BY ALEXXA GOTTHARDT
If the artist and writer
Henry Darger had superpowers like the characters in his artworks, he might have
lived to see his 125th birthday: April 12, 2017.
Though Darger passed away
at the age of 81 in 1973, a frail and penniless man, he would posthumously
become one of the most celebrated outsider artists in the world. And the
unlikely protagonists that he created live on in his fantastical writing and
drawings. Their powers: the strength of gods, the goodness of saints, and the
ability to shift fluidly from one gender to another.
Darger’s “Vivian Girls,” as
they are known, are the enslaved but resilient child protagonists of his
15,000-page illustrated epic “The Realms of the Unreal.” They look like the
angelic young girls of the magazines and media from Darger’s day, except he
often rendered them with penises.
Today, from our more
gender-fluid point of view, they might be considered the earliest transexual
superheroes—a perspective that’s explored in an exhibition titled “Betwixt and
Between: Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls” at the Intuit, the Center for Intuitive
and Outsider Art in Chicago.
Darger was born in the
Windy City in 1892, lost his mother not long after, and in short order was sent
to an orphanage and then to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children.
There, though he felt that he “knew more than the whole shebang in that place,”
as he later wrote in his autobiography, he was subjected to a range of abuses:
physical, emotional, and likely sexual.
But he escaped the
institution at the age of 17, walking some 200 miles from Decatur, Illinois,
back to Chicago. He landed a position as a janitor at a Catholic hospital and
for the rest of his life he’d move between menial jobs, attend Catholic mass
three to four times a day, and make himself scarce around other people.
In a small boarding-house
apartment where he lived for 40 years, however, Darger created a world where he
felt safe and strong. Over time, he lived increasingly in the pages of “The
Realms of the Unreal,” where the Vivian Girls fought to overthrow the evil
Glandelinians—a band of grown men who wore Confederate uniforms and bore names
like General Pugnose and Lord Lechery.
Darger wrote and
illustrated himself into the story, too, as the benevolent general on the
children’s side, helping them wage their war for freedom.
In Darger’s tale, the army
of small, sweet children are also strong. More curious, though, is their
ability to embody a “spectrum of gender, as opposed to just one,” as Darger
scholar and curator of “Betwixt and Between” Leisa Rundquist explains. Upon
close study of the artist’s work, Rundquist discovered that this fluidity is
portrayed as an empowering force for the children.
Several large, complex
drawings that will appear in the exhibition support this thesis. They show the
Vivian Girls and their child compatriots playing in ethereal landscapes. In
these happy environments, they’re clothed in pretty frocks and flanked by a profusion
of flowers. In other paintings showing the protagonists at war, in peril, or in
the throes of negotiation, though, Darger often renders them naked and with
small phalluses.
“Darger only shows this
metamorphoses in moments of action, when the Vivian Girls need strength,” says
Rundquist. “I thought there had to be a reason for that.”
Rundquist’s scholarship has
long focused on Darger’s relationship with and views about gender and the way
in which these manifest in his work. And she’s uncovered several touchstones
that Darger might have referenced in developing his intersexed characters.
Darger read voraciously and
had favorite books that informed his concepts of good and evil. Along with
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the works of Charles Dickens, he also often referenced
the “Wizard of Oz” series and the Bible in his diaries. Both of the latter
books, Rundquist posits, might provide clues.
In The Marvelous Land of
Oz, the protagonist Tip discovers that he was transformed into a boy by an evil
sorceress when he was young. At the end of the tale, the spell is righted and
Tip turns back into a girl, in turn reclaiming her rightful throne as the
princess of Oz.
The Bible also tells a tale
of magical gender transformation. The female saint Vibia Perpetua has a vision
in which she metamorphoses into a male gladiator, a state in which she martyrs
herself. The name Vibia, as Rundquist points out, also happens to be a version
of “Vivan,” both meaning eternal light.
But even without
identifying these cultural references, one can speculate about why Darger might
have equated gender fluidity with strength. “It shows the process of
transformation,” Rundquist says. “And at its core, transformation is a form of
vitality. We equate it to renewal and to resilience.”
While we will never know
exactly why Darger bestowed his heroes with a radical gender fluidity, we can
easily surmise from his work that he believed, even as a devout Catholic, that
this quality was virtuous, redeeming, and powerful—one that would ultimately quash
the evil, bigoted Glandolinians of the world.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-radical-message-henry-dargers-transsexual-superheroes
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