Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell

In considering both Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell this week, we see two artists who strive to depict idealized childhood in their work, but instead give their audiences a window into the world of pathological child worship and the prisons they make for the girls at the heart of their imagery.  As we’ve seen in both the cases of J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the imaginatively gifted Cornell and Darger express their love of idealized childhood through great works of art and literature.  Work that is, at least in the eyes of these artists, meant to allow childhood to ascend to its rightful place upon the top of the developmental ladder.  However, as we view their pieces – understanding the fact that we bring the passing of time and our own lenses and prejudices with us to this viewing – disturbing obsessions, fetishes, desires and symbolisms rise to the surface.

In Cornell we find a man driven simply by the desire to document, catalogue and present to the world the childhood perfection that has been captured by visual and material culture during his lifetime.  His collected work The Crystal Cage [Portrait of Berenice] is, in the words of Jodi Hauptman, “a search for Berenice” those “documents, photographs, prints, memorabilia, etc” of young girls who are, in the eyes of Cornell,  “symbolical of perpetual youth” (Hauptman, pg. 163).  Cornell obsessed over the idea that “seeing a child is evanescent” and in the artist’s own words, “over in a flash” (Pg. 168).  Cornell’s response to this ephemera was to collect, bottle, box, film, and otherwise capture the children (both famous and ordinary) he felt represented the fictional Berenice, or child of perfect youthful imagination, brilliance, beauty and innocence, he so passionately created and housed (or imprisoned?) in the crystal pagoda.

Yet there seems to be a more troubling side to the nearly compulsive clipping, pasting, collecting and observing of Cornell.  While believing he was seeing these children of Hollywood or print media as they really were, he lacks the perspective of Hauptman who states that, by its very nature, the look or arrangement or collecting by an adult “fixes and defines” these children on the terms of the adult.  By framing and presenting the children – and his perceptions and desires about them – Cornell could manipulate their childishness to serve his own needs.  He could deny their inevitable maturation, he could deny their passions, and ultimately, he could deny both their undefined, threatening sexuality and his apparent discomfort with his own.  So in the end, as Hauptman so astutely argues, the crystal pagoda becomes not only the telescopic-microscope through with the adult can understand the being and wisdom of childhood perfection, but the lens through which his audience can better come to know Cornell himself.

Similarly, Henry Darger struggled to capture the evanescence of childhood through his representation of young girls both is his collages and in his fictional tome In the Realms of the Unreal.   While Cornell clung to idealizations of childhood with the ultimate hope of stopping the passage of time, Darger collected the images of little girls as if he was adopting them, bringing them into the world of his expansive imagination.  The world these girls inhabited was seemingly borderless and full of adventure, but it was also dark and the setting in which Darger allowed for the fulfillment of his often violent and sexually devious fantasies.  Throughout his rich and often intense fiction and in his collage paintings of the scenes that he created, we see the confusion and anger within Darger – the result of a traumatizing childhood, although Deleuze might not agree with such a formulaic diagnosis – expressed artistically.  Hermaphroditic little girls (reproductions of the images he saved over a lifetime) are cut and pasted into scenes of either intensely beautiful landscapes or intensely graphic violence, often featuring disembowelment.  In the end, Darger’s fantasies about a life for the little sister he never had, and his anger at a God who seems to have forgotten his pain, lead Darger to seek the same possession of childhood we see in Cornell, but where Cornell self-identified as innocent and as asexual as any child and sought to remove the child from life and the passing of time, Darger adopted his imagery as his own and painted or wrote these fictional little girls into lives of adventure, violence and often death.  Once again, the images of childhood presented by Darger tell us little about the actuality of the girls we see, but volumes about the man behind the lens.