Henry Darger | Hacker News Reader

Henry Darger

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An excellent film about his life and work has been made: In the Realms of the Unreal [1]. Oddly not mentioned in the article (or did I miss it?)

[1]. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390123/

He wrote a massive novel, is dead and left no estate, and yet it remains unavailable to read. There is certainly no technological reason why this is the case.

Personally, I find his work compelling - I saw an amazing exhibit at the Frye in Seattle and the scale of it was incredible, also the composition. But I think his work makes some people uncomfortable. From Wikipedia: "One idiosyncratic feature of Darger's artwork is that his girl subjects are shown to have penises when unclothed or partially clothed. Darger biographer Jim Elledge speculates that this represents a reflection of Darger's own childhood issues with sexual identity and homosexuality."

There is a great documentary on him: In the Realms of the Unreal

I saw this and came to say the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRlvDKcDvsI

Weird dude, but outsider art is fascinating.

I also got to see his work at the Frye many years ago. It was one of the best exhibits I've seen in Seattle. That was also the era they had R. Crumb retrospective--a real coup for a museum that's free to the public.

From all accounts, it’s—not good. Also, it’s really long and it would be a non-trivial (and expensive) effort to make it available.

It's already been digitized [0]. It's just being held up due to you, you guessed it, lawsuits [1]. Whether it's "good" or not is not really relevant; we have the capacity to preserve it and make it available.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230811081008/https://www.lexol...

[0]https://folkartmuseum.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resourc...

This is the best (only) copy that I have been able to find that appears to be legitimate (?). It only includes selections, is of low quality, and is not the entire work -- but it does provide some legible pages:

https://archive.org/details/realms-of-the-unreal/Realms%20of...

This book also supposedly includes excerpts from his writings, but I didn't check: https://archive.org/details/henrydargerdisas0000darg/

A lot of problems like the one you're describing boil down to commercial rather than technical reasons.

Why do some randos get to profit from this work? Life of the author full stop. Leeches and hangers on fuck off.

“I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”

I really like his quote. Simple, maybe said before in different words, and yet it stops you and makes you think for a moment about yourself.

Fredrik Knudsen did a really nice video covering Henry in his Down The Rabbit Hole series [1]. Would recommend

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg

Another similar artist that's still alive is Jon Sarkin [1] He has made over 10,000 pieces of outsider art usually drawn on the back of vinyl album covers. He has an archive of work online [2] and is active on instagram [3]

[1] https://jonsarkin.com [2] https://archive.jonsarkin.com [3] https://instagram.com/jonsarkin

“I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”

It very much frustrates me seeing professionals too timid to click through wizards on something as inconsequential as installing Word. "OK, it says click here to continue. Should I click there?" Even when mentoring new team members, I'm amazed at how afraid they might be to try something in a test environment where they know it doesn't matter if something goes wrong. Sometimes I think I've gotten as far as I have in life because I'm just not afraid to try, and I don't even think of myself as a risk taker.

I don't care if you think of yourself as a sucker or as a wise guy. Just make the damn thing (even if you're making mistakes).

If you ever happen to be in Lausanne, Switzerland visit the “Collection de l'Art Brut”…!

https://www.artbrut.ch/fr_CH/auteurs/la-collection-de-l-art-...

THANK YOU!

Also you can view The Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg Germany.

https://www.sammlung-prinzhorn.de/

Henry Darger is one of the most illustrous examples of outsider art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art

He held the same job his entire life as a janitor and yet he created a mystical complex world only know by himself.

In the world of software, the closest equivalent to outsider art would probably be TempleOS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

I would say no, and here is my reasoning.

Check the bio. Davis was a skilled programmer with a solid background: a master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State, which he earned in 1994, just two years before the documented onset of his mental illness in 1996.

Because of his illness, Davis himself became an outsider, clearly.

But TempleOS isn't any more "outsider art" than any other solo project, like Bill Joy's vi, or Knuth's TeX or what have you.

Also, religious themes aside, the techniques in Temple OS are thoroughly mainstream, full of familiar concepts. The code is understandable to any engineer competent in those areas. (No worse than any other mountain of uncommented code that occurs in our industry, in any case.)

Maybe the mood is similar, but it's not outsider art, Terry frequently published and participated in communication with regards to TempleOS.

There should be no other art, arguably.

What is an "insider" in art? Someone who has a private telephone line to the god of true style?

The article hints at that, it basically means he didn't have any formal education in art, little outside influence from established artists, did not get any feedback on his work, did not publish anything on his own; I'm not sure if he ever gave any interviews or context after the works were discovered.

Three-year-old's drawing posted on refrigerator: outsider art or not?

It seems that "outsider art" only really makes sense as "work produced by someone not participating in a certain socio-economic structure that some people have erected in connection with their art-related interests", which is a remark that has no value.

Someone doing "outsider art" is an outsider to something, but that something is not art itself. That socio-economic structure is not art itself. The "outsider art" designation doesn't say anything about the art itself, only the circumstances of one who made it; it is a form of ad hominem. There is no such thing as "outsider art" just like "logical proposition uttered by a known liar" is not actually a real category of logical propositions, like "true proposition".

Art requires no membership in any club, or conformity to any shibboleths. Because art is a basic human expression; it doesn't require education, or discussion or anything else.

"Insider art" is not any more valid than "outsider art", because art doesn't require any conformance to a code. It's not like "outsider residential wiring", where someone who is not a trained and licensed electrician can make a code-violating mess that is unsafe. Becoming part of some millieu in connection with doing art is entirely optional.

The literal interpretation of "outsider art" is nonsensical, like this: "You may have produced a natural smell out of your anus, but since you have no formal education in it, don't follow influences of notable farters, and don't receive feedback on your work from connoiseurs of flatulence, it is 'outsider fart'."

Community art. Think the Algonquin round table, or Cyberpunk, or Impressionism, etc etc. Very often when something begins to happen, people's social behaviors kick in and they get interested in what they all are doing, and that's where you get movements and styles across multiple artists. They're in a community.

Very simple, if you look at the definition of outsider art. "Insider" would be someone with training in arts, or an artist having art connections while doing their art. Most notable arts are done this way.

That is a someone; but the term in question is "insider art". If that someone makes art, that gets labeled "insider art". Without knowing who made some art, in what circumstances, can we reliably test a work of art to tell whether it is insider art or outsider art?

Art is not just about the thing itself, it can be about the context of the creation, and the viewer too. "Outsider art" is about the context of the creation. So without knowing who made the art, it's impossible, or impractical to determine if it's outsider or not.

> Outsider art is an umbrella term for any art made by self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds.

Does this definition even matter when, in order to gain any significant recognition, outsider artists must get noticed and picked up by those same conventionalists of the art world?

It's useful for sales and promotion. Same as any other genre.

In this case "the conventions of the art world" refers more to technical concepts like perspective, composition, color theory, etc. In this way, outsider art is distinguished from naive art. I personally think the distinction is flimsy, but humans do like to create these kinds of taxonomy. Folk art is another similar, but somehow technically different genre of art.

It has less to do with the people in the art world: gallery owners, agents, critics, etc. Artists who meet the definition of outsider artists had their work shown in the traditional way, like Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin, etc.

The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago is small but good. I found Darger's art there captivating and disturbing.

https://www.art.org/henrydarger/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vXjwTux8T4 - my intro to Henry Darger which sent me down a rabbit hole on wikipedia

In the Realms of the Unreal – Henry Darger's Magnum Opus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17987678 - Sept 2018 (1 comment)

I first learnt about Henry Darger in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City. It is a first-hand account of the psychological effects of loneliness and isolation. The author draws parallels between her own experience and that of other artists like Darger, and describes the way in which this experience can drive their creative process.

I don't believe he's credited for it, but the cover for the Melvin's Houdini album is drawn from his art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_(album)

Also a song about him https://www.allmusic.com/song/henry-darger-mt0054857381

Much more detail on wikipedia [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

The artwork comes across as Japanesque.

What even is "japanesque"? I don't believe that word has any meaning tbh.

Why would anyone harbor a belief that can easily be refuted by dictionaries? I don't get it. ELI5.

From the webster entry:

-esque adjective suffix : in the manner or style of : like

A very accesible blog post on how to use it: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/esque/

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