Thank Heaven for Little Girls
Is it tasteless to suggest
of JonBenet Ramsey--the cute, blond 6-year-old from Colorado who was strangled
to death a few weeks ago--that it is her grisly death, rather than her career
as a juvenile beauty queen, that makes her so uncannily resemble a girl in a
fairy tale? For while a pageant princess is merely tacky, a murdered
pageant princess takes her place in the illustrious line of pretty young girls
in what, pace multiculturalists, we might call our collective lore, to
meet, or at least be threatened with, a gruesome end. Little Red Riding Hood,
Goldilocks, Gretel, Alice--there is an intimate connection in our culture, it
would seem, between being a sweet young miss and getting garroted.
By
curious coincidence, this fairy-tale conjunction of appealing nymphets and gory
murder is currently the subject of an unusual show at the Museum of American
Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of eccentrically magnificent watercolors by
the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would
be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the
subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went on to write and
illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute
prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little
girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes off. In
the course of Darger's story--titled 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 --the sisters (the Vivian Girls) manage
to escape from the men (the Glandelinians) time and time again, but countless
less fortunate girl-slaves are spectacularly mutilated and slaughtered along
the way.
Darger is what is known as an "outsider" artist--which is
to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his
lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed very little, if at all, to
traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work
out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to
other art. Darger spent nearly all his life living alone in a rented room in
Chicago, earning his living as a janitor in a hospital during the day, going to
Mass frequently, and coming home at night to work on his paintings and his
writing. He was born in 1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then
placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age
of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing
home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably
artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old
pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page
autobiography, an 11-year weather log, 87 watercolors, 67 pencil drawings, and
the tale of the Vivian Girls.
The Darger
watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some
naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous
flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same
tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and
disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a
fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's
Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded
version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic
nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind
them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces,
and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched
around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and
fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of
Matisse.
Darger produced a lot of his little-girl
pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut
pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he
transposed the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the
girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several
images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same
painting--a girl mixing something in a bowl, a girl sitting on a fence, a girl
running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her.
Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no
alterations in the pose), and sometimes they even appear next to each other in
series of as many as eight. But the effect is not at all proto-Warhol. It's
subtler, less programmatic. It's reminiscent, if anything, of those groups of
angels or monks or soldiers in medieval manuscripts in which some of the
figures are identical to each other, and others only slightly different--but
the repetition seems to be employed for the purpose of visual economy, in order
not to divert attention from the picture's central theme, rather than to draw
attention to repetition or image-making itself.
Of the enormous quantity of
material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of
attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages
from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's
none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous,
strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as
well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes
extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this
if you're squeamish):
Indeed the screams and
pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went
insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789
children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being
strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows
[sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one
could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung
up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been
cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of
knives.
The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the
pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest,
softest grandpa porn. For instance, "The little girls were even glad to leave
the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they
could not find, having to leave in their nighties."
The outsider-art movement
responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding
niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past
decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks
ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art
in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which
Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.
But while
the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is
often an unfortunate interpretive one--outsider artists tend to attract a
particularly crude and irritating kind of psycho-biographical analysis. Chief
culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom
Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive
access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of
Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about
Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes
confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge
to produce all that crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy
and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited
writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar
Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, "The trauma of
[Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional
preoccupation with weather." "Clearly," MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition
catalog, "Darger was not free."
It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures
can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of
children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the
terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book
Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 "Barbie
Fetish," for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails),
and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a
contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather
common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees
angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think "It's a
Small World" or David Lynch.)
It's ironic, too, that
critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious
obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in
fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in
a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of
postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include
depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the
images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several
different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the
war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title
draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place "in What is Known as the
Realms of the Unreal." And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a
number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about
Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:
About
noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet
and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed
bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from
their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood.
...
[When
Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads
and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst
them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps,
ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil.
Although
it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters]
thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and
heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.
What to make of this?
Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged
outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a
latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out
and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary
parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings
remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.
