Deborah Fisher: Darger, Some History and Bias

Darger, Some History and Bias

I've been reading about Henry Darger, and getting over the holiday.

Henry Darger is what he is from, and this is a beautiful and painful project. I'm glad it's not my project.

When I was a child, one of my parents was kind of cold and empty, and lived to hurt and ruin the other. The other parent was terminally angry and addicted to martyrdom. Even after a brutal divorce and a decades-long "cooling off" period in which horrors surfaced that are too nasty to discuss in this relatively polite company we keep, these people are still going at it. My brother and I were sometimes busy parenting the parents, but were more often used as weapons. When we were not of utilitarian value, we were largely ignored. I was a semi-feral child, highly attuned to the adult action and constantly seeking fixes and approval, but from a fairly distant orbit that my parents kept, roaming pretty much independently. I am still trying to truly understand that just because these people used me, that doesn't mean they needed me, or that I should seek a closer orbit to either of them. I don't pretend to know what that means in terms of basic expectations of parent-child love, except that I am careful.

I started making art for Darger-esque reasons--to describe and make sense of this world that I endured. But I quickly developed biases against the forms that would help me do that project, and became attracted to all the forms that would push me away from it. I developed an irrational hatred of narrative in art, and despised art that was about psychology or getting to know the artist as a person. Kiki Smith, Darger and Louise Bourgeois were the enemy, and I tried in vain to say that Matthew Barney's narratives are irrelevant! I fell headlong into worshipping Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Charles Ray, Chris Burden. I wanted art to extract me from this painful cesspool-of-mind I grew up in and tell me what was real on a phenomenological level that, if not objective, at least clearly lived outside my head.

I am grateful for these strong biases, even though they hobbled my ability to appreciate art for a period of time. These are the biases that delivered me from having to make art at all, you know. And now that they have run their course,

(and with the exception of Kiki Smith)

I am finding that I am relieved of them. My project is to see clearly, and to do that, I need to see more.

I can clearly see that my parents still have the energy to do that voodoo that they do so well, and that in some very small ways I am still the cleanup crew. I can sit here with a Darger monograph on my lap and accept this, and use this circumstance to help me sink into this Glandolinian Child Slave Rebellion, and let it soothe instead of panic me.

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I love Darger's I love Darger's paintings. The colors and compositions are frequently stunning, the bonkers subject matter is fascinating, the repetitive traced patterns are like a foreshadowing of sample/remix culture... it's a shame he's inseparable in people's minds from the phenomenon of outsider art. He was utterly unique and shouldn't be shoehorned into a movement where the pissing and arguing overshadows the work.. The colors and compositions are frequently stunning, the bonkers subject matter is fascinating, the repetitive traced patterns are like a foreshadowing of sample/remix culture... it's a shame he's inseparable in people's minds from the phenomenon of outsider art. He was utterly unique and shouldn't be shoehorned into a movement where the pissing and arguing overshadows the work.

Posted by: Traduceri | January 05, 2011 at 09:18 AM