Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - New Statues

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

As statues of slaveholders and Confederate War losers come down, we imagine what could go up in their stead, revisiting a conversation with artist and rememorialization expert Chris Vargas. And since the Trump administration has banned any official raising of the rainbow flag to commemorate Pride month we revisit our audio memorial to the artist Henry Darger.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called New Statues. Statues of slave traders, racists, and civil war losers are coming down. It's a great moment to think about what we could raise up in their place. Personally, I think we should just erect more statues of Danuta Danielson. Back in 1985, neo-Nazis marched through her little town in Sweden. Danuta Danielson was not going to have it, and she was photographed at the march clubbing one of the skinheads with her purse.

The woman with the handbag is a hero to anti-fascists all over the world. And in 2015, a Swedish artist created a statue of Danielson. Actually, there are now two statues in Sweden. Perhaps one day, I'll get one for my neighborhood as well. Last year on the show, I spoke with someone who's thought a lot about the need for new statues, specifically in regards to the Stonewall Riots, which kicked off the gay liberation movement. And while that uprising began in 1969, a memorial wasn't raised until 1992, in the park across the street from where it all started. Two pairs of white figures,

sculptures by the artist George Siegel called Gate Liberation Monument. Two men and two women. The women are sitting on a bench. And they're awful. I don't know. I always thought they were awful. This is artist Chris Vargas,

and he is not a fan of George Segal's Stonewall Memorial. Yes, I can be critical of them as like a trans queer person of color, feeling totally not seen or represented in that. But then knowing that the neighborhood people in the 90s were protesting their placement in the park. Yeah, critique is coming from all sides. But as monuments pointing to these events that were riots, they're ridiculous. They're ridiculous, yeah.

Last year, Chris got an invitation from New York City's New Museum. They offered to help him re-memorialize the Stonewall riots. I was wondering, what would new monuments to Stonewall look like? So I do as I do, and I invited other artists to propose new memorials. Chris Vargas' Stonewall re-emoralization Project is massive. 12 monuments from 12 different artists. I love G.O. Wyeth's kind of graveyard of trash. There's kind of headstones, but in the headstones, the headstones are sort of angled downwards and there's mirrors so then you can see actually on the headstones that it says, Pay it no mind, which references Marsha P. Johnson

in a so much better way than a Ron statue could. The P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for pay it no mind, which was how Marsha would respond when asked about her gender. She was celebrating her birthday at the Stonewall Inn when the cops showed up. And she, along with some other trans women of color, are credited by many with starting the riot. But if you haven't heard of her, you are not alone. The dominant narrative that has existed for a long time, up until recently, was white, gay, cis male experiences in Stonewall and centered them as the insiders of this riot. In fact, in the big Hollywood Stonewall movie from 2015,

it's the fictional main character, a cis white boy from Indiana who throws the first brick. No, that's not the way, Danny. No, Trevor, it's the only way! Gay power! Come on! Gay power! Yeah, I'm working against a very whitewashed history. The 12 artists that Chris chose all contribute to the de-whitewashing and opening up of the story of Stonewall. Most of the artists I work with are trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way.

But for this specific project, the intergenerational group of artists felt important too because of the ways that we understand this history. Every generation rewrites the history of Stonewall because it's so complicated. There's so many awesome layers to it. The Stonewall Rememoralization Project is multi-layered with meaning, but Chris doesn't have to worry about the neighbors objecting to any of it. He doesn't have to worry about any community standards or municipal laws either. He doesn't even have to worry about the laws of physics. For example, Devin Morris's contribution

looks like lounge furniture for a tropical resort. They're meant to kind of replace the benches in the park, but they're a lot more luxurious and loungy. They're beautiful, actually. And totally not feasible. No. There's the weather. Yeah, and I loved, yeah, these impossible materials in public.

And just this project, because we didn't have to adhere to the parameters of public art sculpture. And reality. And reality. Which brings us to what might be my favorite component of the project. A pile of bricks made by the artist Nikki Green. She created these tiny little bricks with stone walls stamped onto them. And if you can imagine entering a park

with a pile of bricks, you would, I would, inevitably take one. So it's this pile of bricks that are just sort of meant to disappear as people use them, take them to maybe incite other riots or throw through another window or a cop car. I like to imagine that Chris Vargas is getting a lot of phone calls now from cities and municipalities looking for new monuments. You can hear my whole conversation with him about his rememoralization project in the TOE episode called Institutionalized.

So it's Pride Month, and even though the Supreme Court is affirming U.S. laws that protect gays from discrimination, the Trump administration has banned embassies all over the world from flying any rainbow flags. And while I can't fly any flags here on the podcast, I would like to erect an audible statue of my own in honor of this month, a statue dedicated to the artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger is one of the art world's most famous mysteries. He spent most of his life working at Catholic hospitals in Chicago

doing janitorial work. And when he died, his landlord discovered a pile of large paintings in his room, most of them featuring little girls with penises. I think that his representation of the little girls with penises really were his way of representing the queer theory of the day. Jim Elledge is the author of a new biography of Henry Darger called Throwaway Boy. He says the answer to the mystery of the little girls with penises can be found in Henry Darger called Throwaway Boy. He says the answer to the mystery of the little girls with penises can be found in Henry Darger's sexuality. I really do believe that he was gay.

There's just too much evidence to deny that. And because of that, these were little boys that he was painting who just appear like little girls, little boys who are dressed up like little girls or little boys with girls' hairdos. Now, I own most of the weighty Henry Darger monographs that have been published, and I've watched Jessica Yu's 2004 documentary film about Henry. So, when I heard about Jim's book, I was very intrigued. A biography? In the documentary, we learned that the people who lived in the same rooming house as Henry knew so little about him, they couldn't even agree on how to say his name. Henry Darger. Henry Darger. I always pronounced it Henry Darger. It seemed to me that was what other people in the neighborhood called him.

Darger. Darger. Darger. The information there was was perfect for myth, you know, like janitor found after his death. That's Art Spiegelman. In 1990, he and his wife, Françoise Mouly, published 10 pages of artwork by Henry Darger in their magazine Raw. This is one of the first major publications to feature Henry's little girls with penises. I don't take any special credit for shining a flashlight on it because it's a perfect story and the artwork's really great.

Well, I'm convinced that this issue of Raw magazine is the reason Henry Darger can count so many cartoonists and cartoon fanboys like myself as early members in his fan club. I still recall being blown away by the images, but the total lack of biographical information was definitely part of the appeal. So I dropped by Art Studio in Soho to tell him about Jim Elledge's new book and to ask him what he thought about the idea that there might be more to the Henry Darger story.

You know, one assumed he was virginal because he was said to be so outside of any social discourse, total outsider. And then at some point early on, looking into it, it would be like, oh, and he kept like a weather journal of what the weather was supposed to be and what it actually was that day, which to me was hilariously compulsive. But if the story surfaced now, the fact that he's gay would actually help

his career. We're living in the gender studies moment. I think he's still a pretty strange character. If I found out that he'd gone to as a student to the Chicago Art Institute, I'd be a lot less interested. Jim Elledge's new book blows up the idea that we don't know much about Henry Darger. The Throwaway Boy is an incredible work of scholarship. Drawing from a wide range of sources, city records, medical journals, and newspaper accounts, Jim Elledge is able to show us the real world that Henry Darger, outsider artist, inhabited. Henry Darger grew up on the north side of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. At the age of seven, he was already on his own. His mother was dead, and his father spent most of his time in an alcoholic stupor. One night, Henry, at the age

of seven, was picked up by the police. He was caught coming home late at night, having visited a night watchman who worked at a lumber yard with whom Henry had developed a relationship. The police put him in the city's insane asylum for his protection, of course. Henry was rescued by his father, who finally understood that something had to be done about his son. So he put Henry in a Catholic mission, an orphan's home. But the mission was not a safe place for boys like Henry. At the time, a newspaper article had been published saying that the boys who live at the mission were involved with what the newspaper reporter called evil. They learned more evil, he said, in one night than there, than they could have learned for weeks out on the streets.

Henry lived at the mission until he was 12. But then one day, the priests decided there was something evil about Henry. And so they went back to his father, who was now living in a charity home, and they told him that they were going to kick Henry out. This is when Henry's father made a decision that would change the boy's life forever. He had his son committed to an asylum for feeble-minded children downstate Illinois. He went to see a famous doctor in the loop, a man named Otto Schmidt, to get the paperwork. And so what they did was to fill out a three-page application to this asylum. The doctor actually filled it out, and he mentioned self-abuse three different times,

one time on each of the pages, as it turns out. Now, at the time, self-abuse was the nice word, a euphemism for what we call masturbation. It was also a code used by many medical men, physicians primarily, to indicate that somebody was either already homosexual or was about to become homosexual. In Henry Darger's imaginary world, the little girls with penises, the Vivian girls, are fighting a war to liberate the child slaves. Many of his large paintings depict battle scenes or massacres from this war. Little children are subjected to unspeakable horrors, beatings, mutilations, decapitations.

But mostly, Henry shows us little children being strangled by adults. The state of Illinois investigated the asylum about a year after Henry Darger escaped. And in the thousand-page report, there's evidence that Henry most likely experienced the things he put into his art firsthand. Boys were routinely beaten with boards and other sorts of things like that.

But more importantly, in order to control these boys, the adult caregivers would strangle them. They would strangle them until their faces turned blue, until their tongues protruded, until they blacked out. And then they could do anything they wanted to the boys. So what he is painting then is obviously to me representations of himself and other gay boys that he knew at the asylum and on the streets of Chicago and who had been physically and sexually abused by the adults around them. Most of Henry Darger's artworks are illustrations for his novels. Henry actually thought of himself more a writer than an artist. He wrote a lot. The book about the Vivian Girls in the realms of the unreal is the largest. 15,000 pages. His second book, Crazy Town, is also huge. 10,000 pages plus. And his

autobiography slash weather journal, that's gigantic as well. 5,000 pages in manuscript form. Altogether, the books that Henry Darcher wrote come to about 35,000 pages. None have ever been published in their entirety. It would probably be pretty impossible for that to happen. Sometimes he repeats things over and over. He adds too many details here and there. And so the novels take a lot of effort to read. It took Jim Elledge almost two years to read everything. He says there are many instances where Henry alludes to his sexuality, especially in his book Further Adventures in Chicago or Crazy Town. One of the main characters in Crazy Town is a little boy named Weber George who gets in trouble just as

young Henry Darger did. Jim Elledge is convinced that this little boy provides us with the answer to the mystery of the little girls with penises. At one point in the novel, Darger addresses the reader and he says that the reason why Weber George is such a bad little boy is because he had wanted to be born a girl, and he was angry that he wasn't. Then Darger drops a bombshell. He says, dear reader, you may think this very strange, but the author knows many little boys who wish they had been born little girls. In the 1920s, a group of University of Chicago sociologists conducted interviews with gay men who lived in Henry Darger's neighborhood on the north side of Chicago.

Many of these men claimed they were women trapped in male bodies. But is this something that Henry believed? Was he part of a gay or transgender subculture? Those questions are impossible to answer. But Henry Darger definitely had a long-term, serious relationship with a man. This is perhaps the most striking revelation in The Throwaway Boy. Because the evidence is not something Jim found buried in the Henry Darger archives or something hidden in one of the texts.

It's something that's been staring us in the Henry Darger archives or something hidden in one of the texts. It's something that's been staring us in the face all along. You see, Henry Darger had three photos of himself, and these photos have been printed in almost every article and book. They even show up in the movie, and they all feature Henry and his friend Bill Schlater, or Willie. Jim Elledge says it's time to acknowledge that these two men were more than just friends. The photographs, the three I'm talking about with Willie, were taken at a photographing studio at Riverview Amusement Park. People would go into the studio and choose a setting. One of the more popular ones that couples, heterosexual couples who were serious about one another or who had just gotten married or who were about to get married would often choose was the back of a caboose. It was a

honeymoon caboose and there was even a song at the time that talked about this very thing. And in all three of the photographs of Henry and Willie, they chose the exact same setting. It was the honeymoon caboose. Their relationship was far, far, far more than just a typical straight guy friendship. The first photo was taken in about 1911 and the last in the early 30s. Henry and Willie palled around, that's the phrase Henry liked to use, for almost 30 years. They never lived together. Henry roomed in cheap boarding houses and Willie lived with his two controlling sisters, Lizzie and Catherine.

In 1931, Lizzie died and Catherine decided that she and her brother should move as far away from the frigid Chicago winters as possible. After a few years in the suburbs, they settled in San Antonio, Texas. Henry and Willie never saw each other again. When Henry received word of Willie's death in 1959, he sent Catherine a letter. He wrote, I feel as if lost in empty space. Now, nothing matters to me at all. This is something that someone who was in love with another human being would have written. They weren't just friends.

They were so much more. In Henry Darger's imaginary world, the little girls with penises don't fight alone. Magical dragon-like creatures called blingons sometimes come to their aid. And sometimes sympathetic adults are drawn to their struggle for freedom and liberation. One of these adults was named Captain Henry Darger, and he had a friend named Willie. This is an excerpt from The Realms of the Unreal. His friend's name is William Slater. The two are regular hawks. They are the head presidents of the Children's Protective Society, called the Gemini, a lodge of men congregated who are terrible enemies of all those who prove themselves child haters. I have a picture of them both.

And he produced a picture of two tall men, not handsome in looks or appearance, but nevertheless with a grim determination upon their faces. There are ways that creativity will ignore the obstacles in an artist's or a writer's life and figure out ways in order for that artist, that writer, to express what needs to be expressed. And for him to be able to figure out how to tell his queer story, not just to queer people, but to anyone who wants to know it, is quite amazing and very heroic, I think, ultimately. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called New Statues.

This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It's a remix from segments from the episodes Institutionalized and transformers. You can find more details about the work of Chris Vargas and Jim Elledge's book on the TOE show page at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia Find them all at radiotopia.fm.