evenings she worked at a restaurant that was owned by one of our countrymen (who apparently I also should have known, but didn’t) as an administrator or something to that effect. She shortened the daylight hours by painting. In a neat and tidy corner of her neat and tidy apartment sat an easel-mounted canvas and a box of paints.
“It reminds me of someone . . .” I said uncertainly, pointing at the canvas.
“It’s our Edek . . .” said the woman, opening a coffee table book featuring the work of another of our countrymen. She pointed to the painting she had just started copying. The woman was copying the work of the most significant Croatian abstractionist, Edek, two of whose signed prints hung on the wall.
My first thought was that this woman’s life must be catastrophically empty. And then a sadness crept up on me, not because of the woman, but because of the catastrophically dull automatism of my own reaction. What gave me the right to judge the richness or emptiness of someone else’s life?! Was my own life that much richer just because I didn’t copy other people’s pictures?
“I adore our Edek . . .” said the woman somewhat melodramatically, putting the accent on the wrong syllable, a Zagreb girl born and bred. And it was only then that I understood the real reason for my irritation. It was Edek. Had she been copying someone else, I’d have had greater sympathy for her depressing hobby. But Edek, whether he liked or not, had become a poster boy for Zagreb’s chattering classes. Just as every Croatian redneck proudly packs his little ethnic bundle with a Croatian flag, a Dinamo or Hajduk t-shirt, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and a prosciutto ham or paprika-flavoured salami, this woman had packed hers with the requisites of Zagreb bourgeois life. These requisites (and I’m guessing now) included the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre, a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Theatre, buying a hat at Kobali’s, haircuts at Kincl’s, shopping in Graz or Vienna, skiing on Mt. Pohorje. And Edek.
I remembered the woman many years later. At Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery I passed the gigantic headstone Edek had built in his own honor. Bordered with white ceramic tiles with colorful abstract motifs, the monument looked like a wall that been lifted out of a trendy wellness center and placed on the grave. It was an exemplar of artistic karaoke. The artist had copied himself.
Darger
The American and international cultural public only discovered Henry Darger posthumously. In his lifetime no one suspected that the “oddball” (he is thought to have been autistic), the collector of “trash,” the recluse who talked to himself, was actually an artist and autodidact, the meticulous creator of an autonomous world. Darger became a sensation in the art world when the American Folk Art Museum in New York opened the Henry Darger Study Center in 2001. In 2008 the Chicago room he rented from Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, where he spent his solitary years, was re-created as a permanent exhibition at The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. Over the past ten years Darger has inspired a radio drama, a play, a multimedia production, a number of songs, and a poem. In 2004 Jessica Yu released the Darger documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. I saw Darger’s New York exhibition in 2002. My attendance isn’t worth noting. In an episode entitled “Lisa the Drama Queen,” Lisa Simpson also visited the exhibition.
The results of Darger’s decades of oddball “activity” have been neatly tucked in the niche marked “Outsider Art.” Darger didn’t know how to draw, he was, as Michael Thevoz put it, “a thief of images,”[5] stealing from children’s coloring and picture books, newspapers, advertisements, comics, caricatures, photographs, stamps, whatever he could lay his hands on. From this “trash” he selected his “little pictures,” tracing them in pencil and coloring them in watercolors. Certain images (stamps, for example) he would have photographically enlarged.
Darger’s personal world is shaped by a number of factors, including the trauma of growing up in an orphanage (which he later fled), a childlike interest in the American Civil War (which they say he inherited from his father), Catholicism, mental illness, solitude, poverty, repressed sexuality, monomania, and a childlike fear of adults.
He would often glue his drawing paper into a long roll, painting it on both sides. Most of Darger’s pictures feature little girls, nymphettes, the prototypes for which he copied from newspaper advertisements and children’s fashion magazines. The soldiers in his pictures (largely inspired by American Civil War comics) represent the world of evil grown-ups. His nymphettes are located in rich phantasmagorical landscapes, in spaces that are part paradise and part war-zone.
Darger’s sprawling composition In the Realms of the Unreal tells the story of the seven Vivian girls and their struggle against the evil Glandelinians who keep children as slaves. The Vivian girls free the children and defeat the evil Glandelinians. The child-slaves are naked and, were it not for their penises, would also appear as young girls. Nakedness points to innocence and sacrifice, with crucified children frequent motifs. The Blengins are giant mythical beings—naked young girls again, with penises. Their heads bear heavy rams’ horns, their backs enormous wings and dragons’ tails.
Darger’s compositions provoke a conflicted feeling, somewhere between attraction and rejection, wonderment and unease. His visual world overflows with details, bodies, faces, and colors. His images of young girls are identical, one little clone next to another. It seems that Darger crammed his pictures with everything he saw, and everything he saw he “stole” from the surrounding “cardboard” everyday. His world is one in which giant frogs and horsemen, flying childlike beings, giant ducks, flowers of different colors and types, distorted Mickey Mouse heads, and sunflowers that dwarf clouds all simultaneously co-exist. A child’s utopia and a kingdom of evil.
Identifying the original sources for the details copied in Darger’s pictures is a treat for those familiar with the American everyday. The fantastic anthropomorphic beings with butterfly wings, for example, are stolen from advertisements for “Karo” syrup. “Darger steals his images, lifts them from conventional narratives, common everyday journals, and sentimental stories. He takes them out of context, disorients them, and re-enchants them. Indeed, he uses these images to reconstruct another narrative ensemble, but in the process, the images do not reject their origin but persist like foreign bodies, bodies with disquieting strangeness . . . Thus, Darger does not control anything: he is not the master of painting, nor is he even the master’s assistant . . . he is a sorcerer’s apprentice.”[6]
Darger was proclaimed a great artist when his world, finally in tune with the Zeitgeist, could be understood as art. There is an inadvertent correspondence between Darger’s world and contemporary cultural practice. His way of thinking can be compared to that of a child who spends day and night on the Internet. Cut and paste is Darger’s primary artistic technique, and today, with Photoshop and programs such as Illustrator and Brushes, he would get the job done much quicker. Teenagers use different computer programs in this same way, the practice of vidding, making video clips and posting them on YouTube, is a good example. Teenagers trawl the alluring chaos of popular culture, selecting, combining, parodying, ridiculing, retouching, and beautifying, turning hierarchical relationships on their heads, making the incompatible compatible.
The second respect in which Darger’s art corresponds with contemporary cultural practice is that his imagination, fired by popular culture, is perfectly in tune with the contemporary hunger for parallel fantasy worlds. In the world of Harry Potter children also create their own communities, fly, inhabit magical worlds, struggle against the forces of evil (most frequently embodied by adults), perform miracles, befriend mythical beings, and take control. In all of this the borders between worlds are soft. Darger’s visual poetics likewise overlap with the aesthetics of popular mass media products, from comics to computer games. In this respect his poetics can be understood as a harbinger of manga and anime aesthetics.
Although canonized, Darger remains
