Every Man for Himself

Henry Darger was never diagnosed. The adversities of his life began at the age of four, when his mother died giving birth to his sister. Unable to cope, his father put the baby girl up for adoption, and four years later sent young Henry to a Catholic home for boys. At the age of 13 Henry's mental health was predicted by his doctor as stormy, who concluded: 'Little Henry's heart is not in the right place'. Three years later Darger began his life's work, weaving together themes of aberrant adolescent sexual fantasies to create hundreds of hand-coloured, panoramic drawings to illustrate his 15,000 page epic text: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Little Henry never really became Big Henry. The loss of his sister seems to have registered with Henry in ways that further arrested his development, but it also lent him passage to his chimera. Within his imaginary realm Henry could spend his life searching for his sister, pretending to rescue her in the form of drawings of little girls traced from abandoned comic books and advertisements scavenged from the garbage. For the most part, Darger kept himself to himself, working at a series of menial jobs and whisking up his fantasy world in the Realms. None of this work, writing or drawings, would come to light until after his death in 1972.

The legend of the Realms begins with Earth as a minor moon revolving around a gigantic planet. On this planet, the Christian nation of Abbiennia has pledged its people to a ferocious war against the Glandelinians in order to put an end to their practice of child enslavement. This conflict may have offered Darger endless opportunities to imagine the sadistic ways male Glandelinians would strip, torture, mutilate, and murder little slave girls, but he also concocted polite soirees set within lush paradise landscapes, where the littlest of girls dressed in bright party dresses would toast one another as shrewd tacticians planned the next morning's battle. Darger's heroines, the Vivian Sisters, were seven comely young Abbiennian girls who led their nation's soldiers into the fieriest battles against evil. After sessions of untold sexual torture, exceptional battles and not a little bloodshed, they win out. While the plot seems familiar today as a sort of B-level Star Wars, Darger's sincere writing style and panoramic descriptions of innocent girls in battle give his work a unique and touching quality.

How are we to evaluate this work? How should we estimate the achievement of a man whose artistic ambition was absolutely internalised, who was more mentally unbalanced than merely idiosyncratic? Does he fit somewhere between Mike Kelly in his fascination for the uncanny and Alzheimer's period Willem de Kooning, or elsewhere? While Jim Shaw and Paul McCarthy aspire to recreate an arrested adolescence, Darger produced naturally, and unselfconsciously. Ironically, Darger's fantasy realm upsets the normal course of rational critical procedure precisely because his insane reverie represents an abrupt return of the real. He speaks to us in the first person, while Shaw and McCarthy are consigned to the second.

Not surprisingly, the general approach to Darger's work has been along the well-trodden path of creating cultural consensus. A good deal of ink has been spilt promoting him into the realm of high culture, verifying a dominant and homogeneous culture where exceptions are not preferred. Those few art historians who have trained their sights on Darger attempt this tactic of inclusion by summing up his artistic accomplishment as if he were being compliant with tradition, suggesting that, though nutty as a fruitcake, he could draw realistically when he wished to, just like Picasso. These chroniclers have tried to bury Darger's individuality beneath abstract ideologies for high and low, and this self-interested attempt to rehabilitate the marginalised status of 'outsider' art, grandly uncovering Darger's enlightened and sophisticated spirit, shows their critical tactics to be as sloppy as they are transparent. This art should never be used to quench our desire for the irrational creativity we have never felt, but still long to 'recover'. Perhaps Darger would have known better than any of us how impossible it is to rehabilitate something you have never possessed. His creativity was never mortgaged to the history of art and its various techniques; those traditions wouldn't have spoken to him then, so why should they now?

Amongst the great number of extraordinary drawings, there is one that seems especially apposite. Its proportions are typical of Darger's elongated format, and it depicts a scene within the great hall of a stately home. Through the French windows we see that it is snowing outside, and that children are gathered for a party. Between the grand windows hang large paintings in elaborate frames, perfectly complimenting the exquisite setting. But the subjects of these paintings are unexpected. Neither Arcadian landscapes confirming the manor's status, nor masterpieces that have been passed down through generations, these paintings are of happy childhood scenes, of play and work, of holidays and harmless pranks, of domestic security. In the crowded room, one little girl in a very nice blue dress discretely holds up a secret message meant only for you. Written in Darger's tottering hand, it reads: 'Don't worry we Beligans will help you escape'. Might that have been the artist's own wish to escape to these Elysian fields, his sister recovered, his lost family restored? This place we know as his art was the place Darger could escape to, where he could fight the good fight, see that justice would be done in a world beyond that in which he had only known injustice. He made his world just to be beautiful, and perhaps not as art at all.

Ronald Jones

One thing is certain: commentaries on Art are the result of shifts in the economy. 1

Imagine that it's 1970 in Chicago, Illinois. It has been rough going lately for the city's independent record labels, what with the corporate monolith of Motown and the recent buyouts of Chess and VeeJay, but a keen ear for talent has kept Brunswick competitive. All across the country 'Oh, Girl', the latest hit by their biggest stars, The Chi-Lites, is in heavy rotation. The song is a doleful ballad about a man who thought that the best way to win affection was to behave how others wanted him to behave, but by doing so loses not only his lover but himself. It could be a metaphor for any activity whose primary motivation is the approval of others, and the crises that set in when that approval invariably wanes. It is a song about the perils of popularity.

In an apartment on the other side of town an old man pauses, puts down his pencil, and fiddles with one of the two knobs on the little plastic radio half-buried on his kitchen table. The man, Henry Darger, smiles. Not because it's the fourth time he's heard the song today, nor because the song is about girls, a subject with which he is more than a little obsessed. He smiles because a certain section of the lyrics keeps sticking in his mind: 'So I tried to be hip, and think like the crowd/ but not even the crowd can help me now. Oh girl, tell me, what am I gonna do?' Having worked alone for almost 50 years on a 15,000 page novel and illustrating it with hundreds of drawings, he has no idea what that dilemma would be like.

Perhaps by now you have heard about Henry Darger, the orphaned hospital janitor who died in 1973 and whose exhibition of drawings at the Museum of American Folk was the most delightful show in New York this past year. Not because the drawings are freaky, or cool, or weird, or 'pure', or even topical, but because they are so sublime as to defy description. Even though it is obvious that a story has informed the making of his images, you don't really need to know what the story is, because their beauty is enough, enough.

The drawings - epic, mural-sized watercolours and collages detailing the carnage, flight, retaliation and refuge of an army of pre-pubescent girls - are most noteworthy for their compositional grandeur and brooding colour schemes. Imagine the Prussian Army and a majorette team engaged in hand-to-hand combat across a vast plain of chrysanthemums and cypress trees. The girls, most of whom are naked and have penises, are kicking ass. This isn't so weird - certainly no more sensational than passages in the Bible or the Brothers Grimm. (In fact, my favourite drawing in the show was a rather modest depiction of the Vivian Girls trying to escape by rolling themselves up in sections of carpet.) What is impressive in Darger's work is his formal inventiveness, the extent to which he was able to turn his practical limitations into such sublime, operatic complexity, and how that accomplishment might skew our perceptions of recent art.

Unable to draw very well (or at least to his own liking), Darger traced much of his imagery from advertisements and colouring books, at first working from a kind of inventory of stencilled figures and body parts that he would mix and match according to scale. In later works, after he had discovered the process of photo-enlarging at his corner drugstore, mechanical reproduction becomes strikingly evident. Thus his images are not propped up by commentaries on authorship, nor are they defined by mere banal repetition: rather, they are flush with the opulent free enterprise of his own ruthless economy. One is always aware of Darger's fundamental tools - a certain character pose, a boil of storm clouds, a pot of pumpkin-coloured paint - but never so much that they get in the way. Clearly, Darger contrived all the details of his images as quickly he could, not so he could rush to the corner gallery before Gary Gradeschool got there but so he could concentrate and languish on the pictures themselves. However lean his wallet or limited his skills, Darger spent his time and effort to the fullest.

This expenditure becomes all the more impressive when we realise that Darger was only doing it for himself. These days, economists can assess the virtues of art as aptly as historians and critics, and I suspect that the sheer sense of surplus in Darger's drawings is what makes them so welcome now. Given his obviously destitute life and his apparent disinterest in any public recognition, it seems fitting that Adam Smith, ole Free Market himself, might have best accounted for Darger's particular type of genius. 'Every individual' he wrote, 'intends only his own gain. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.' Darger provided us with a level of intensity few trained professionals can muster without ever requiring viewers to complete the meaning of his work. Insider, outsider or upside-downer, Darger's greatness was his ability to be ignored.