Artist Henry Darger's outsider work gets inside look in libertarian "Reason"

July 20, 2001 Chicago Tribune

by James Warren

One of the art world's hottest stars right now is a dead, demented outsider, which is really nothing new, according to the August-September issue of Reason.

The libertarian almost-monthly, which tends to focus on distinctly serious policy issues, includes Charles Paul Freund's "Outside In," proof that a magazine piece can be provocative, learned and thankfully brief.

He focuses on artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), whose "bizarre works," writes Freund, will help inaugurate a new New York City museum, the Museum of American Folk Art, in December. In Freund's mind, this will only accelerate a tendency toward mainstreaming so-called "Outsider Art."

Such art, he explains, includes often naive efforts by self-taught weirdos who, like Darger, have caught the attention of some establishment types. In Darger's case, watercolors have fetched $60,000 and have made it onto the walls of such A-list venues as the Smithsonian, while one Ivy League academic has written a 1,200-word analysis of Darger's oeuvre, as the French would put it.

More to Freund's point, Darger "is in many ways the perfect demented outsider. A reclusive obsessive who talked to himself in different voices, his mural-size painting illustrates a sadistic 15,000-page fantasy about a war between soldiers and child hermaphrodites, `The Story of the Vivian Girls.'"

As the Tribune has recounted previously, Darger lived on Chicago's North Side, working on occasion as a hospital janitor. The text and images for his fantasy were apparently found by his landlord, "along with hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles and balls of string, after Darger left. He'd otherwise have been known for attending Mass all day, and rummaging through garbage."

What's the bigger picture, so to speak? For Freund, it's that Outsider Art has a clear history, often linked to mental patients and possibly spawned by a 19th Century Romantic interest in locating the genesis of supposed genius.

This tended to be scoffed at by the art establishment for many years but now it has gained adherents and legitimacy. And that's all to Freund's obvious chagrin, since it all amounts to a "study in the collapse of tastemaking. The question becomes, are art's gatekeepers letting outsiders in, or themselves out?"

It's a tough question. We'd probably be better off just downing a small bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 20, 2001

Answers

Henry Darger link

This is what can happen when you live as a recluse for 64 years and go to Catholic Mass daily.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), July 20, 2001.

SAD=====SOUL!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), July 21, 2001.