Unadulterated imagination

Guernica on Henry Darger.

Outsider art, the great “other” box we seem to put artists in when they don’t fit into our constructs, challenges how we view and discuss art. Darger doesn’t sit comfortably in the categories of his mainstream contemporaries. Klaus Biesenbach, a curator at MoMA, compares his work to the immersive epic fiction of Tolkien, the childlike collage and talisman-gathering of Joseph Cornell, the pop comics in Lichtenstein, and the obsessive repetition in Yayoi Kusama. But the ignorance and innocence of Darger’s work, the compulsive manner of its creation, and the absence of self-commentary (in his thousands of pages of writing there’s only one known reference to Darger’s self-conception as an artist) make him impossible to regard as a true parallel to these figures.

Taken together, the futility involved in creating an accurate biography of Darger and the failure of our conceptual frameworks to encompass his work pose a formidable challenge. The collective strategy so far has been either to tame the wildness in his work with some of the labels I’ve mentioned or to introduce viewers through his personal story. Outsider art as a category relies on biographical detail to bring an artist within its confines, but considering how problematic it is to pin down the details of Darger’s life, how can we rely on even this broad distinction? With our methods for seeing and understanding artwork of little value in this context, how should we experience Darger’s work? Perhaps it’s time to expose ourselves to these collage-paintings, without the guidance of our placards, literal or otherwise.