Henry Darger

Started by LR, December 31, 2009, 02:31:47 PM

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FreakAnimalFinland

have forgotten to write into topic. Actually bought two books. One is gigantic size 26 x 35cm with 300+ pages. Another is smaller japanese publication called "Henry Darger's Room 851 Webster". It simply deals with his room. Photos of room, descriptions, close-ups, story of it. Actual "blueprint" type of drawings how it was, and so on. A5 and little over 100 pages.

In this book it also mentions that landlord too care of the room, and removed all the violent newspaper clippings from walls. It mentions about one wall having lots of clippings of unsolved child killing case that happened very near of where he lived, and there was slight assumption that maybe it could have been even Darger, yet nothing really to support the idea.

Indeed, perhaps 2nd documentary would be needed.

Anyone seen multiple documents of Children of God? Perhaps issue to be discussed on Documentaries topic. But it is kind of amusing, that prior to murder/suicide thing, the documentaries involved some very "friendly", almost promotion-like things with just kind of entertaining stories about flirt fishing / whores for god hippie girls turned into alternative religion type of thing. When one of the ultimate victims, Davidito, "hero" of the Story of Davidito book takes revenge & commit suicide and records confessional VHS...  Well, nature of the topics indeed changed. In industrial scene at least Swans and Pain Nail has dealt with the subject matter, but it seems to be quite unknown/forgotten for most of people?
Anyways, if it would be to found out, Darger actually did commit some dirty deeds, somewhere else than his mind, perhaps tone of documenting his work would change?
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Unheard

He's also featured in the (pop culture) art show The Museum of Everything, currently in Torino (northern Italy); i got the catalogue, not that interesting i must say.

I found out a (pretentious) videoartist called Paul Chan who realized a video-installation called Happiness inspired by Darger's Story of the Vivian Girls

Scale

Quote from: Andrew McIntosh on January 01, 2010, 11:37:57 PM
The American comic book "Raw" published a rather good section of his work, including fold-outs of his larger works. Sadly, I no longer have that edition. From what I remember, it states he was an obsessive who documented the weather every day. Lived by himself and most of his work was found after he was dead. He copied a lot of his images from childrens' book, magazines, etc. I remember these very graphic graphics of young girls being strangled, their tounges lolling out, hanging naked from scaffolds and trees with feet removed, etc. His fetishes where there for all to see. And he spent every waking hour, when he was not working his job, on his art.

that particular  Raw issue was published by Penguin and in quite a large run, so if you are persistent, you'll find

theotherjohn

This is a massive necropost (exactly 14 years -and a day!- since the last reply), but fuck it, it's a massive discovery to my mind. Someone recently shared microfilm scans of the majority of his writings on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/realms-of-the-unreal/

Given the nature of their preservation they're very difficult to read, but if this kickstarts some sort of project towards properly OCRing/transcribing his writings then I welcome it. I believe the motivation for the upload is the still unresolved lawsuit surrounding who owns Darger's estate: https://archive.is/Dfhy8

aububs