by Olivia Laing
As an artist, he was entirely self-taught. Although he possessed a remarkable gift for composition and had loved colouring since very early childhood, he was burdened by the belief that he couldn’t draw. Many artists are opposed to or uncomfortable about working free-hand, committing their own lines to the page. Sometimes this is about wanting to avoid determinism, à la Duchamp, who said about one randomised work: ‘The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand.’
This desire resurfaces in the work of Warhol, who though magically gifted at drawing wanted to erase the evidence of the hand, preferring instead the chancy happenstance of machine processes, especially screen printing. Others simply doubted their abilities. Whenever David Wojnarowicz was asked how he got started as an artist, he’d say that as a boy he used to trace pictures – ocean panoramas, say, or images of planets circulating in outer space – presenting them to kids at school as his own work. Eventually a girl confronted him, insisting he draw freehand in front of her. To his surprise he found he could, and from then on the anxiety he’d felt about drawing fell away.
Darger never really experienced a lessening of that fear, but like Warhol he did find elaborate ways of circumventing line drawing, sharing too his pleasure at making art out of actual pieces of the world. How did he do it, though: making painting after painting with no training, a punishing job and only limited resources? The curator at the archive was himself an artist, and in between fetching boxes he explained Darger’s career to me, the painstaking way he’d honed and developed a working practice.
He’d started with found images, sometimes backing them on card or doctoring them in subtle ways, especially by painting over them, adding hats or costumes or simply piercing the eyes. Next, he progressed to collages, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines and pasting them into increasingly complex composites. The problem with this technique was that each component image could only be used once, meaning that he had to find more and more raw materials, either at the hospital or by going through the trash. It was wasteful of resources, and also frustrating, having to surrender a favoured image, to commit it to just one picture, just one scenario.
This is where tracing came in. With tracing, he could liberate a figure or object from its past context and reuse it dozens if not hundreds of times, inserting it by way of carbon paper into a diversity of scenes. It was economical, a thrifty process, and it also let him magically possess the image in a way that scissors didn’t, transferring it first on to tracing paper and then again through the blue sheets of carbon into the painting proper. One of his favourites was a doleful little girl holding a bucket, one finger in her mouth. Once you’ve spotted her, she crops up over and again, a picture of abject misery and desolation. The Coppertone Girl, too: often with horns, or transformed into one of the winged creatures Darger called blengins, a world away from where she’d begun.
There were thousands of these source images: folder after folder filled with pictures clipped from colouring books, comics, cartoons, newspapers, adverts and magazines. They attested to an obsessive love of popular culture that reminded me again of Warhol, a hoarding and repurposing of just the kind of ordinary things that would later be embraced by Pop Art, something Darger never mentioned and quite possibly never saw.
Despite the rumours about his disorderly, chaotic habits, Darger had evidently been meticulous in organising this raw material, establishing thematic groupings: sets of clouds and girls, images of the Civil War, of boys, men, butterflies, disasters – all the divergent elements, in fact, that together make up the universe of the Realms. He’d stored them in stacks of filthy envelopes, which were carefully labelled with his own idiosyncratic descriptions: ‘Plant and child pictures’, ‘Clouds to be drawn’, ‘Special picture Girl bending with stick and another jumping away in terror’, ‘One girl with some one’s finger under chin Maybe sketch maybe not’. Some of these so-called special images were further labelled ‘to be drawn only once’, as if multiple replication would divest or drain them of their uncanny power.
His working practice became even more sophisticated when in 1944 he discovered that he could get images turned into photographic negatives and then enlarged at the drugstore on North Halsted, three blocks away from his house. Enlargement facilitated the extraordinary complexity of his work, allowing him to play with scale and perspective, to compose elaborate scenes using foreground and background, to create kinetic and receding layers.
One box was stuffed with envelopes from the lab, each containing the original, the negative and the enlargement. The receipts were also preserved; seemingly small sums of $5 and $4 and $3.50, until you remembered that in all Darger’s life his salary never exceeded $3,000 a year, and that in the decade of his retirement he lived off social security. Nothing is more declarative of someone’s priorities than how they spend their money, particularly when they don’t have much of it. Hot dogs for lunch, begging his neighbours for the gift of soap, but 246 enlargements of children, clouds, flowers, soldiers, tornadoes and fires, so that he could incorporate actual beauty and disaster into his unreal world.
All the time that I was working in the archive, I was aware that there was a painting behind me, draped in sheets. It was enormous, at least twelve feet long, so that it was hard to imagine how Darger had stored it, let alone worked on it in his cramped little room. On my final day, I asked if I could see it and so the curator drew back the covers and let me look my fill.
It was made from multiple materials: watercolour, pencil, carbon tracing and collage. A caption had been handwritten on a pasted sheet of plain white paper: This scene here shows the murderous massacre still going in before the winged blengins arrived from the sky. They came so quick how however that those fastened to the trees, or board, and those on the run escaped the murderist rascals or were rescued, and flown to permanent safty and security. [sic]
Like many of Darger’s paintings, it showed a rural landscape, partially wooded and coloured in a lovely symphony of greens. There was a palm tree, a tree with huge hanging grapes, an apple tree, a pale tree giving forth large white blooms. In the foreground, there was a great profusion of flowers, spreading outward from a clump of crocuses, which rose like snakeheads from the bottom of the canvas.
All the trees bore strange fruit. There were girls tied to them, girls hanging from them, girls lashed to boards and girls running screaming from an army made up of uniformed soldiers and cowboys; one on horseback, the others hurtling through the bush. Some of the girls were naked, especially the ones in the trees, though most of them had managed to keep their socks and Mary Janes, their hair in incongruously neat plaits tied with ribbons. Elaborately coloured butterflies moved among them, drifting through an expanse of rose-pink sky.
The girl with the pail was right at the back, also dressed in pink, her finger in her mouth. ‘I have to stop this,’ she says by way of a speech bubble. ‘But how, by myself?’ She’s not the only speaker. This is a highly verbal painting. ‘We could only get a few. The others would escape. We will signal to our friends flying in the sky,’ says a naked girl crouching at the far left of the painting. ‘Let’s go at the murderers,’ her friend replies. Two of the cowboys are arguing nearby, shouting: ‘She’s mine I tell you. I won’t let go’ and: ‘You let go, will you. She’s the one I’m supposed to hang, not you. Yours is on the run.’ They’re wrestling for control of a rope, which vanishes upward, presumably to an unseen branch. From the other end a girl is hanging, naked but for blue socks and shoes, her tongue protruding from her livid fuchsia face.
I stood by the painting for a long time, writing detailed notes about colour and position. Three dimensionality by having half of each face/body painted a darker pink. Actual lines drawn in to divide pale from dark. Three naked save for socks and shoes. Girl’s throat crushed in crook of elbow, red hair mauve face. Dark purple almost black dress matched to socks. Kicking her legs, knee and hand lost in foliage/flowers. One brighter yellow and with plaits with white ribbons.
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I was starting to feel a little dizzy. There was a squirrel in the tree, a dangling bunch of grapes. Seizing on details was a way of resisting the overwhelming impact of the painting, its orchestrated violence, the way it invited and resisted interpretation in the same field of time. A blond soldier had two girls by the throat, one in each meaty fist. His uniform had gold buttons and his large blue eyes were gazing vacantly into the middle distance, totally disconnected from the actions of his body.
Pain was everywhere in the painting, though not everyone was capable of acknowledging it. In fact, it was a profound investigation into three kinds of gazes: the gaze of agony, the gaze of empathy, and the gaze of disassociation: an account of pain and horror registering on multiple faces. It was hard to know which were the most disturbing, the agonised girls or the blank-faced, wooden men, who didn’t understand that they were causing pain, or didn’t care; who were unable to register or engage with the harm that they were doing to another body, another sentient being. The result was chaos, a tumult of limbs and mouths and hair, carried out in a landscape of indifference, the blooming ground on which all wars occur.
What was Darger doing, all those years alone in his room? You might paint something like that once, but imagine doing it again and again, consecrating your life to an analysis of violence and vulnerability in all their many permutations. How does one make sense of it, this work that anyway wasn’t meant to be seen? For months now I’d been gathering up responses, different tacks that people had taken.
One in particular had stuck in my mind. It was from John MacGregor’s biography, a work that was evidently the product of many years of devoted thought and labour. All the same, there were statements in it I found hard to take. He wanted to dispel the notion that Darger was a conscious artist, was in fact an artist at all, rather than someone mentally ill, making work as a symptom, a compulsion as meaningless as that odd hand gesture that looked like he was throwing snow.
‘This endless stream of words and images,’ MacGregor wrote:
. . . was born from his mind with the same inevitability and force as the feces thrown off from day to day by his body. Darger wrote at the urgent prompting of internal necessity . . . At no point was his vision arrived at freely, as a spontaneous, or willed, manifestation of creative choice. His written and pictorial products are the direct and unavoidable expression of a strange, irresistibly powerful, and far from normal, mental state. The unique personal style which we have been examining in the context of his writing is unmistakably the product of psychiatric, perhaps even neurological, anomalies which were present throughout his life.
It was hard to square that statement with the things I’d seen: folder after folder attesting to creative decisions, to choices made and problems solved, though if I’d never read anything by David Wojnarowicz, I might have been more likely to accept it. But the Darger story looks different if you are familiar with Wojnarowicz, which is to say familiar with issues of violence and abuse, of poverty and the devastating effects of shame. Wojnarowicz was a courageous and eloquent advocate for his own work, but the things he said about himself, about his motivations and intentions, also have wider applications. At the very least, they ought to make one ask questions about agency and class and power in the work of vulnerable or socially excluded artists.
You can’t think about people like Darger, or Solanas, for that matter, without thinking too about the damage society wreaks upon individuals: the role that structures like families and schools and governments play in any single person’s experience of isolation. It’s not only factually incorrect to assume mental illness can entirely explain Darger; it’s also morally wrong, an act of cruelty as well as misreading. One of the saddest and most telling things in all his work is the declaration of child independence he wrote for the Realms. Among the rights he chose are: ‘to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night’s season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart’.
How many of those rights had he actually been granted in his own life? The one that really got me was the right to an education. It underscored the brutal, careless way that he’d been treated. You can destroy a person without resorting to the graphic violence of the Realms; can crush hopes and squander dreams, waste talent, refuse to train and educate an able mind, but rather keep a person in a prison of work, without praise or prospects, and certainly unable to develop what is in them of mind and heart. Extraordinary, in this light, that Darger managed to create so much, to leave such luminous traces in his wake.
What MacGregor saw in Darger’s work was a compulsive and sexualised desire to cause pain. He believed that his identification was with the men who choked and hung and slaughtered the defenceless, naked girls. Other critics have suggested that on the contrary he was compulsively replicating traumatic scenes of his own abuse. Perhaps both are true, since it is very rare that any single act occurs for just one motive. At the same time, what this leaves out is the possibility that Darger was actually carrying out a conscious and courageous investigation into violence: what it looks like; who its victims and perpetrators are. Bigger questions, too: like what it means to suffer, and whether anyone can truly understand the existence of another person’s internal world.
For me, they were paintings made by someone who’d mustered the resolve to look again and again at all the multiple forms of damage committed in the world. This possibility was first given serious weight in 2001, when the touring exhibition Disasters of War, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, brought Darger’s paintings together with work by the Chapman Brothers and Goya. The show contextualised him within art history, not as a maddened outsider, but as a diligent practitioner of a kind of imaginative reportage of violence, a subject that has always been within the purview of the artist.
While I was in the Darger archive, there were multiple child abuse cases in the news, images of massacres, of people murdering their neighbours: all the component elements of the Realms, the accesses of cruelty and brutality that never seem to end. In fact, there’s a way in which his work is the opposite of imaginative, being composed entirely from things that actually existed: from newspaper reports or adverts; the desirable as well as loathsome elements of our own elaborate social world. Ours is the culture of sexualised little girls and armed men. Darger simply thought to put them together, to let them freely interact.
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Even Darger’s hoarding changes aspect when considered in terms of larger social forces. A few weeks after my stint in the archive, I went briefly to Chicago to see the replica of his room at Webster Street in INTUIT, the museum of outsider art. It was smaller than I’d expected, cordoned behind a scarlet rope. I thought the attendant would stay to supervise while I craned on tiptoes, but to my surprise they unhooked the clip and left me there alone.
It was very dark inside. Everything was covered in a fine black powder, maybe charcoal dust or grime. The walls were painted an oily brown and covered in Darger’s pictures, including many hand-coloured portraits of the Vivian Girls. There were stacks of scrap books and magazines, boxes of cutting blades, brushes, buttons, pen knives and coloured pens. But what really caught my attention were two things: a table piled high with paints and crayons, many of them designed for children, and a laundry basket filled with dirty balls of brown and silver string.
People who hoard are often socially withdrawn. Sometimes the hoarding causes isolation, and sometimes it is a palliative to loneliness, a way of comforting oneself. Not everyone is susceptible to the companionship of objects; to the desire to keep and sort them; to employ them as barricades or to play back and forth between expulsion and retention. On an autism website, I’d come across a discussion on the subject, in which someone had encapsulated the desire beautifully, writing: ‘Yes, very much a problem for me and while I’m not sure if I personify objects I do tend to develop some weird sort of loyalty to them and it’s difficult to dispose of them.
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Something of this sort was clearly going on with Darger, and yet the place of poverty must also be considered: both in terms of the need to be thrifty with resources and the physically confined space in which he lived. Despite the dirt, despite the staring portraits of the Vivian Girls, their pupils scratched out, it didn’t feel like the room of a mad person. It felt like the room of someone poor, creative and resourceful, someone who must be wholly self-reliant, who knows they won’t be getting anything from anyone else, but must instead gather it for themself from among the discards, the leavings of the city.
He worked his pencils down to stubs, fashioning lengthening devices out of syringes to eke the last inch out. He hoarded rubber bands in old chocolate boxes, mending them with tape rather than throwing them away. He made his paints by pouring tempura into lids, often keeping great heaps of them unused: a symbol of wealth, perhaps; a gesture of ownership and plenty. They were neatly hand-labelled, sometimes conventionally – Rose Madder, Oriental Turquoise Blue, Mauve, Cadmium Medium Red – and sometimes with more personal or punning titles: Storm Cloud Purple or Seven not heaven dark green colours.
The issue of space was also significant. The same pathologising rhetoric that affects Darger is also active around the Chicago photographer and nanny Vivian Maier. Like him, she worked in isolation, never showing her photographs to anyone and often not even developing her film. In her seventies, she was forced to go into hospital and could no longer afford the upkeep on the locker where her possessions were stored. As is customary in such cases, the contents were auctioned off, falling into the hands of at least two collectors who understood the value of a street photography archive of this quality and scale. Gradually, her 15,000 photographs are being developed, exhibited and sold, commanding, like Darger’s work, increasingly high prices, a queasy spectacle when the artists themselves were so poor. Two documentaries have been made, piecing her life together by interviewing the families for whom she worked.