“Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger”

Henry Darger, At Battle of Drosabellanaximillian. Seeing Glandelinians retreating Vivian girls grasp Christian banners, and lead charge against foe.

Photograph: Courtesy American Folk Art Museum, New York

I must admit to feeling a bit conflicted about “Dargerism,” the American Folk Art Museum survey pairing self-taught great Henry Darger (1892–1973) with 11 contemporary artists influenced by his work. On the one hand, who doesn’t love Darger’s obsessive oeuvre, with its bizarre mythology of the Vivian girls—prepubescent hermaphrodites battling the forces of child enslavement in a millennial war to end all wars? And curator Brooke Davis Anderson should be commended for taking chances; this is the first exhibition at the museum to include academically trained artists, a decision which represents a break with the institution’s mission.

On the other hand, you have to wonder about attempting to create a school, as Anderson does here, around someone who was, after all, unschooled. Whatever the merits of the other artists in this show—and some are better than others—hanging them alongside Darger’s scrolled vistas comes off at times as an exercise in rebottling lightning. Darger, who labored in total obscurity, was sui generis; paying homage to him hazards mere imitation or worse—a canonization that drains his work of its ineffable qualities. Some of the artists here fall into one or both of these traps; the best avoid them altogether. Yet witnessing who exactly escapes such pitfalls is just one reason that “Dargerism” is so fascinating, and well worth seeing. Another, perhaps more important reason is the question the exhibit raises, not so much about art, but about artists: How do we know when we see one?

Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, certainly understood they’d discovered the work of a genius when they stumbled upon his drawings and writings in the one-room Chicago apartment that Darger, a school janitor, occupied for 40 years. (This was after illness had forced him into a hospital shortly before his death.) Lerner, though, was a photographer who taught at Chicago’s New Bauhaus; what if a less aesthetically inclined individual had been the owner of the building? Would the Vivian girls have survived the dustbin? This is the salient point to remember about Darger: His entire career is a found object.

Anthony Goicolea, Before Dawn

Photograph: Courtesy Postmasters Gallery

This is only fitting since Darger was an appropriationist avant la lettre, whose pop-cultural source material (everything from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to comics and coloring books) and methodology (he traced his drawings and sometimes enlarged them photographically) eerily prefigure much of the art of the past 40 years. His approach has endeared him to many contemporary artists since his work became publicly known, so much so that, ironically, the consummate outsider has become a touchstone for insiders. Indeed, Anderson’s slate had to be whittled down from an initial list of more than 60. One can easily play a game of who should have been included. Marcel Dzama comes to my mind, if only because his recently closed show at Zwirner Gallery perfectly illuminated the problematic interplay between inside and out—namely, that however naive Dzama’s drawings and sculptures appear on the surface, they are self-consciously sophisticated: One work referenced Duchamp’s peephole masterpiece Etant Donnés. Still, compared to Darger’s unbounded imagination, Dzama’s gesture seemed rigid and cramped.

And so it is for the weaker artists in “Dargerism.” Justin Lieberman, for example, literally slaps the faces of child-beauty-pageant contestants, as well as cutouts of artist Paul McCarthy’s Mr. Potato Head figures, onto Darger’s work in some misguided attempt to update it, hollowing it out in the process. Similarly, Anthony Goicolea’s photos featuring multiple views of himself as a Darger character reduce the latter’s ruminations on good and evil to simple narcissism. However, Amy Cutler manages to capture some of Darger’s surreal soulfulness in her paintings, as does the show’s standout, Turner Prize winner and cross-dresser Grayson Perry; his large ceramic pots are pure gems, vessels for finding spirituality in the oddest of places.

Not to pick on Lieberman too much, but it’s worth noting he has an M.F.A. from Yale, that golden ticket to art-world advancement, which says a lot about our cultural situation right now. As Manet well understood, the Academy is ultimately always more inclined to preserve its hierarchical point of view than it is to push for artistic truths. This remains the case today, even as the Academy searches for inspiration on society’s margins.