Moosje Goosen's speech for the opening of: “Quiet is the New Loud”
What makes an art opening a success? Usually, you can predict that the bigger an opening event, the less people look at what is to be seen. One of the artists in this show, David Stamp, describes some of his objects as so-called “red herrings” whose presence taints the perception of the space, or a group of works. When I heard this, I didn’t know about this expression, and couldn’t help but imagine a bunch of red herrings, in a gallery space, drinking beer and discussing art. For those of you who don’t know: a red herring refers to a rhetorical tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance. I still can’t help but think that we, at art openings, are the beer-drinking and art-discussing red herrings. Cheers, by the way. Sometimes, openings of big museum shows are so crowded with people that you forget what brought them together in the first place. We know that these occasions are just as much social gatherings, moments of interaction between people, sometimes with a little help of free beer. I’m not a beer drinker by the way, just so you know that I didn’t come to all the way to Hoorn for a couple of free drinks.
By way of opening this exhibition in the wonderful and romantic place of the Mariakapel, and because of this small but happy social gathering, I would like to introduce someone special to you. Later, you will understand why it makes sense for you to meet this person, today, and in this place. For now, consider this your pre-opening networking opportunity. A meeting with someone you weren’t expecting to meet today. He wasn’t expecting to meet you either.
First of all, let me remind you that this place was once an orphanage. I imagine that children gathered here in this chapel to do their prayers. Perhaps they asked God for a loving family. Perhaps they resented him for bereaving them of their parents. Or perhaps they didn’t question their fate at all. Life in this place was, after all, their reality: they were the orphans-in-residence, and this was their home.
The artists in this show all share a sensibility to space and architecture: Sjoerd Westbroek for example says that instead of depicting space through his drawings, he uses drawing to create space. A similar approach can be found in the work of Stefano Calligaro, who uses sculpture to understand and define space, often crossing the minimal borders between the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. Anyway, because the artists and their work share a sensibility to space and architecture, I thought it would be nice to revive the original purpose of this building complex, and look at orphans, before we will look at art.
Orphans do well in literature, as well as in horror cinema. Their presence, in both, is often unsettling, because they embody the stranger in the narrative of domestic happiness and family life. Heathcliff, the orphan in Wuthering Heights, is classic in this sense, as he is literally haunting the home of his adoptive family, before and after his death. Orphans are uncanny, or unheimlich: not belonging to the home. They always remain outsiders. Perhaps they are also unsettling because they remind us of what might be our worst fear: abandonment, rejection, and perhaps most frightening of all, the idea that some parents might be better off without their children. This idea works both ways of course: in some cases, children seem to be better off without their parents, biological or adoptive. In this regard, I have to admit that I find the musical Annie one of the saddest orphan stories of all. The idea that this red-haired young girl with dog needs to perform and entertain, 24/7, always singing and dancing in order to support her foster father’s pursuit of a somewhat hysterical happiness, makes me shiver. What would have happened if Annie hadn’t been a shining star, not the cute singing bird that she is but just a young girl, like any other?
Annie fulfilled her American Dream of becoming an insider, her dream to become part of a happy family life, with a loving and caring father. There are also orphans that always remain true outsiders, who never stand out in the crowd, or who stand out in the wrong way; children who don’t steal your heart on the first impression and who therefore will never be considered for adoption.
Henry Darger, a writer and artist from Chicago who died in 1973, is an orphan and outsider in the truest sense. Henry was born in 1892, and lost his mother when he was four years old. At eight years old, when his father could no longer take care of him, he was placed in a Catholic boy’s home. A few years later, when his father died, Henry was institutionalized in a an asylum for “feeble-minded children”, with the diagnosis that “he did not have his heart in the right place.” Here, you see Henry Darger in his later life, in one of the three photographs that are known of him, a photo that was taken by his neighbor in Darger’s one-room apartment in Chicago. 
As a teenager, Henry tried to escape from the institution in Lincoln, Illinois on numerous occasions, and finally succeeded in 1908, when he was sixteen years old. After that he led a reclusive life and spent most of his hours in his room or in the Church. Most people thought he was a little crazy, “but not in the normal sense,” as one lady puts it in a documentary about Darger’s life—and whatever that means. I really don’t know how you can be crazy in a normal sense. Perhaps we are all a bit insane, some in a more normal way than others. Henry hardly held conversations with others. Maybe he wouldn’t have liked to be here today, at the center of your attention, although I’m hoping he at least would have liked the title of this show. This doesn’t mean that he was actually a quiet man: his neighbors recall that he did have lively conversations with himself in his room, in a range of dialects and voices. In other words: I assume he didn’t need social gatherings like this one here today. When he was by himself, it was crowded enough already. On the few occasions that he did speak to others, it was about tornados and hurricanes, and everyday weather patterns: this seems to have been the only worldly subject he chose to relate to. Other than that he lived in spiritual devotion to his Christian faith and in a fantasy world unknown to others. His landlord was provided the occasional glimpse in this fantasy world: one day Henry came to him in panic and told him that he was raped the day before, by a beautiful seventeen-year old Italian girl, who took his wallet. No one, however, not even his landlord, could have guessed the scope of his fantasy world.
This is what his landlord discovered a few days before Henry’s death. It’s a little hard to see, but the closet in the center contains 15 densely typed volumes of a total of more than 15,000 pages, of what is probably the longest novel in the world. Three bound volumes of several hundred watercolor illustrations, accompany this text. Other writings that were found in his room were an eight-volume autobiography, a 10-year daily weather journal, and a second work of fiction, provisionally titled the Crazy House, of over 10,000 pages. The manuscript that we are looking at is that of 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.
Henry’s story is set on an unnamed planet, of which Earth is the moon. The planet is inhabited by the Abbieannians, Angelinians and Glandelinians, and a number of fantasy species, such as Blengins, Gazoonians and Rooverines. Here’s one of Darger’s Blengins:
On this planet, hundreds and hundreds of thousand children are torn from their parents, orphaned in order to become slaves and work themselves to death without getting a penny. From Henry Darger’s autobiography, we know that he himself was forced into labor during his years at the asylum. Children, so he had personally experienced, were considered beneath the dignity of grown-ups, and he felt it was his mission to emancipate them. Darger’s magnum opus tells the epic tale of seven blond Shirley Temple-like innocent looking girls, called the Vivian Sisters, supported by a mob of even more innocent-looking young girls, who battle against the evil John Manley’s regime of child slavery, imposed by the nation of Glandelinians. The girls end up in horrific situations, such as public hanging, crucifixion and strangulation. 
Despite the cruelty and horrors of this war, the girls never give up battle, and even fight naked if they have to, which I have to say, happens pretty often in the parallel universe of Darger. And because of this peculiar fascination with nudity, we also learn that they are not quite girls “in the normal sense” because most of them had penises. 
Anyway, the story of the Vivian sisters and their fight against child-slavery deserves more time than I could give them today, so instead of telling about their adventures, I want to tell a little bit more about the way the Vivians were brought into existence by Henry Darger.
In his journal, we can read that Henry Darger wanted to adopt a child himself. In 1917 he writes: “must adopt child to inspire me.” He never got granted permission to do so. No one wanted him as a child, and now no one wanted him to become a father. Because of this, he retreated in his fantasy world, and instead of raising real children, he fathered the vernacular images of girls in newspapers, magazines and children’s books. These are just a few out of an immense archive of clippings that is now conserved at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. 
The most important image, however, was a newspaper clipping of a young girl called Elsie Paroubek, who was strangled to death when she was five years old. The murderer was never found. In Henry’s journal, we can read that he looses the picture; he believes it was stolen from his locker at work. For unknown reasons, this loss of Elsie, who he might have regarded his fantasy-adopted daughter, really disturbed him and sparked a war in his head that gave way to the story of the Vivian girls. In his interpretation of events, Elsie becomes the model for the child labor rebel Annabel or Annie Aronburg, the heroine of his story, who appears to the Vivians as a spirit and informs them that “I was cruelly murdered because I was the leader of the rebel children…I appeal to you to avenge my assassination.” This sets of the war between the girls and the Glandelinians. Painfully enough, there is reason to believe that if it wasn’t for the assassination of Elsie Paroubek, the Vivian Sisters would never have existed.
Children who loose their parents at least have a way of referring to their situation: they can express their existence and loss in language, by calling themselves orphans. But let me remind you that there is no way for parents to express the loss of their children. There exists no such term that addresses the parental loss of a son or daughter, however painful and significant this is for the life of these parents. In this sense, Darger was twice bereft of a family. However, and on a more hopeful note, we can assume that he did really adopt the Vivian girls, and most of all, their heroine, Annie Aronburg.
Although there is an almost immediate recognition of Darger’s talent for color and composition upon seeing his watercolors and collages, Henry’s drawing skills apparently did not match with the vivid images he had in mind when he was fantasizing about the Vivian girls. Therefore, he used his archive of clippings for his drawings, and he developed a method of carbon tracing his collected images in a cut-and-paste manner, and assembled fragments of his archive into one image that was in synch with his own imagination. This explains why these girls often look like Shirley Temple: Shirley was often used as a model for the Vivian girls. Thus, Darger had a sort of pre-Photoshop era way of appropriating the visual repertory of pop and vernacular culture. 
Here he provides four children with a story of his own: his caption reads that “these little children near came being victims of the Glandelinians but were rescued at Sandersbery. The Vivian girls were their rescuers. The little girl with the golden hair lost her speech for a long time. They were rescued of being strangled by a strong Glandelinian soldier, who Violet Vivian killed with a well-aimed shot.”
Here you see how his collected images are echoed in his work, and how he applied a cut-and-paste technique for his girl figurines. He even traced clouds for his assembled skies.
This brings me to the fourth artist in this show, Andrew Sroka, who translates the imaginary space of cinema into yet another imaginary space of still life, and in doing so, gives these characters an afterlife in a realm that is the product of the artist’s mind and imagination.
Finally, I’d like to remind you that Henry Darger made this work cut off from art history, and with no awareness of what was going on in the art world. 
He made his work before anyone had even heard of Pop Art, and before the Pictures Generation drew attention with their collective show in Artists Space, in 1977. Henry’s style did get adopted, by artists such as Amy Cutler, and on some occasions you would think that Andy Warhol must have been familiar with the work of Darger. But for Henry, this all happened posthumously, too late for him realize that he was part of a larger family. This, finally, makes him the true and lonely outsider, an orphan that deserves to be with us today.
Upon his death, his landlord Nathan Lerner, an artist himself, confessed to Henry that he had been in his room and had discovered his work of art. He also asked what he should do with it when Henry died.
“It is too late now,” Henry said. “Throw it all away.”
Moosje Goosen, June 2010