Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Henry Darger or "The Secret Lives of Janitors"




Henry Darger is like a geode. A geode is, or looks like, a rock, nothing more, nothing less. It just seems like an ordinary gray stone, boring, unimportant. However, when you crack a geode open it reveals a beautiful, crystalline structure, none you would have never known existed had you not looked deeper into the stone.

That's who Henry Darger was. Henry Darger looked like an ordinary man to those around him. He was a janitor in a school for most of his life. He collected trash off the street. When he was young he was put into an asylum, what for is still unclear. At one point, a record reported the cause to be "masturbation." What that was still hasn't been elaborated upon by the institution. After he was released, he lived in a tiny one room apartment in Chicago until his death in 1973, at 81 years of age. It was at this time, just prior to his death, that his neigbors, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, actually went into his apartment (he was a very solitary person). To their surprise, they found that Henry Darger had been an artist.

And this was no ordinary art. This was the kind of mind blowingly creative art, the kind that makes you sit down and just stare. Colors flowed with crisp images, creating fanciful portraits of young children in surreal landscapes. There were books too, things that Henry Darger had written about foreign worlds and armies of children fighting against alien races. These books related his life experiences as well as telling intriguing stories. It turned out, that Henry Darger was on of the most creative people of the 20th century.

So the neighbors began to publicize his work. Slowly, he began to gain notariety. More and more people began to recognize his talents. He became known as one of the most influential artists of the "Outsider Art" movement, which primarily consisted of self-taught artists, or artists who had not been given a formal education. His work continues to be highly sought after to this day.

Most of his paintings are actually illustrations of a massive tome, which he authored. The title of the piece is The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and boasts a total of 15,143 pages. The story, while sitting somewhere in the fantasy genre, is based around 7 Princess sisters who start a rebellion against a race which employs child slavery. The novel as well as the paintings all reveal an extremely creative talent that no knew Henry had.

The art is truly amazing. The colors really do blend so nicely together. It's a literal rainbow in each piece. What I find interesting is that many of the figures portrayed in the paintings are white, often devoid of color. And all the figures are little girls, hundreds of them. And they all look so innocent and quiet. Their eyes are very light too, density wise, not color wise. The overall feel is very...pure.

So remember Henry Darger, when you take all that acid on the way back from that ski trip in Kennebunkport, and all your friends have seven heads and you hansd are trying to get you to buy "this really nice new car." Because that's what it was like in the head of Mr. Darger, and you should respect that.

-duchamp

No comments: