Word: darger
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...Three of Chan’s dizzying works are currently on view at the Carpenter Center: Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier) is an animated adaptation of the alternative Bible written and illustrated by “outsider artist” Darger (church indeed) and read through the work of utopian philosopher Fourier. Baghdad in No Particular Order, shot over two months just before the start of the Iraq War, presents scenes of the city’s glorious and disturbing heterogeneity in a 51-minute impressionistic jumble. Finally, there?...
...long poem with Edenic ambitions, Ashbery's latest work is based on a 19,000 page illustrated novel by the late recluse Henry Darger. By the time he died in 1972, Darger had produced an opus of lolli-comic girls, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, in which Peggy and friends are chased about by storms and sundry tormenters. These girls reappear in Girls on the Run, running about with a most coherant inexplicability...
...Darger's 19,000 pages would be a tempting companion to Girls on the Run, but neither HOLLIS nor Amazon seems to have heard of it, and his delicious piece on Ashbery's cover is credited to a gallery in Lausanne. Still, on its own pre-pubescent feet Girls on the Run is a wonder, combining dead-pan modernist language with the poignancy of a concrete burn on a Sunday afternoon. Reading the entire 55-page poem through is akin to sitting through a ten hour film, and Girls on the Run features an additional hypnotism in the person...
...would be easy in these prurient days to think of Darger merely as a compulsive old pervert--a sort of Poussin of pedophilia. (One art-historian-cum-psychiatrist opined in the New York Times that "psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer," a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about his character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly; much the same--and on the same evidence--could be said about the authors of the Old Testament...
...makes more sense to relate his work, in all its extreme, inward-directed fantasies of evil and innocence, to Darger's main lifeline, the Catholic faith. Catholic iconography, as anyone knows who is even briefly exposed to it (and Darger was marinated in its kitsch forms for 70 years), is suffused with Massacres of the Innocents, scenes of the roasting, flaying and disemboweling of idealized martyrs, sinners in hellfire and visions of a countervailing Paradise. Rummaging back through his fantasies for redemption of his own wretchedly maimed childhood, Darger was able to bind up his wounds with his religious fixations...