Someone please guide ChoosyChipsAndCeilingWhacks to this thread if she doesn’t find it on her own.
This movie about the life and work of Henry Darger opens tomorrow in Atlanta (and in other parts of the country, I assume/hope).
It’s a sad, but fascinating tale. Makes me think of Emily Dickinson, the Collyer Brothers, E.R.R. Eddison and, just a little bit, myself.
So, you’re a janitor?
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ow, ow, stop
Here’s a link to a book containing some of Henry Darger’s art and writings.
This flick opened in NYC a few months back.
Although I’m perversely fascinated by Darger, the idea of immersing myself in a 2-hour documentary of brightly-colored child-strangulation and disembowelment was too much for me.
I’m still messed up after going to the big Darger exhibition at the NYC Museum of American Folk Art, and that was SEVEN YEARS AGO, for god’s sake.
Jesus, Darger threads are just death, aren’t they?
Your pronouncement of the death of thread is a bit premature. Still, perhaps one reason why there haven’t been a lot of responses is because the subject of Henry Darger and his life’s work is so damn creepy. I confess I’m not that familiar with Darger beyond what I heard on a story on NPR and several articles but, from the descriptions, I can’t help but get disturbed after a short while–and that was before I read this 2002 article from Salon that links Darger to the murder of a five-year old Chicago girl in 1911.
Because, to read this article, you either have to watcj a short ad, I’ve quoted a relevent paragraph from it below.
So that’s who he is. Natalie Merchant does a song about him in her ‘Motherland’ album. Nice song, never understood the words.
One of the album’s most intriguing songs is HENRY DARGER. The eerie arrangement that Stephen Barber has written for chamber orchestra fuses with Merchant’s cryptic lyrics and ghostly vocals and opens up the aural landscape of a strange and private world. Henry Darger (1892-1973) is the author and illustrator of what might be the longest unfinished fictional work of all time. For six decades, Henry worked in obsessive isolation on his saga, entitled “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.” His towering hand-bound manuscript of 17,000 pages was found in the apartment of this retired hospital janitor after his death. The illustrations of Realms of the Unreal number in the hundreds and depict the battle between the forces of good and evil as seen through Henry’s wildly imaginative fantasy world. Merchant explains:
“I saw my first Henry Darger collage/paintings in the early 1980’s when the tale of Henry’s life was an oral tradition new born. He lived and died a recluse in Chicago, no one knew of his writings or of his paintings. There was a small folk art gallery in New Orleans that had acquired a small pile of his illustrations. Taken out of context the seven little horrified girls pursued by a purple and orange winged cat was so odd. I was instantly curious to see more. The search for evidence of Henry Darger was difficult, brief mentions in surveys of outsider artists. A retrospective of his work appeared years later at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Henry’s manual typewriter was on display along with large-scale painted scrolls of the Vivian Girls, the objects seemed like holy relics to me.”
I’ll let it go now. I just hope ChoosyChipsAndCeilingWhacks knows about the movie, because I know she’s interested in Henry Darger.
In celebration of what would be Henry Darger’s 113th birthday, on Tuesday, April 12 the American Folk Art Museum is presenting a reading from In the Realms of the Unreal. The 15,000 page manuscript, a collage of print from different color typewriter ribbons and paper, can be seen up close at the audience-participation event.
45 West 53rd Street, NYC, 7 PM, $10 admission charge.
Well, I saw In The Realms Of The Unreal last night. I must say, I find Darger much less interesting now, if the movie is an accurate portrayal.
His art, if we can call it that, consists mainly of cut and pasted images or tracings; he gets credit for the compositions, but he doesn’t seem to have been much of a draftsman in his own right.
And his writing seems to be mainly a pastiche of Baum’s Oz ideas, with lots and lots and lots of battle scenes. As described in the film, there are few to no original ideas there. His principle gift as a storyteller seems to be his fecundity.
Still, it’s hard not to feel affectionate and sympathetic toward him. Clearly he had an unhappy childhood, in which his caretakers made a series of bad decisions about his welfare. His art and writing were probaby attempts to fix in fantasy what had been broken in real life.
The movie leaves alone the suspicion that Darger may have murdered Elsie Paroubek, and doesn’t interview any psychologists for a post-mortem diagnosis of his mental illness (and it’s certain he was mentally ill in at least benign ways). I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.
Still, I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad Henry Darger existed. He’s the sort of person that makes the world interesting.