The Vivian Girls Grow Up
Project Wall:
"Let us not arrive at conclusions! The present, a chance event, will free us."
--Georges Braque[i]
Here, I am delving further into the
problematic realm of vulnerability, sexuality, commerce and inspiration, while grappling
with the physical manifestation of this experiment: a single wall, which
should be seen as one composition, and which combines some old and some new
kinds of media. It is not necessary to make too literal a connection
between the content I present and the Vivian Girls, the heroines of Henry
Darger's visual and literary output. But I will say this: I have
long been concerned with the oddness, persistence, harmfulness and enduring
validity of the male gaze, and how it relates culturally and commercially as a
phenomenon to the vulnerability of its most common subject matter, girls and
young women (at least since classical times, when, for example, Psyche's beauty
became a commodity, which angered Venus.[ii]).
Like Darger[iii],
I have appropriated commercial images (and events) and put them into very
different contexts. In doing so, I have also seen new characters,
personalities and social constructs form from the aether of the creative
process, and this is what most fascinates me.
Darger's experience as an institutionalized
orphan in Chicago[iv], and his
empathic response to news items of brutalized children, led him to consider
himself a "protector of children"[v].
Darger's intuitive connection between what he observed and what he
imagined resulted in works that are psychologically potent and charged with
enduring cultural relevance. Filmmaker
Andrey Tarkovsky's definition of art and the artist well applies to
Darger: art expresses "man's need
of harmony and his readiness to do battle with himself, within his own
personality for the sake of achieving the equilibrium for which he longs."[vi]
Those who
believe Henry Darger to be merely an "outsider artist" may be on the
outside looking in. To be sure, he
worked outside of the commercial realm of the art world, but he may well have
been a self-aware inhabitant of a sophisticated counter-culture. Not a lot is known about Darger's life, but
it is possible, as research suggests[vii],
that Darger's imagery was the product both of observation and a broad
multicultural knowledge of the representation of sexual personae (as opposed to
the product of the simple, unhinged mind of an outsider-savant). He was an avid reader. “Darger’s
collection of literature included many famous examples of child adventurers
from mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, including: L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series,
Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, J.M.
Barrie’s Peter Pan, Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, and Oliver
Twist, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,”[viii]
quoted below:
Pretty soon it
darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten….Directly it begun to rain, and
it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all
blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick
that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would
come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside
of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set
the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it
was just about the bluest and blackest--fst!
It was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops
a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than
you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the
thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling,
down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels
down-stairs….[ix]
Storms and tornadoes captivated him. One imagines his encounters with tremendous
storms during his escape from imprisonment in the Illinois Asylum For Feebleminded
Children[x],
when he walked 162 miles back to Chicago.
He wrote extensively about "the greatest tornado disaster of the
age, which he named "Sweety Pie":
All Illinois was
Joyful in the beauties of late summertime:
prosperity and progress were reigning.
Suddenly out of that cloud belly came the shock of the most violent
tornado ever on record: the destruction
of Johnstontown, Gleason, Jena, and Ground Contour villages, the disappearance
of most of the people and all on the Contour of grounds. This terrible tornado disaster, which
overwhelmed and wiped out six miles length of Ground Contour, among the most
peaceful and beautiful landscapes in the world, and even here destroyed an
unknown number of lives in almost an instant and injured many more badly and
painfully, had about it certain unique features that justify special
attention…. It had far more wallop than
even a powerful atomic bomb.
It’s easy to imagine, given the length of
his novels, that Darger’s writing was an every day activity. His process was additive, rather than
editorial. But the diction of his prose
could well be a response to the local color and colloquialism used by the
authors he admired.
Regardless of what one makes of his
"outsider" and untrained status as an artist, Darger was an early
responder to the industrial scale use of the most vulnerable members of society
for mass-marketing campaigns, and used these images in illustrating his epic
tales of the struggles of rebellious Christian child-slaves fighting against
heathen adults. His hopelessly unedited, endlessly vivid[xi]
story of the Vivian Girls' war against evil had two alternate endings, one
where the Girls, and (Catholicism) triumph, and one where the forces of evil
triumph. So the Vivian Girls must essentially grow up into a compromise.
The professional vision scrutinizes and
analyzes, but in the end hopes to present a transcendent appreciation, a leap
of aesthetic technology that seeks to communicate, to order, to celebrate, to
unwind the mysteries of our sexual psychology, to unmask the lazy taking and
encourage a mutual participation, a recognition of a broader persona. Vermeer
triumphed over the inadequacy of a one-way gaze in "Girl With A Pearl
Earring", a painting that truly looks back at the viewer. Did Darger do something similar? He certainly worked counter to those in the
commercial mainstream of his contemporary culture (the heart of the 20th
century). Simone de Beauvoir writes,
in, "Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome":
"Love can
resist familiarity; eroticism cannot....the dream-merchants [solution:]....The
adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man, but the child-woman moves
in a universe which he cannot enter. The age difference re-established
between them the distance that seems necessary to desire. At least that
is what those who have created a new Eve by merging the 'green fruit' and
'femme fatale' types have pinned their hopes on.... The legend that has been built up around Brigitte Bardot by
publicity has for a long time identified her with this childlike and disturbing
character.... BB is a lost, pathetic child who needs a guide and
protector."[xii]
Darger, working onshore from, but
contemporary with these cultural currents is compelled to explore and
remediate, through fantasy, not just the idea and presentation of the
vulnerability of youth, but its reality. He was responding to his own
childhood and to current events, news items, and in using both true crime
photos and advertisements he recognized the parallel between sociological
events and commercial/cultural norms. His presentations of precociousness
are heroic as opposed to vixenish, and thereby counter the "dream
merchants'" recurrent message. The ambivalent finish of his novel
reflects the ongoing and eternal struggle between the vulnerable and the
powerful. Darger's lifelong daily output was a continuum: his
playful early boyhood experimentation; his artistic training at the Asylum[xiii];
his increasingly sophisticated visual - and compulsive, naďve, poetic - means
of making the world more right through the ongoing production of an empowering
fantasy.
My conscious feelings towards my subject
matter (professional runway and print models and the models of internet
erotica) are ambivalent, and as I go deeper into my projects I find that I am
compelled to think more deeply about the high and low worlds to which they are
tangent. Both types of model are sometimes presented with a kind of
classical perfection, where the celebration of youth and beauty seems to
approach the (aesthetic/erotic) ideal. Contrary to contemporary Puritan
belief, one mustn't feel guilty about appreciating and desiring beauty.
The morning
commute is something of a forced march.
Still, faces sometimes triumph.
There was a beautiful woman, not stunning, but I couldn’t take my eyes
off her. She had a soft face with dark
eyes and dark hair, a tranquil expression, I think capable of a sublimely tranquil expression under
relaxed and private circumstances. In
glances, glances perhaps that approached and passed acceptable curiosity and
recognition of another, I mulled the possibility of her beauty, the possibility
of the sublimation of the shape and complexion of her face. Her skin tone was rather light compared to
the darkness of her hair and eyes, but the foundation of the sublime for her
rested simply on geometry, the perfect geometry of a triangle of moles on her
right cheek. Each mole was the same
size and shape, each a touch smaller than Marilyn’s, and all above that iconic
mark: the right-most just left and
above the nostril, the top just at the tangent of the under-eye and upper curve
of her cheek, the lowest by a little at the transition of the convex of her
cheekbone and the concave formed by the top-left edge of her lip and the area
containing a possible dimple (I didn’t see her smile).
Nor should young women be robbed of their earning potential. Successful models, through their unique skill set, professionalism, and beauty, carve a professional niche that, for a few, is deservedly profitable. And yet the participants, when they begin their careers, are almost universally very young. They are generally selling their beauty, or using it to sell a product. This speaks both to their special quality as beautiful people, and to the age-old economic reality of gender inequality (about which one ought to feel guilty). To what are the worlds of haute couture and internet erotica tangent? The greatest, most pure pleasure and beauty, and the most grotesque horrors of slavery, cruelty, power, control and murder. The realm of Darger, and art, to be sure.
[i] Georges Braque, Illustrated Notebooks 1917-1955 Dover Publications, New York. 1971.
Page 64
[ii] See Apuleius, The Golden
Ass, p87, Yale University Press, 2011, Translated by Sarah Ruden
[iii] Mary Pickford's
"Little Annie Rooney" was a favorite model for Darger's Vivian Girls
(see Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy, Jim Elledge, Overlook Duckworth Press,
NY, 2013, pp167-169), as was Shirley Temple, and he routinely collected images
from cartoons and other mass media.
(see also Henry Darger, Disasters of War, KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin, ed. Klaus Biesenbach. Page21 "He had quite a systematic approach to using and
storing….newspapers and magazines")
[iv] "Come and show me another city with lifted head
singing so proud to be alive and course and strong and cunning….
Fierce as a dog
with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the
wilderness." "Chicago"
by Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, Dover Publications, 1994, p1
[v] see Henry Darger, Throwaway
Boy, Jim Elledge, Overlook Duckworth Press, NY, 2013, p318
[vi] Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting
in Time, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1987.
Page 238
[vii] see Henry Darger,
Throwaway Boy, Jim Elledge, Overlook Duckworth Press, NY, 2013, p 18, pp125
-149
[viii] Leisa Rundquist, Pyre:
A Poetics of Fire and Childhood in the Art of Henry Darger
[ix] Mark Twain,
"Huckleberry Finn", The Favorite Works of Mark Twain, Garden
City Publishing Co, Inc, Garden City, NY, 1939. Page 475
[x] See Henry Darger,
Throwaway Boy, Jim Elledge, Overlook Duckworth Press, NY, 2013, pp 64-85
for a discussion on possible reasons for Henry's move from The Mission of Our
Lady of Mercy to the Asylum, including a description of the turn-of-the century
attitudes towards and treatments of "self abuse".
And,
"Myself, I
am the bad one, I am, I am that / promiscuous every five minutes for that I
live on a farm on Mars. Our hearts our hunger our very / red children our
human pain."
From "Home
Movies", Walking After Midnight, Bill Kushner, Spuyten Duyvil, New
York, 2011. Page 27
[xi] "In the middle of the
court could be seen a beautiful but broken fountain whose marble basin was once
fringed with a deep border of fragrant violet and whose water was once placid
as crystal and alive with myriads of gold and silver fishes twinkling and
darting through it like so many living jewels, but which was now choked with
rubble and plaster." Henry Darger,
from The Realms of the Unreal, Chapter Sixty Three, Vol. A XII, p28b,
excerpted in Henry Darger, Disasters of War, KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin, ed. Klaus Biesenbach. Page199
[xii] London, 1962