although it is definitely not free of the typical grimace-inducing ways people talk about "outsider art", i am nonetheless appreciative of Michael Bonesteel's essay on Henry Darger (in Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, 2009) as an author. The vast majority of discussion of Darger discusses him as an artist and considers the voluminous epic novels he wrote as essentially just scaffolding for his art. Which is unfair because goddamn he wrote these incredibly long and in-depth novels, why are we forgetting that? Is it because it's easier to look at weird art than read a weird book? Probably. Is it because, for better and/or for worse, we have more of a framework for "raw art" in visual art than in text? Probably. Should we do better with our literary/aesthetic analysis? Ye.
Like imagine how nuts it would be if when people talked about Wlliam Blake's prophetic work, they were just like "yeah he drew all these pictures of weird guys. Also he wrote some poetry or whatever but who cares about that check out these weird guys! Who are they? I dunno, no one reads his poetry!"
As Bonesteel (what a name by the way) points out, in addition to this generally being unfair to the artist and also tying into the typical ableism of the art brut movement, it also just makes artistic analysis impossible. Like yeah analytic frames, death of the author, etc., but an analytic frame that willfully ignores part of an artist's piece (not part of an artist's ouvre, mind, but part of the piece) doesn't seem like a good frame to me! It's how you get to stuff like a Guardian article I read a bit ago that made me very angry, which speculated that Darger was a repressed serial killer because of his paintings of grisly violence to children, while completely disregarding the narrative and personal context that these images are part of a large-scale story of a violent but ultimately successful children's revolution against child slavery, that it is a story of hard-fought children's liberation by a man who was deeply concerned with the abuse and protection of kids.
[The right] to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart.
- Henry Darger, Declaration of Childhood Independence