In the realms of the fun-real.

So during a delightful little jaunt down to Seattle, I managed (despite the best efforts of Quick Shuttle - grrrrrrrr) to catch the last day of the Henry Darger Folk Art Museum touring show at the Frye Gallery. Which is a great (and free!) space by the way.


Mommy, why do the little girls have boy parts?



Never mock a janitor - he could be making beautiful things like this.



If I remember correctly, this is a good guy. One of the few adult protagonists.

Henry Darger intrests the hell out of me for a few reasons.

First, his story is captivating. A reclusive janitor, he died at 81, leaving behind a massive amount of artwork, including a 15,000 page illustrated novel of considerable weirdness, called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. His life is summarized pretty well on his wikipedia page, and excellently in the amazing movie made of his life - In the Realms of the Unreal.

Secondly, his stuff is almost more psychology than art. The Story of the Vivian Girls is an incredibly rich system of symbols which stand so clearly for his own internal issues. The same themes he struggled with at 15 - oppression and totalitarianism within the asylum in which he was institutionalized at 13; a conflicted and intense relationship with the Catholic church etc. - are replayed and explored as he writes the book over 65 years. It gets really meta at points too - where he writes himself into the stories, and

Thirdly, whether he intends to or not, he asks some pretty challenging questions around media and culture. The faces and images he's blatantly traced and re-used from advertising and other sources take on an entirely different tone in his surreal environments. At the same time, they're inherently contextless. They're no less connected to Darger's bizarre epic than they are to their original 'sources' - the happy beach scene in the Coppertone ads etc.


This is the trailer - but it hangs a bit at the beginning. Come for the outsider artist - stay for the Dakota Fanning narration.

Okay, I'm babbling. Moral of the story? His work is fascinating, and I'm really glad I got a chance to see it in person.