from articles I'm reading about Jim Elledge's biography of Darger (2013), it appears as tho Elledge, who argues that Darger was a gay man, refuses to consider the possibility that Darger may have been a trans woman. also I would LOVE to read your thoughts on Darger!!! I was actually wondering if Darger might interest you related to comics as a medium and an art form.
I mean to the extent that I feel comfortable speculating about the trans status of a person who is dead and whose work and life and identity etc have all been picked over and (mis)represented in really fucking exploitative ways that would probably be incredibly traumatizing to the actual person in question, I think it is REALLY remiss to not even mention the possibility that Darger was a trans woman. This seems... fundamentally unkind in its dismissal of a lot of the themes in Darger’s work, as well as what we know of Darger’s life (which isn’t much because this was an intensely private person with a relatively limited social circle, etc).
I am just perpetually deeply, deeply upset by the constant positioning of Darger as an “outsider artist” (WHOM is an outsider artist! I’m sorry but this concept is so fundamentally fucked up!!) whose creative output was only ACCIDENTALLY profound and beautiful and otherworldy, and whose motivations for creating it must have been abusive or predatory in nature because, like, heaven forbid we acknowledge that this person may have been a trans woman or may have been gay, but we can certainly still, I guess, work that in by implication through casting Darger as a fucking pedophile! The fact that this all fucking stems from Darger’s LANDLORD of all people finding the work itself and profiting off of it is just like, an awful twist of the knife - so many people who were strangers to Darger have profited, published, built up their art critic reputation, etc on this work that the artist CLEARLY did NOT intend for anyone to EVER publish or analyze or exhibit! Like, I dunno, I do not know what was truly in Darger’s heart, but so much of that work reads like diary entries, and was clearly like, never published, etc, and I feel like people have made a big thing of it because the work and the artist are “mysterious” but in a way that can be read as salacious or whatever (all those naked pre-pubescent girls! What REALLY was going on in the head of the person who drew them? etc etc).
Like, the speculation about this - the abuse themes, the age of the children in Darger’s work, etc - makes me DEEPLY fucking uncomfortable, because it seems like Darger was maybe just doing what I and probably a lot of other people do: catharsis through some sort of creative outlet that is NEVER EVER EVER intended for other people to see. I have written and drawn things that I would quite literally rather die than have made public in any capacity - most of these things I destroy upon creating them because they are not made to be revisited even by myself, but whatever, I understand the archiving impulse - and this ties in to a larger discussion about survivor “coping mechanisms” and the difference between exploring something maladaptive or whatever in a private fucking journal, and curating a public blog where you not only make that public but create and participate in public social interactions with other people about it and encourage that in others... but that’s another discussion for another day, obviously, this is just kind of an aside to this whole thing. Because I think it’s necessary when we talk about this work to acknowledge that Darger did NOT make it public, it was entirely a private expression, and we at the very least need to ATTEMPT to THINK about what an ethical approach to this work might be now that it’s out there in the world, you know?
ANYWAY! Yeah, Darger’s work especially w/r/t comics as medium and the perception of comics as medium, including (especially!) ideas about comics as a corrupting influence on youth, comics as the medium of “lazy” artists whose output is workmanlike or whatever, even to some extent comics as an avenue of “outsider art”, really really is important to me! There’s a lot more I have to say about comics as medium and Darger’s work and like, the cultural impact of comics and the concept of the artistic “outsider” how that is connected to a person whose life’s work is “discovered” posthumously and who is then represented in strange and patronizing and unethical ways (this has happened to people who WORKED IN COMICS, look at Bill Finger, the original creator of Batman!)... but I spent more time typing this than I’d like to spend creating tumblr content while I’m soaking up time with my girlfriend so I will definitely like, make a note to expand on this later when I have the time/inclination and leave it at this.
