The phrase “don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, implying that the recipient’s creative skills aren’t good enough to attract a career-supporting audience. But it can also be practical advice in certain cases, especially in the case of artists whose sensibilities are too specific and strange to bear direct exposure to the market. it has been henry dargerHe spent his 81 years in deliberate near obscurity, taking increasingly menial janitor jobs during the day and, when not attending one of his five daily Masses, spending the rest of the time absorbed in his art. The art took many forms, most notably: The story of the Vivian girls in the storm of the Grandeco-Angeline war caused by a child slave revolt known as the Realm of the Unreal.said to be the longest and strangest work of fiction ever written.
As explained in Video above by Fredrik Knudsen (And in the 2004 feature documentary in the realm of unreality), its 15,145 pages depict the adventures of a pair of chaste girls against the backdrop of an apocalyptic and ultra-violent religious war. When Darger’s landlords discovered the work after his death, they also discovered various drawings, paintings, and collages, many of which were at least indirectly related to the story.
Vivian’s girls, whose backgrounds are alternately idyllic and harrowing, are often naked and sometimes disconcertingly equipped with penises. Darger’s visual compositions, apparently composed without formal training of any kind, demonstrate some kind of mastery, or at least some kind of incredible evolution over several decades. Whatever the appeal of his work, there is no other artist like him. This is impossible, given the very specific historical scope of his long but strictly circumscribed life.
Shortly after Darger was born in Chicago in 1892, the death of his mother and subsequent incapacitation of his father led him into a difficult, Dickensian-sounding childhood, spent in institutions with names such as the Illinois Asylum for Mentally Retarded Children. A tormented loner who seemed to be suffering from what we would call mental health problems from the beginning, he took a kind of refuge in the illusions that had condensed in his head, illusions that were similarly formed by the phenomena of mass print media, such as: winnie winkle and little annie looneyCivil War photos, and a super devout Catholic. Since his posthumous discovery and elevation to the status of the ultimate “outsider artist,” there has been endless speculation about his personal habits, sexual proclivities, and state of mind. However, all such questions are beyond solution, so for the time being the last word can be left to the artists themselves. “It’s better to be a bad person who makes something than a smart person who is too cautious to make anything.”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
