Conceptual Mystique in Late Modernity, Part 1, by Adam Lehrer
In the first part of a two part series, Adam Lehrer explores the pitfalls of artistic anonymity in a society of total transparency
In April of 1973, Chicago landlords Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner discovered that their reclusive and bewildering tenant, Henry Darger, had created something almost unfathomably strange and glorious in the decades that he spent living there. After Darger’s health declined, he was moved to a retirement facility and his landlords took it upon themselves to clean up their tenant’s apartment. While sifting through the debris of a deeply solitary, lonely and alienated life, he came upon something that, even absent a deep grounding in art history, he knew was fascinating and, just possibly, a visionary work of art. You see, it appears that Darger spent his decades of nights following his shifts as a hospital custodial worker drawing and writing and assembling something magnificent in its scope, strangeness, beauty, formal inventiveness, and disquieting content.
What the Lerners discovered was a 15,000 page plus book of drawings, collages and texts that loosely told the profoundly disturbing and visionary story of the Vivian Girls, or the seven daughters of one Robert Vivian, who boldly lead a revolution against a tyrannical arm of power that has legalized child slavery. The drawings vacilate but inspired and encouraging images of courage and honor displayed by the girls and despicable and stomach churning torture perpetrated against them. The book has since been called In the Realms of the Unreal and its focus on the Vivian Girls is subtitled 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. The emotions evoked by the book are troubling and profound, likely inspired by the torture inflicted upon Darger during his childhood at a particularly brutal Catholic school for orphans. Darger apparently had a profound sympathy for lost and neglected children, even attempting to adopt them as his own throughout his life and for a long time trying to start a orphanage, along with a man he referred to as his “special friend” who some speculate was also a homosexual lover, to bring abused children to loving, caring homes. In one drawing, men dressed in the garb of 19th Century Imperial officers gather the girls and chain them to the cross. Though crudely rendered, Darger applied much detail in the horror, blood, gore, and viscera. They are profoundly anguished images, often difficult to distinguish whether they came from someone who was profoundly sensitive, deeply damaged or both.
“How could something like this be created and kept in private,” you might ask, “How could any artist of this genius toil away in such abject obscurity?”
It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand how this happened. Without connections, friends, or education, where was Darger to turn? Who would take his call? What institution would give him the time of day to review what he’d created? And because of Darger’s afterlife discovery, his melancholic story of loneliness has become inextricably linked to how we perceive his art. His pain and solitude, you see, gives him credibility. It gives him mystique. The evocation of his name, Henry Darger, is like the conjuring of a ghost. Did he ever even really exist? This sad man who haunted Chicago and left it with a metaphysical scroll. It’s all so wondrous, so fascinating. It should be no surprise then that Darger is now perhaps the most sought after artist on the Outsider Art market – people clamor for this kind of biography. His life is a relic of a society that died long ago. Because, absent privacy and anonymity, mystique becomes a problematic prospect.
The story of Darger is all but an impossibility in late modernity. Bret Easton Ellis often casts doubt upon the idea that there are innumerous unpublished works of brilliant fiction in the world, and he’s likely right. Even writers who can’t get published by mainstream houses (like me) will find their work welcome at the less censorship-driven independent houses and, if all else fails, will put their work on the Internet. If there was a lonely janitor in America spending his nights accumulating thousands of drawings, it’s impossible to imagine that said lonely janitor artist wouldn’t be putting those images on Instagram or some other form of digital media.
We have no privacy. We gave it up for convenience, for the ability to “market” ourselves, and because we’ve lost the ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. Once Mark Zuckerberg gave us the ability to share our lives, share them we did. Now, no one is obscure. Not really. An artist with 1000 Instagram followers is still more exposed than some of the greatest and most revered artists of early modernity. And with this over-exposure, we lost mystery. Transparency, revered as the backbone of democracy by the same libtard rulers who turn around and use that transparency as their primary method of control, replaced the magic of story with the banality of information. Byung Chul-Han calls transparency a “neoliberal dispositive.” As ever, what is sold as a tool of progress is in actuality the dystopic descent of human life into algorithmic singularity. Bummer.
Walter Benjamin said that an art work or object’s “cult value” is dependent on its existence, and not on its accessibility. As of now, this point is so commonly understood to be true that it barely warrants mentioning. So, why the fuck do we, as so-called “underground artists” or Counter-Agents or whatever, continue to revere something — cult value — that is essentially impossible to attain in the culture we inhabit? How can any of us truly be “cult” when sharing work on ANY digital platforms? Not only are none of us cult, we’re comparatively over-exposed, at least against the truly occulted artists of yesteryear who toiled away in obscurity either to only occasionally dribble out some work, or to never show it at all.
Consider some of the artists still working who have become synonymous with the very concept of “cult”, anonymity or mystique. Though these artists can be alluring and even seductive, the focus on anonymity and cult appeal nevertheless feels forced or retrograde when stacked against a cultural landscape of total transparency.
The Iconic Texan avant-garde bluesman Jandek, for instance, spent the ‘80s and ‘90s releasing music behind a veil. Very few of the musician’s admirers, allegedly, had any idea who he was. The mystery surrounding Jandek reinforced the aesthetic of his music – “a hermetically personal take on gallows blues played in non-standard tunings that rewire rock logic that demolishes axiomatic idioms,” wrote David Keenan in 2014. But the mystery around Jandek began unraveling around the year 2000, when various journalists were allowed to speculate on his identity and communicate their ideas at a moment’s notice to the entirety of the avant-garde music community. Jandek did his first live performance in 2004, giving us an image of him, and by 2014 he finally revealed his identity to Keenan in The Wire: he is Sterling Smith. It made no more sense to hold onto that mystery when forum fueled speculation was puncturing holes in that construct anyways. “I’ve done the mystery thing,” he said. And, unsurprisingly the artist named Sterling Smith is a much less fascinating proposition than the mystery that was Jandek, but at least it’s more honest.
The most influential fashion designer of the 2010s, Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga, also came into the industry beneath the veil of anonymity. His Paris-based label Vetements became a colossal and near overnight success for bringing a gritty, countercultural, “ugly-hot”, and Eastern Bloc-tinted ready-to-wear aesthetic to high fashion. Looking back, it’s undeniable that Gvasalia’s vision was radical. With often bizarre looking models, massively oversized bombers, DHL t-shirts rebranded as $600 luxury items, and references that connected dingy Chinese restaurants to Rammstein and postmodern art to sweat stains, Vetements catapulted to almost global recognizability behind the strength of their shows and a Kanye West co-sign. Vetements as a “fashion collective” was inspired by Gvasalia’s time working for Martin Margiela, who infamously never showed his face in public. But by 2016, Vetements’ popularity was at a fever pitch. Understanding that fashion can only function as a marketing entity beneath the glow of an almighty creative director, Gvasalia stepped forward to announce himself as the brand’s visionary. Again, the anonymity proved unsustainable against the rapid pace of fashion in digital modernism. Later, Gvasalia took over Balenciaga and is now one of the true titans of the industry — weak sauce pedophile marketing scandals be damned — and Vetements, absent his vision, has struggled to hold onto its relevance.
I bring up the Vetements anecdote not just because I’m a bit of a fashion faggot, but also because it embodies the notion that anonymity in contemporary culture is often little more than a branding slogan. It simply doesn’t make sense. It comes off as try-hard, and there's nothing cornier than trying too fucking hard. Your identity, your very sense of self, it’s all just data anyways, baby! The Counter-Agent needs to be able to adapt to the times. To go with the flow. Therefore, trying too hard prevents you from fulfilling you potential as a warrior of information and art. You can shield your identity as much as you want, but your work and the speculation around that work will still be discussed and dissected by more fucking losers on Reddit than the most famous artists of all time ever had to deal with.
Black metal is rampant with an obsession with cult appeal that borders on the delusional. In some cases, the occulted nature of black metal works to its benefit, to be sure. I was once told second-hand by a friend that Antichrist Kramer, the proprietor of the Satanic Skinhead Propaganda label, posited the black metal philosophy as one of transcendence and domination through self-debasement: I recognize my own worthlessness, and that makes me superior.
This binary allows black metal some elusiveness against the grain of banal commodification. Punk, on the other hand, is merely self-debasement, which is why it become fashionable as anti-fashion. Black metal will always be more or less alienating to the vast majority of those engaging with music, and even underground music. And yet, black metal’s obsession with remaining cult DOES have the burden of fashion. The Finnish Satanic Warmaster, for example, is one of the genre’s most controversial stars. But how cult can he really be when he’s on Instagram professing his love for Led Zeppelin and Metallica and HEAVILY promoting his band? Another Finnish act, Dead Reptile Shrine, shuns interviews, social media, and seemingly publicity of any kind. Though this certainly does make the project and its wildly strange and often disgusting sounds alluring and evocative, it also quickly devolves into something more silly than terrifying. In a video that has since disappeared from the Internet, Ritual for Julius Evola, Dead Reptile Shrine pantomimes a Satanic ritual involving a handgun and a death. It’s cool and it’s edgy, sure, but it’s also hilarious. Does anyone really think skinny European malcontent white boys pretending to commit ritual suicide is terrifying? Doubtful, but it makes you want to buy the records. It’s, you see, a fucking MARKETING ploy. Even the most occulted of these artists is still in a state of perpetual publicity.
Anonymity, unfortunately, bastardizes the artist into ghettoized cultural spaces. There’s perhaps no better example of this in recent years than BAP’s Bronze Age Mindset. In my opinion, that book was sharp, hilarious, and imminently readable – the perfect condensation of the most avant-garde wing of the 4Chan right with history, literature, and philosophy. But in BAP’s insistence on remaining hidden behind his muscle bound Twitter avatar, he basically assures that literature itself will never afford his book the artistic merit or even curiosity that it arguably deserves.
“The book is above all a performance of a persona that is of its time but claims to be of another,” writes Christian Lorentzen in what might be the biggest attempt at a charitable review of Bronze Age Mindset to be written by a left-leaning Bookforum approved critic. “A 128-page troll that claims to be entirely in earnest or at least not ironic, irony being ‘ghey.’”
But Lorentzen’s claims about BAP’s role as a performer is pertinent, and it’s where BAP truly thrives: the creation of a personified version of the self (more on that later.) It remains unfortunate, however, that BAP’s appeal will always be segmented to his Twitter following and lack the reach of his clear influences, from Nietzsche to Mishima to Houellebecq.
One could argue that BAP’s anonymity is warranted to protect his personal life from his frowned upon opinions, but I’ve always thought this was a cop out. There are plenty of successful media figures on the right, and it often feels like BAP’s insistence on remaining anonymous is, again, a marketing tactic. The same could be argued about the other writers who generated audiences under similar circumstances – especially Delicious Tacos, whose literary content is hardly more provocative than Phillip Roth’s was at its horniest (and infinitely less well written to boot.)
Nevertheless, practical reasons to justify an artist’s anonymity do often lend this kind of art its most appropriate intrigue. The pseudonymous German exploitation film artist Marian Dora, for instance, keeps his identity hidden because his films leave him open to the very real possibility of criminal prosecution. His first film Cannibal was a recreation of the case of Armin Meiwes, who committed an act of cannibalism with the permission of a victim that he had met on the Internet. It was assigned to Dora by his mentor, the cult filmmaker and Rainer Werner Fassbinder associate Ulli Lommel, who rejected the film for its over-the-top brutality and gruesome gore. Dora learned then that these kinds of moral rejections could lend his art some credibility, and when he made Melancholie der Engel, which apparently had a film shoot just as horrifying as the actual film with lead actor Zenza Raggi being drug addled, sadistic and cruel to others involved in the production, featured scenes of real animal cruelty that could have resulted in Dora’s imprisonment. The knowledge of this makes the films more exciting and repulsive to watch, and I find myself wanting to protect the identity of the real Marian Dora simply so he can keep justifying making art of this kind of nature.
I also appreciate what my friend Dominick Fernow, otherwise known for his legendary noise project Prurient and equally revered techno identity Vatican Shadow, does when he releases torrents of music under those names but still ends up releasing all manner of strange and brutal sounds under other project names that he doesn’t announce himself as the creator of. This allows Dom to experiment with new forms absent the expectations generated by the popularity and success of his most well known projects. The artist isn’t anonymous, but many of the works of art that the artist makes are. This is a clever use of anonymity.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Art by Henry Darger
2. Jandek
3. Gosha Rubchinskiy walks for Vetements
4. Antichrist Kramer
5. Bronze Age Pervert
6. Melancholie der Engel
One of your best pieces yet on SP. I look forward to the second half.
The Lerners knew he was an artist. Kiyoko is quoted as seeing Henry working on a painting and said to him “Henry you are a very good artist”. He replied “Yes I am!”.
There was no secret discovery. They knew we was an artist.
Henry’s apartment wall were covered with his art. His paintings were in display. Including the one described as his “opus” by a prominent gallery.
Henry Darger ate at the same restaurant every day. He was well loved by the staff. He had friends. William Schloeder was a friend he had for many years.
The “facts” that are being put out there regarding Henry Darger are a sales pitch and not reality.