Henry Darger

[complaintregister]

the documentary is absolute shit. its attempt to turn darger into some sort of accessible indie rock folk hero type. truth be told darger was a deeply disturbed man. a schitzophrenic, and most likely a pedophile. the documentary barely touches on the sinister nature of the majority of his work, opting only to show the more colorful "cute" pieces. i have a collection of his work that came out pretty recently, that talks about and shows how he would obsessively draw little girls being strangled over and over filling up entire notebooks with the same image. some one needs to make a documentary that actually documents the nature of his work.

[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?

[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]

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