still in the realm....

No, the earlier post was not a cryptic message about my current state of mind, though it could easily be read that way as well. Rather, it is the evidence that a web browser gobbled up my earlier post when I hit the preview button before publishing the post [note to self, don't try to blog with the Camino browser]. I had typed an entire post about In the Realm of the Unreal a film that I saw last night. It is about Henry Darger, who is considered to be a quintessential American "outsider artist." Upon his death in 1973, his landlords found hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious iconography, his handwritten diaries, weather journals, and a 15,000 page novel entitled: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. What I find fascinating about the folk art and the outsider art that I have seen deals with religion. In Henry Darger's case, his fraught relationship with Catholicism is explored in the film through excerpted readings from his diaries. I think Darger's religiosity poses a callenge to much of the secular reception of Darger's work within art and academic circles. This gallery's curating statement of Darger's work concludes that Darger's: fantasies often hovered on the fringes of sanity,[thus] his art enabled him to transform his obsessions into a luminous production that, in its best moments, transcends the pain and circumstances of its making. This transcendence I would imagine is not a transcendence of experience into Art, but much more ambiously so and certainly inflected with religious overtones that the gallery summery completely excises. One interesting fact that I learned about why exactly he kept a handwritten hourly weather log for ten plus years - it was to prove the hubris of the weathermen, as response to those who would claim to have knowledge of the future. That being said, I was concerned with the fact that the rights to Darger's work is held by his former landlords, whose foundation also funded the making of this work. It reminds me of the situations where art owners want their works to be exibited and written about in catalogs so that the work's exchange value would increase...