Bash Compactor: Phallus in Wonderland

“Did they ever figure out why he put penises on the girls?” asked a woman with a big smile. In any other context, this would have really creeped me out. At the Andrew Eldin Gallery on Saturday, though, it seemed like a totally normal question.

It wasn’t long after I arrived at the opening reception of the Henry Darger exhibit that I stumbled upon the drawings of transgender, rosy-cheeked girls. Much of Darger’s work incorporates childlike renderings of young girls, particularly the cherubic Vivian Girls. Colorful scenes of androgynous children laughing, playing, battling generals, wielding guns and being killed, hang on the gallery’s walls.

“I think the exhibit is really great,” art conservationist Karen Yager said. “It’s good to hear that it resonates.” The gallery had a quirky atmosphere that matched the peculiar nature of Darger’s work. The Chicagoan artist was institutionalized as a boy, escaped as a teenager and lived a reclusive life until his death in the 1970s. He was posthumously recognized for his 15,145-page fantasy novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Accompanying the manuscript were hundreds of drawings, sketches and collages.

College students took advantage of the day drinking opportunity and tried not to stand out while a little boy played limbo with a hanging art piece. One woman accidentally spilled a drink on her white T-shirt, but that didn’t stop her from dancing around the room and mingling with a straight face. It was as if eccentricity was bleeding out of the drawings and into the room, making everyone feel a little more open, communal and strangely comfortable. Or, maybe it was just all the free champagne kicking in.

Halfway through the opening reception, the band Vivian Girls took the makeshift stage. “Are you guys having a good time?” singer and bassist Katy Goodman asked the crowd, “Because we are!” The group played as a two-piece since new drummer, Fiona Campbell, was in Brooklyn playing a record-release show with her other band, Coasting.

The band, with a third album coming out this spring, adopted its name from Darger’s novel and its songs have the same dreamlike simplicity that characterizes the artist’s work. When asked about her own art, shown at Chelsea’s Rare Gallery, guitarist Cassie Ramone sheepishly replied, "The art is going really well. I'm doing more art than I've done since college."

There were over a hundred people in the gallery when Vivian Girls started to play “Wild Eyes.” A pack of NYU students refilled their plastic cups and snaked towards the band, nodding to the music. After the show, a kindergartener in polka-dot leggings who looked like she jumped straight out of a Darger painting, squeaked to Goodman, “I really like your guitar!”

Opinions on Darger’s work varied from “Do you think he was a pedophile?” to “He seems like a case of arrested development,” as Mike Macher, a Huffington Post blogger, put it. When looking at the illustrations, it’s hard to tell exactly what the artist’s intended message is. Take away from it what you can, because if you try too hard to figure out Darger’s enigma, you may get lost in his eclectic wilderness. As far as the mystery of the penis-clad girls goes, I never found out the story behind this phallic oddity, but after a while I stopped caring and simply accepted the nuanced whimsy for what it was.