SHOW: Henry Darger Exhibition GALLERY: INTUIT: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art DATES: January 18–June 28, 2008 REVIEWER: Renay Kerkman Mental illness and poverty were said to run in her family. Despite these unfortunate and sad cir-cumstances, Sylvia Skullworthy has created, collected and preserved at least 2,500 sketches of herself, including self-portraits of Sylvia the rodeo clown, Sylvia the mushroom cultivator, Sylvia the Hollywood noir movie star, Sylvia the vampire and Sylvia the famously attractive art critic. Sylvia would explain that she used very special, perhaps magical, art pencils to draw on very special, perhaps magical, art paper. With no levelheaded parents to guide her, Sylvia dropped out of school in the eighth grade, after having taken only one formal drawing class. Her art teacher scolded her, saying Sylvia obviously had no talent for art because she wasted so much class time com-plaining about the little boy at her table who kept eating all the paste. Sylvia’s IQs on record are variable scores—sometimes 180, sometimes 80. [caption id="attachment_324" align="alignright" width="297" caption="At Wickey Sansinia. They fight their pursuers still nude., Henry Darger, Collection of Angela and Dale Taylor, Photographed by Kiyoko Lerner"][/caption] As an adult, in spite of her difficult life as a single mother and assembly line worker at a screw factory, she has pursued her tortured inner visions with obsessive discipline and a delightful sense of humor. A prankster at heart, Sylvia continues to host countless costume parties for both her real and imaginary friends. At these lively gatherings, she documents, with a special art pencil, the shapeshifting of her curiously assorted identities. Sylvia Skullworthy (surprise! not her real name) is a friend of mine. We meet for a drink at a tiny bar near the new Henry Darger Room Collection— a collection compared in its promo-tions to the deconstructed and rebuilt Francis Bacon Studio in Dublin. Darger’s rebuilt sanctuary is snuggled in the rear gallery space of Intuit, a Chicago center for Outsider Art. Here, works from Outsiders, Intuitives, Naives and Art Brut artists are dis-played, along with photographs and art pieces that have an “Outsider” flare. Outside of what, you ask? Well, the formal, mainstream art world has traditionally operated in a rigid structure of expensive schools with fascist taste-mongers for teachers, rich kids with proper paint brushes and OCD, elitist-sterile galleries, smug collectors with cheeseballs, and ART STARS. The Outsider Art world emerged from an interest in the art of insane asylum inmates. Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) was written by Dr. Walter Morgenthaler in 1921. This book greatly impressed a French artist named Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet began his own collection of art created by insane asylum inmates, and called it Art Brut (Raw Art). Jean Dubuffet thought that the formal, mainstream art world devoured or eventually incorporated all fresh advancements in art, and sucked all the power out of them. In the end, all authentic expression is suffocated— lynched or eaten alive by the greedy fiend of culture. Feeling that Art Brut was immune to this, Dubuffet and other artists, including André Breton, formed the Compagnie de l’Art Brut. Because of their isolation from the world of fine art, Art Brut artists—not always “insane,” sometimes just imaginative loners—are supposedly immune to the manipulations of the culture-fiend machine. I debate within myself whether I should introduce Sylvia to the formal world of Outsider Art using the ART STAR shrine of Henry Darger. I am intrigued by the idea that Sylvia may be inspired by the galleries; the expensive frames; the gift shop; the Darger Room, prepared using archeologist-preservation methods; and Darger’s story. He was an underprivledged loner, a mild-mannered janitor with a wild fantasy life who created amazing murals and epic novels, all based on his wish-fulfillment to save his sister and her friends (the Vivian Girls) from adult monsters who ran rampant through the same orphanages where Darger and his sister were dumped as small children. The idea that Sylvia’s art could be worth millions someday might inspire her to continue her art-production frenzy with a renewed zest – or stop it with a screeching halt. My fear is that Sylvia, a bit of an old-fashioned prude, will be put off by Henry Darger’s art, most specifically the penises of his Vivian Girls. Will she mistakenly conclude that Darger and his collectors are perverts? Will she not value the more sophisticated concepts of coloring book appropriation; the importance of 64 crayons; and the deeply beautiful fantasy life of a man who wished to rescue, with unusual flare, a lost sibling from the cruel world of orphanages and brutal institutions? Will an introduction to the formal Outsider Art world somehow contaminate Sylvia Skullworthy’s own outsider innocence and authenticity? I sneak away from the tiny bar, leaving Sylvia alone, and duck in next door at the Intuit Gallery. As I look over the Henry Darger Room Collection, I feel like the artifacts are a bit haunted. I recall someone telling me that the Joseph Cornell collections are full of boxes of dust bunnies, and that Maya Deren’s archive is full of parking tickets—documents that may somehow connect her to buying “special vitamins” and frequently visiting several other women’s husbands. So what? These somewhat revealing artifacts serve as a warning to living artists: be careful what you save, because some straight-laced historians and prudish visitors may twist and misconstrue the evidence you leave behind. When I return to the tiny bar where I left Sylvia, I find her deep in con-versation with a man I know is a prominent Outsider Art collector. Sylvia is practicing her unvarnished charm on him, informing him that she is an artist, but that her real interest is in history. “So now, tell me, who won the Civil War?” The collector blushes and shakes his head, says “THE NORTH!” “Of course,” Sylvia replies, “But was it Grant at Appomattox, or Sherman burning the South to the ground?” After this second question, the collector looks more than a bit perplexed. He has read all the Outsider Art brochures, and he isn’t sure where to place Sylvia—a living, breathing human being. Perhaps she has “Outsider tendencies,” perhaps multiple personalities; or perhaps she is pulling his leg in a dual effort to disguise her poverty-entrenched, underprivileged background and to mess with his condescending, money-polluted head? Realizing Sylvia may resemble the ART STAR Cindy Sherman more than the ART STAR Henry Darger, I whisk her away, and take her safely to the privacy of her home. I then help her to reorganize her collections of vitamins, self-portraits, and the magic art pencils. Later, she can come over to my house and help me to organize the parking tickets and dust bunnies that live under my bed.