‘That is a mystery your Excellency, even to me.’ The mystery, Darger wrote in his journal, ‘shall be avenged to the uttermost limit’ (e.g. strangulation, battlefield massacre, and more of the abovementioned afflicted pain, in meticulous and obsessive writing and drawings). His characters know it but can’t help it, and proceed to play out their torture and sufferings. That’s a lot of collateral damage for a picture that has gone astray.
IV
The trouble with Henry is that he appeals to us as an extraordinary case. Had he lived today he might either have ended up with murder allegations (why the obsession with an unsolved-murder victim?) or at least be subjected to an aggressive neighbourhood watch. But because of what he left us (an insight into the dark obsessions and troubled mind of a nevertheless talented man) it is hard not to love this supposed nutcase. It is tempting to write about him with the same whimsical flavour that his life and work possessed (Time magazine's critic Robert Hughes fancifully labelled him the ‘Poussin of pedophilia’)[4], and his biography invites the certain mythologizing sought after by a pop audience. It is all the more tempting to conceive of him as an outsider, not just in relation to art but life in general. Yet, I believe that he is loved and recognized most of all as one of ours.
Beneath the carbon traces of Darger’s eccentric wonder and malice is something strangely familiar; a déjà-vu of generic kitsch imagery and ephemera that was once ours, not his – like a half-eaten sandwich rummaged out of the trash can by a homeless person and that suddenly, self-consciously and maybe only for a flash of a second, reactivates your hunger. Here’s the thing: You don’t really want that sandwich, it just reminds you of an impulse that is already gone. We might have already forgotten about Shirley Temple, but adore her when her mystified appearance as a Vivian girl sets off that initial, forgotten spark of ephemeral appeal (drawing after drawing). As Darger expressed himself in The Story of the Vivian Girls…, ‘Their beauty could not never [sic] been painted had they been seen for real.’ In other words, these pictures are not blueprints of these girls’ beauty. Their beauty is in their flat pictorial appearance. A little boy in Darger’s writings asks his sister, ‘What is rape?’ to which the sister responds, ‘According to the dictionary it means to undress a girl and to cut her open to see the insides.’ That, indeed, seems to be worst that could happen to these superficial images of happy young girls.
Darger pursued his happiness in our trash: in the vernacular imagery of mass entertainment that is both the product and remainder of our own compulsive obsession to indulge in short-lived pleasure. Shirley’s image is replaced by Marilyn’s is replaced by Madonna’s. In his accumulation of this residue (the leftovers) of American visual culture, Darger did not just capture a transitory Bildgeist. Even more, he excavated – from America’s very own trash – a cultural impulse for instant, ready-made disposable happiness: that whim that brought these pictures into being in the first place, and then into oblivion. It seems no surprise then, that in his fantasy world Darger sides with children – those innocent creatures that seem to know best how to obey every impulse and desire. As Darger says on their behalf: ‘The world was ours and to defend our rights, we have to shoot it to pieces.’ Their battle against slavery might not differ that much from our own everyday struggle in a world of relentless desire. That is the uncanny recognition we find inside Darger’s realms of the unreal. That’s why we love Henry Darger with our senses, the way we love Andy Warhol’s conceptions of Pop with our intellect.
Final question: Is the true image of happiness, or rather, the pursuit thereof, concealed in our garbage bags? Perhaps no one but Darger could best answer that question. When his landlord, Nathan Lerner, inquired about the discovered writings and drawings and asked how to proceed, at Darger’s deathbed, the latter responded: ‘It is too late now. Throw it all away.’
Moosje Goosen is a writer and art critic, Rotterdam/New York
Notes
- Darger’s quotes in this article come from the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) by filmmaker Jessica Yu. Arthur MacGregor’s publication, titled Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (2002) can serve as a reference work for more lengthy excerpts from Darger’s unpublished manuscripts.
- The interview took place in 2003 and can be found in full length on YouTube.
- Sarah Boxer, ‘He Was Crazy Like a . . . Genius? For Henry Darger, Everything Began and Ended With Little Girls’, in: The New York Times, 16 September 2000.
- Robert Hughes, ‘Art: A Life of Bizarre Obsession’, in: Time Magazine, 24 February 1997.
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