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May 11, 2005
Henry Darger's Ghastly Innocence?
As well as my piece on Pat Graney’s The Vivian Girls, I commend to you Lisa Traiger’s report made when the work was performed in the Washington, DC area, which does more justice to the details of the dance itself than my report.
I find one sentence in Lisa’s piece especially striking:
Darger's work is ghastly at its core and strangely enticing and beautiful—its colors, its imaginings, its fantasy—on the surface.
This is completely the opposite of how I see Darger's work. To me it’s ghastly only on the surface and innocent at the core.
I think about the goriness in Darger they way I think about the Brothers Grimm, or childhood rhymes like Ring around the Rosie, which we’ve completely forgotten is about the plague. Or for that matter even Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny cartoons. The awfulness, the deaths, the two ton anvils turning Wile E. Coyote into a pancake are omnipresent and almost zestily unreal. He’s up in the next frame, laying out rope for his next trap of the Roadrunner, and this time he's going to get shredded into ribbons by rotating knives.
It’s quite possible the dismembered and hanging children in Darger’s work betray the darkness in the soul underneath. He’s not here to tell us. Is it also possible they also show a child-like innocence where the fascination with the grisly and the ghoulish is a sort talisman against it?
Posted by Leigh Witchel at May 11, 2005 2:52 PM
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Comments
I saw Darger's work several years ago and my memory
of it isn't precise. Perhaps I have surpressed the
ghastly images, but that's not what struck me. Neither do I remember their innocence. What sticks with me is Darger's use of the trite and cliched[ the faces of the little girls from advertisements] and how he transformed that into a personal vision.
His cherubic girls are strong, sometimes even heroic. Of course, memory is selective. The exhibition I saw was very large, the images repetitive, leading me to think the work was obsessive. I think Darger would have been better served by a smaller group of his best sections. s
Posted by: Karen Klein at May 12, 2005 10:06 AM
Good to hear from you Karen! (Background note - Karen was one of my English Lit professors at Brandeis, my favorite professor in fact. She's now concentrating on visual arts, and I am now older than she is, but still not wiser.)
For me, the innocence is in the colors and composition. I think the work is watercolors, but lush colors with high contrast. There's a child-like quality to the palate, but a very sophisticated, talented child. The composition is not at all naive or child-like.
It's interesting to me to mention the curating of the exhibit. Darger never conceived of the works as being exhibited. They were stored in his apartment among endless empty pepto-bismol bottles and balls of string. Ironic to think we'd be culling the work of a man who never culled a thing in his life.
Posted by: Leigh Witchel at May 12, 2005 3:32 PM
Thanks to Leigh for his kind words about me. I agree with the innocence being in the colors. Thanks too for reminding us that Darger did not paint for the purpose of exhibitions. He had no notion of showing this work. In taking images from the public world of advertising and making them into his private fantasy, Darger reminds me alot of Joseph Cornell(who haunted used book stores, antique stores, junk shops for material), although the works of each are radically different.
Posted by: Karen Klein at May 16, 2005 4:13 PM