She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap!: Henry Darger’s Preparatory Tracing in the Context of Modernism as a Product of Popular Culture

“The idea that modern art looks like something a child could do is one of the oldest cliches around; it has been with us since the inception of the avant garde” (Fineberg, 1997, p.2). This essay will discuss She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap, a preparatory collection of collage and tracings as a piece of modernist art. This will be discussed through ideas of Western primitivism, psychoanalysis, pop culture, remediation, self reflexivity, surrealism, and as a piece of layered visual experience. First the artwork itself will be described, followed by a definition of Modernism, ending with applying this definition to the artwork.
She Got to Sit on Ringo’s Lap Henry Darger (1892-1973) was an American outsider artist who lived and worked mostly in isolation, creating his vast amount of work over the span of five decades. The majority of his work is in the form of a picture book and preparatory sketches, made by watercolour and pencil drawings with elements of collage. The hardships of his early life influenced the themes of Catholicism, violence against children, gender and escapism ,(Rhodes, 2000, pp 108-110). These were all shaped by his surrealist and dada sensibilities which are often described as a “childlike” or or Western Primitive style (Rhodes,2000 p.24).“The same comparisons between child art and modern western art have also been applied to the production of Outsider Art by adults.” (Rhodes, 2000, p.37). His artistic process consisted of collecting and “adopted countless images from popular-media sources, such as newspapers, magazines, comics, and cartoons” (American Folk Art Museum,2010) which he then reproduced in pencil and watercolour. Darger’s magnum opus was his collection of 15,000 pages of his book “The Realms of the Unreal”, for which many preparatory sketches, tracings and collages were made as well as notebooks containing hundreds of pages of notes (MoMA.org, n/d).




“Though living and working in isolation, Darger intuited many strategies of 20th-century avant-gardes. Like Dada and Surrealist artists, for instance, he appropriated found images and produced startling compositions by juxtaposing unrelated found and made images.” (MoMA.org, n/d)He used diverse materials, reminiscent of the experimental techniques employed by artists associated with these influential artistic movements such as Hannah Höch and Martin Ramirez (Rhodes,2000, p 113).


The Darger piece that this essay will discuss in the context of Modernism is a preparatory sketch that contains repetitious tracings and collage. - “Darger often took his source material to a local drug store, where he was able to have it photographically enlarged” he did “sketches and studies “ also called tracings “Executed on tracing, typing, wax, and drawing paper” (Anderson, Parnell, 2001, p.13). These works are supplemented by collections of Darger’s reference images which he held dear as nearly all of his artistic process consisted of him tracing these found images to create the world of his “Vivian Girls” (example in Fig.1). “no single source influenced him as steadily as the colouring book” (American Folk Art Museum,2010). The colouring book served as a primary reference, forming Darger's visual language and contributing significantly to the thematic and stylistic elements of his work. These colouring books provided Darger with the image of his typical “Vivian Girl”, an innocent, Judy Garland-esque figure of the image of childhood in the popular culture surrounding him (Fig.1).

Fig.1, Darger, Henry ,Mid-twentieth century, Untitled, Collage on cardboard with 1953 Christmas Seal stamps, 11 1/4 x 14 1/4", Chicago










Fig.2, Henry Darger, 1967, Untitled Preparatory Tracing, (She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap), c. 1966-67 Mixed media on cardboard 43.2 × 43.2 cm, Kiyoko Lerner and Andrew Edlin Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY


The primary focus of this essay is on the untitled preparatory piece by Darger (Fig.2) which is often referred to as “She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap”. The piece is mixed media on cardboard consisting of drawings and collage(Situations, 2016). The pencil drawings are traced repeats of the “Vivian Girls” and a bunch of flowers (right), shown in yellow and orange water colours with a central, contrasting pop of cornflower blue. The top and left edges of the piece are bordered by Christmas postal stamps dated 1957. The collage cut outs are held onto the cardboard via thumbtacks, bordering the top and bottom of the piece. “Darger’s powerful mixture of innocence and imminent catastrophe is underplayed here, but the image is still affecting. It includes a group of Darger’s young girls, variously dressed in red and yellow frocks, framed on the top and bottom by black-and-white pictures of children and celebrities, including the beatles” (Goodman,2020).


Repetition is the main mode of which the “Vivian Girls” are depicted in the central drawings. There is a set of twins, and two sets of triplets, only one of them being a single copy, remediated from Darger’s surrounding sources. The two-tone cut outs that make up the upper collage (left to right) depict a young boy at a three quarter turn with a glass of milk in the foreground, a segment of a cartoon giving information on seals, a newspaper cutting of five children who were orphaned by a plane crash, and then another showing a young girl sitting on the lap of Ringo Starr with Paul Mcartney in the foreground. Finally there's a segment of an illustration of a Scottish terrier.


The images collected by Darger at the bottom of “She Got to Sit on Ringo’s Lap” continue the themes of children in need of protection, quaint images of childhood, and pop culture references. (Left to right) there is a photograph of Red Skelton, a TV and radio personality popular during the lifetime of Darger(Situations, 2016) , a photograph of a domestic scene of a woman and child, and a newspaper cutting describing the abduction of a child. Similarities can be seen between the three quarter angles faces and haircuts of the “Vivian Girls” and the children in the photographs that surround them (Fig. 2.1 and Fig. 2.2). The repetition in the depiction of the "Vivian Girls" suggests a self-awareness within Darger's work. Darger's use of images sourced from various media, such as newspapers, cartoons, and photographs, showcases a remediation process. He takes existing visuals and incorporates them into his own artistic context, transforming their original meanings and contexts. The two-tone cutouts and collage elements create a layered visual experience, contributing to the notion of simulacra. The combination of unrelated images, including a cartoon, newspaper clippings, and illustrations, forms a new, synthesised reality within Darger's artistic realm. These techniques contribute to the creation of a unique visual language that engages with both personal and cultural narratives.








Modernism

In the history of art, Modernist art emerges as a transformative movement, breaking free from traditional norms and forging new paths of expression. Modernist movements stand as pivotal expressions of creative evolution.Modernist art, characterised by a synthesis of influences including pop culture, surrealism, alienation, self-reflexivity, remediation, and the burgeoning wave of consumerism, encapsulates a complex response to the rapidly changing socio-cultural context. Since Modernism spans over such a contentious period of time, containing many facets and tropes, a broader understanding of modernism could be found by thinking about it is a “succession of ‘isms’ “ (cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, dadaism,) which made up the wider artistic response to living in modernity (Wood, 2004, p.1).

Generally modernism can be described as the reaction to living in a modernist world, that being one which emerged from a new age of production and consumption were the goals of humanity seemed to be to reach high capitalist pursuits and not the nostalgic, romantic pursuits of ‘the old world’. Greenberg in Avant Garde and Kitsch discusses how urbanisation made folk culture less relevant and pop culture took its place. This was interested in simulation rather than values of “the old country” and it is argued that products of pop culture make no demands of consumers.



“The pursuit of aesthetic value, as by variegated and, to the outsider, often eccentric engagement with the multifarious experience of modern life: technology, alienation, commodification” (Wood, 2004, p.1).

The particular branch of modernism that Henry Darger’s work (Fig.2) belongs to is that of outsider artists, childlike art associated with western primitivism, kitsch and consumerism, remediation and self reflexivity. This differs from a purist view of modern painting as argued by Clement Greenberg, “Clement Greenberg… restricts ‘authentic’ modernism to an increasingly ‘ purified’ lineage of abstract art”(Wood, 2004, p.1) as criticised by Paul Wood in the introduction of “Varieties of Modernism”. Greenberg argues that avant garde art is a way to escape parasitic pop culture within modernity (Greenberg, 1939).

Wood instead argues for pop culture, and reference to it within “higher” American Modern art as, “only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising… have in their blind energy accidentally… evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment”(Wood, 2004, p.242) . Wood suggests that it is not the deliberate endeavours of "higher" art alone but the inadvertent contributions of popular culture that together shape a profound cultural monument awaiting interpretation by future generations. ) “ American popular culture possessed much more dynamism and modernity than American art did. It was by engaging with the products of the culture industry rather than turning one’s back to them that the artist… could produce critical art.” (Wood, 2004, p.243).The dynamism and modernity of American popular culture surpass that of American art, suggesting that artists can produce critical art by engaging with the products of the culture industry rather than turning away from them.

Both modernism and outsider art share a fundamental rejection of traditional norms and techniques. Outsider art reflects a raw and unfiltered form of personal expression. The emphasis on the artist's unique vision and experience aligns with the modernist focus on individualism. The recognition of outsider art in the 20th century challenged traditional notions of artistic legitimacy and expanded the definition of art. This transformative influence on the art world aligns with the disruptive nature of modernist movements. Outsider artists in their inherent nature operate by breaking tradition which is a trope of modern art, “The artist outsiders are, by definition, fundamentally different to their audience, often thought of as being dysfunctional in respect of the parameters of normality set by the dominant culture.” (Rhodes, 2000, p.7). Rhodes also addresses how the work of outsider artists, like Henry Darger, are inherently “Products of culture” (Rhodes, 2000, p.23), as they are not formally trained and engrossed in the art world and therefore their experience is solely influenced by surrounding culture and their own subconscious. This utilisation of Freud’s subconscious/ unconscious is a trend often seen throughout the analysis of outsider artists. Modern art came along with Freuds’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, which bled into popular culture and the way visual art was thought about, “After World War II, the assimilation of psychoanalysis into the mainstream of popular culture and the widespread focus on the baby boom brought children and childhood into the foreground for more artists than ever.” (Fineberg,1997, p.208).

“Work of people living either on the margins of society, or distanced from ‘high culture’ by class and lack of education” (Rhodes, 2000, p.23). Since the emergence of mass production and hence the emergence of kitsch and “Dark Matter” (Shoelette, 2002) in the art world, the makers of modern art characteristically derive from a wider pool of people, making the existence of outsider artists unquestionable. In J.D. Fineberg’s book, The innocent eye : children's art and the modern artist. (which later became an exhibition) he researches how different modern artists, such as Picasso and Paul Klee, studied the art of children to inform their own practice, and how one can view the art of children alongside modern art and draw comparisons. “A fundamental connection exists between modern art and the art of children” , “Seeing how modern artists have looked at the art of children forces us…to reconsider the images that inspired them” (Fineberg, 1997, p.xi).




Modernism Applied to She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap



She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap (1966-67) is a piece of modernist art for a number of reasons. As it was made by the outsider artist, Henry Darger, it is an example of Western Primitivism and shows childlike innocence in the techniques of production. Every drawing as seen in the centre of the piece has been traced and amateurishly coloured in using coloured pencil and watercolours (Fig.2). Rhodes speaks regarding Western Primitivism; -”Characteristically, the content of this work concerns the process of becoming and the enunciation of the world, attained through the central ‘dummy’ figure that is the vessel of its image”(Rhodes, 2000, p.24), this dummy figure is the ever existing icon of the “Vivian Girl” in Darger’s work, the repetition of the tracings of these girls evokes a sense that they are one the same, at least in what they represent, they are the central watching god of the piece, yet the ubiquity of the symbol within this image, and Darger’s wider work, contrastingly turn the image of the girl into a “vessel”. There is a visible process of duplication (Fig. 2.3).




Fig. 2.3, Enlargement of Fig.2

“The meticulous analysis of child art by artists… gave way to a more abstract feeling of childhood as the context for the appropriation of the mind or the memory of the child in art

after 1950” …“ making personal introspection the source of artistic content. Tracing the evolution of the mind back to childhood was the inevitable result” (Fineberg,1997, p.208).




The emergence of psychoanalysis being applied to art is a significant trait in the development of the themes of Modernism. The images in "She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap” show Darger wanting to go back to childhood and his “compulsive drive to express [his] interior worlds” (Situations, 2016). This can be seen in his compulsive need to collect, preserve and duplicate images of children, including those in danger, harking back to his own troubled childhood (Fig.2).

The surrealist qualities of this piece comes from the fact that it is narrative free, contains found images, and seems to have no sense of dimension or spatial planes. It is a break from painting traditions which are part of the cannon of “isms” within Modern art.

As described above, Greenberg and Rhodes both displayed ideas on how pop culture was intrinsic to the development of Modern art. The pop culture elements of She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap consist of the collected references and newspaper scraps attached to the top and bottom of the piece. These deal with both celebrity and shocking news stories. The newspaper cuttings describe a plane crash that orphans five children (top centre, Fig.2) and the second tells the tale of two siblings waiting for their abducted sister, Susan-Marie Feldott, to come home (bottom right, Fig. 2). The photos for these seem to be references for angelic children’s faces which Darger would have traced, but it is also important to note that he kept the caption telling disaster underneath, whereas the quaint images do not get the same respect.



The pop culture of celebrity in the collage can be seen in the image of Red Skelton in the bottom left corner. His name seems to have been cut from its original page and moved up to act as a caption (Fig2.4), not only was Darer interested in keeping his face as a reference but his status as celebrity was important as well.











Fig. 2.4, Enlargement of Fig.2






The last pop culture influence in the piece, giving it its namesake, is an image of Kini Devore, daughter of a Hollywood tailor, sitting on the lap of Ringo Starr (Fig. 2.5, the original image Fig.3). Comparing the original image and the remediated one, the quality of the image reduces, softening the girl’s features, finally to become the simple, innocent face of a Vivian Girl (Fig. 2.2). Fig. 4 shows a similar image, taken within a few days of Fig.3, where Shirley Temple’s daughter also sits on the lap of Ringo Starr, another image of the ‘typical’ Darger girl which he derived through pop culture. This image is also called “On Ringo’s Lap”.










Fig.3 (Above,Right)Kini Devore; John Lennon; Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; Richard Starkey; George Harrison,( 1964), Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo, 38.3 x 39.8 cm, David F. Smith



Fig.2.5(left), Enlargement of Fig.2


Fig.4 (Below,Right), On Ringo's lap, (1964),,Writer not listed, San Francisco Chronicle



It is repetition and remediation which turn the above photographs into a symbol with completely different meanings,

”Remediation—which Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define as “the representation of one medium in another”—is necessarily a temporal and nonlinear process, as “new media refashion prior media forms” and, sometimes, old media remediate new”(Najarian, 2023).


This goes as far as the furthest right Vivian Girl’s face has been covered over with paper and redrawn, the stark white obvious compared to her companions (Fig.2)“Each one of these little girls had been removed, lifted by Darger, from another setting. Cut out or traced, she had been forcefully transferred from her world to his” (Rhodes, 2000, p.110). His other images come from colouring book pages, hidden under the story of the plane crash orphans.

“a self-reflexive, work is one that refers to itself to examine its conditions production. Such works don’t just refer to themselves in the sense that they refer to the content of the work, but also the medium of the work and its techniques of making.”(Filimowicz, 2020) .



It could be argued Darger did the same thing with colouring books, just instead of the apostrophe denoting the art belonging for children, it is art made for children (which he then remediates) (Fineberg, 1997). The Vivian Girls are girls about girls, like a Mondrian painting is a painting about paint, a simulacra of the real and the subconscious, simulating the real world through remediating objects (from the one he was so alienated from) to create a new reality.

Images can have “representational effects”, She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap is a layered visual experience which exists to show process, “historical examples of classic forms of hypermediation — Surrealist art”(Filimowicz, 2020), which requires a “suspension of disbelief”. This idea admittedly does go into the realm of Postmodernism, showing traits of Bolter and Grusin’s ideas of Hypermediation, “being aware that one is undergoing a mediated experience”(Filimowicz, 2020).


While Modernism spans various 'isms' like cubism and surrealism, its essence lies in reacting to the challenges of living in a modernist world characterised by rapid production and consumption.The particular branch of modernism that includes outsider art, exemplified by artists like Henry Darger, challenges the purist view of modern painting. Outsider art, with its emphasis on individual expression, rejection of tradition, and unfiltered personal vision, aligns with the core principles of modernism. Both movements share a disruptive influence on the art world and challenging established norms.

As purist Modernist art becomes pasé,, its minimalism to be expected, maybe it is Modernism influenced by pop culture that could be the only mode to stay relevant as we go two decades into the twenty first century. Its icons continuously change as popular culture does, keeping a society entertained, even art with outdated influences playing into nostalgia.

, "She Got to Sit on Ringo's Lap" is a noteworthy piece of modernist art that reflects various aspects of the modernist movement. Darger's work exhibits Western Primitivism through its childlike innocence in production techniques and the central recurring symbol of the "Vivian Girl." The surrealist qualities of the piece, characterised by a lack of narrative, found images, and a disregard for traditional spatial planes, mark a departure from established painting traditions within Modern art.

The remediation and repetition of found images demonstrate Darger's transformative process, turning original photographs into symbols with different meanings. This remediation emphasises hypermediation seen in Surrealist art.But also while Modernism traditionally encompasses various 'isms' like cubism and surrealism, the essence of Modernism lies in reacting to the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The branch of Modernism represented by outsider art challenges purist views and aligns with core modernist principles of individual expression, rejection of tradition, and unfiltered personal vision. As purist Modernist art becomes passé, the influence of pop culture on modernism, as exemplified in works like Darger's, may be a mode to stay relevant in the evolving landscape of the twenty-first century


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