Revolutions of the Night

Darger Preview in Paris

mwstokes — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:42:04 +0000

: ‘Profitable Day for a Lost Child’ (Detail) Henry Darger

Revolutions of the Night: The Enigma of Henry Darger previews at Galerie Christian Berst, 3-5 Passage des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris on September 14. The documentary is to be shown as part of Travelling Brut #1, the gallery’s inaugural film season, and the screening followed by a Q&A with director Mark Stokes.

http://www.christianberst.com/fr/actualites

Darger in Washington, DC

mwstokes — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 03:05:09 +0000

A special preview screening and discussion chaired by David L. Downing PsyD, ABPP with director Mark Stokes at the American Psychological Association’s 119th Convention in Washington, DC.

The annual convention of the American Psychological Association is the largest gathering of psychologists and psychology students in the world, which each year attracts 12,000 – 15,000 or more attendees.

Saturday 6 August at 2pm, Convention Center

REVOLUTIONS OF THE NIGHT: THE ENIGMA OF HENRY DARGER Musings on the Film, by David L Downing, PsyD, ABPP

mwstokes — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:42:14 +0000

Revolutions of the Night: The Enigma of Henry Darger, is a documentary that, in its elegant compositional structure, evokes the world of the film’s subject: the ‘outsider’ artist, with a history of psychiatric institutionalisations, who lived ‘out’ his entire life, literally, on the ‘outside of’ the everyday, taken-for-granted world of lived-experience that most of us take as a ‘given’. Thus, in a unique paradox, he was, to a certain degree, invisible in plain sight. ‘Entering’ the film (the only way to put it) is not so easily accomplished, but inevitable. Most of us resist loosing ourselves from the moorings of the everyday which inhabits us, authors us, and gives us a pretence that we are self-conscious, reflective, and aware; speaking and authoring a self that is the model of free will and rational choice. But, Mr Stokes’s composition seduces us – like all great film – in believing that our perspective as voyeur inoculates us from vacating our removed position. Darger’s disquieting, surreal life and work is so disorienting that, without one’s willing it, the viewer is ineluctably drawn ever down the rabbit hole of this remarkable artist’s legacy.

Resisting the temptation of romanticizing, over-interpreting, pathologising, and, especially, speculating, Mr Stokes sagely has Darger speak for himself – drawing upon Darger’s auto-biography, as well as his 15,000-page novel, In the Realms of the Unreal. This, in combination with his skilful suturing of scenes, images, ambient sounds/recordings (with editor/composer Wayne Balmer), increasingly [dis]locates the viewer from the privileged place of (paradoxically) ‘outside[r]’ – to that approximating a more alarming one of ‘inside’ the subject matter and the matter of the subject. Through the de-centering of the viewer, some modicum of identification with, and empathy for, the ever-absent, but ever-real man of Darger is approached. The paintings of hermaphroditic children; the pictorial depictions of abuse, war, and end-of-the-world disaster; lyrical collage; the voluminous ledgers of writings and newspaper clippings are set against the panoramic profile of modern Chicago, gleaming on the azure shores of Lake Michigan; juxtaposed with rides along the ‘el’ – little changed in many neighborhoods since Darger’s early years; down to the insects in the fields in which he toiled as an institutionalised patient before his escape from the asylum; and the detritus on the close-up, gritty streets of a not-so-gleaming Chicago, that, in Darger’s eyes and capable hands, were art – all stand as signifiers; mute and powerful.

The absence of the man looms heavily and lugubriously in the film – filled as it is with images that were created by Darger; what he inspired in others; and, especially, in the one room [true] asylum of the man for the last decades of his life – of which nothing was known until his death. This is, again, a master-stroke of the film – powerfully visioning Darger’s invisible life, at last, with something of his evanescent presence. The film makes no claim to a tidy resolution, and, thankfully, does not – cannot – provide one. Reminiscent of the words of André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, the film instead seems to offer, fittingly, in parting homage to its subject, further ENIGMA: ‘When all is finished, I enter, invisible, through the arch’.

David L Downing, PsyD, ABPP, is a board-certified diplomate in psychoanalysis. He is the Director of Graduate Programs and Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Indianapolis. He is a current and past-president of several psychoanalytical societies. Dr Downing has presented at numerous regional, national, and international psychoanalytical congresses. His interests include the psychoanalytical treatment of severe psychopathology; as well as diverse applications of psychoanalytical theory to the cultural domain, including art, film, literature, and organisational life. Dr Downing lives and practices in Chicago and Indianapolis.

The Private Collection of Henry Darger

mwstokes — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:16:41 +0000

An exhibition of Henry Darger’s collages- an often overlooked aspect of the artist’s work– opens today at the American Folk Art Museum:

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/?p=folk&id=6172

DargerPrivCollPalmcardLOCATION
American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd Street
New York City
212. 265. 1040
www.folkartmuseum.org
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Subway: B, D, E, F, V
Bus: M1, M 2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7
© 2010 American Folk Art Museum
Design: Krate
April 6–September 19, 2010
The Private Collection
of Henry Darger
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM
GROUP TOURS
212. 265. 1040, ext. 381
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
www.folkartmuseum.org
Henry Darger (1892–1973) had an art collection. He displayed it in his
apartment, hanging from string, tacked into the walls, or pasted with
glue directly onto various surfaces. Like many art collectors, Darger
had a passion to amass images meant, most likely, to provide him
with pleasure, as well as to amuse his curiosity and intellect. And
like many practicing artists, he surrounded himself with his own
production—paintings, drawings, and collages—made in a modest scale,
with simple supplies and readily available material. Selected from
the more than eighty cardboard collages in the museum’s collection
and exhibited for the first time, the works on view illustrate another,
previously unexplored aspect of Darger’s creative world.
Brooke Davis Anderson
Director and Curator, The Contemporary Center
“The Private Collection of Henry Darger” is sponsored in part by the Leir Charitable
Foundations in memory of Henry J. & Erna D. Leir, the Gerard C. Wertkin Exhibition Fund,
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and with public funds from the New
York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. The Henry Darger Study Center Fellowship
is sponsored by Margaret Z. Robson.
Henry Darger’s home, c. 1970s (photo by Nathan Lerner and David Berglund)DargerPrivCollPalmcard

Filming Henry Darger

mwstokes — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:46:26 +0000

Extracts from the forthcoming Henry Darger documentary are to be screened at two events:

A presentation on the life and work of Henry Darger at The Intuit Gallery in Chicago, in conjunction with the Chicago Circle of the Ecole Freudienne du Quebec, which will include a conversation with Kiyoko Lerner, on Saturday 14 November:

www.gifric.com/ecole-cercles-chicago.htm

‘Filming Henry Darger’ is at Parsons the New School for Design in New York on Wednesday 18 November:

http://parsonsillustration.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/filming-henry-darger-a-special-presentation-by-mark-stokes-on-nov-18th/

Darger and the Detective

mwstokes — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:42:14 +0000

On Sunday 21 June, 8.00-9.30pm on BBC Radio 3, a new drama written by Mike Walker, drawing on the writings of Henry Darger. The play was recorded in Chicago by actors of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Tracy Letts and Yasen Peyankov, and produced and directed by Judith Kampfner.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l1r77

recorded in Chicago by actors of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company

The Lights of the City

mwstokes — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:08:47 +0000

The recent exhibition ‘Nathan Lerner: The heritage of the Bauhaus in Chicago’ at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris was the first French retrospective of the artist, designer and photographer. The links between the two continents, Europe and America, implied in the exhibition’s title, were constants throughout Lerner’s life and work. The Musée is now one of the key sites for Lerner’s work, providing a European counterpoint to the most significant collection of Lerner’s works, including his papers and research materials, at the Chicago History Museum (for which an inventory is available at www.chicagohs.org/research/resources/online-resources/online).

In his essay in the accompanying catalogue, Gérard Audinet describes the incredible impact on Lerner of joining the Chicago Bauhaus school at its inception in 1937. Lerner had an epiphany, inspired by seeing the play of light on a sculpture by the school’s Director Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: the realisation that light could be a medium in itself, as much as paint or clay. Scarcely two weeks after joining the school, Lerner created a construction he named a light box, in which objects are lit to create a self-contained universe, transforming objects within, which could then be photographed (perhaps in part a response to Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage?). Moholy-Nagy acknowledged his affinity with Lerner and of Lerner’s role in the Chicago Bauhaus by devoting a page to the light box in Vision and Motion (Chicago 1940). The light box was the springboard for Lerner’s later experimentation, always rooted in the material world, and it’s notable that Lerner understood even his subsequent photographs of the city in terms of the light box.

Lerner didn’t always photograph his experiments, sometimes he did not even process the film that he shot. Rarely did he make prints. For Lerner, as for Moholy-Nagy, photography not an end in itself, but a way of seeing, understanding and changing the world. Audinet places Lerner in the context of the Bauhaus’ vision of the artist and designer not as ‘the specialist but the man in toto’. In keeping with this vision, Lerner is seen by Audinet not solely as a photographer, and both exhibition and catalogue give glimpses of some of Lerner’s fascinating design projects, such as the modular house Lerner designed and built himself in 48 hours in 1951.

What’s also remarkable is that around half of the photographs in the catalogue actually predate Lerner attending the Bauhaus school. It wasn’t until 1937 that Lerner met Moholy-Nagy, but the strands in Lerner’s own work, the sense of community, form, structure and texture, are evident in Lerner’s work even in the early 1930s– and no less recognisable in Lerner’s photographs from the 1970′s.

Visiting the exhibition and reading the catalogue, I was strongly reminded of my conversations about Nathan Lerner and Henry Darger with the late Studs Terkel for this documentary. Studs Terkel described his friend Nathan Lerner as a disciple of the Bauhaus, and recalled Lerner’s compassion for the people of Chicago, as expressed in Lerner’s photographs of Maxwell Street and of Depression-era Chicago: Lerner’s ‘subjects were outcasts’, and Henry Darger could have been any one of the anonymous crowd.

At one point during filming, to underline Lerner’s connection with the Bauhaus, Studs Terkel broke off the interview to search amongst his belongings for a hand sculpture given to him by Moholy-Nagy. Acknowledging Nathan Lerner’s Bauhaus education, and Lerner’s sensibility and values, Terkel thought it was no accident that Lerner could recognise and appreciate the work of Henry Darger, when others may have dismissed it.

Studs Terkel recalled Nathan Lerner as a humanist, and in that sense, he said, seemingly quite unlike Henry Darger, whose contact with his neighbours appeared to have been so limited. And yet, suggested Terkel, Darger’s visions of a world brought by adults to the verge of apocalypse, to be saved by children, had a surprisingly humanist dimension and was absolutely relevant to us today.

‘Nathan Lerner: L’héritage du Bauhaus à Chicago’ Catalogue : 122 pages, 24×16 cm, 80 illustrations with an essay by Gérard Audinet, head curator of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, is available from the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris. www.mahj.org