The Menacing Immobility of Non-Belonging
Some believe that if only we paid more attention, if only we let distractions slip away and dissolve, there would be no difference between objectivity and subjectivity.
According to them, reality exists, and to the attentive eye, it never truly strays from our inner realm.
It is our lack of discernment that creates liminal spaces: fragile zones between departure and arrival, where meaning begins to loosen and what was invisible starts to hum with life.
These uncertain, luminous, and profoundly human spaces are where the story of The Menacing Immobility of Non-Belonging unfolds and where art often finds its pulse, born from those who dwell in the in-between, who transmute isolation into language, who weave beauty out of absence.
It is here that the art of waiting, of listening, of reshaping reality from its edges, takes form.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Orchid, Gelatin silver print on paper, 61 × 50.8 cm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, 1987.
And when the attentive eye ceases to exist, that’s when we lose touch with the outside — when sight can only conceive the subjective. For some, it’s a curse. For others, survival.
The tormented souls that linger in liminal spaces are often disregarded: the invisibles, the pariahs, the outsiders.
Yet, in 1972, the art historian Roger Cardinal sought to give them a new identity, to buy them, at last, a ticket to leave subjectivity behind.
But long before then, in 1945, Jean Dubuffet had already kindled a fragile sense of belonging among those who, though excluded from society, possessed the imagination and creative force to produce extraordinary art. Dubuffet’s Art Brut was a movement of primal, untamed expression; an art free of any social conditioning.
Jean Dubuffet, The Propitious Moment, Oil on canvas, 198.8 × 164.1 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1962.
“Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses — where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere — are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.”
Jean Dubuffet
Recognition, however, came later. In 1972, Roger Cardinal coined the now widely known term Outsider Art, a movement of non-academically trained artists, strangers to the cultural and social systems that define legitimacy.
These outcasts lived among us, yet inhabited an entirely different space. For them, reality was merely a meeting point between imagination and the chosen vessel of release.
While Cardinal was writing the nascent theory of Outsider Art, the yet-to-be-discovered embodiment of it was quietly painting in his apartment.
Henry Darger was an unremarkable, uninteresting janitor; the kind of easily predictable, almost annoyingly insipid man, too often and too readily overlooked.
Yet he harboured a secret: The Story of the Vivian Girls. This 15,145-page long epic, discovered shortly before his death in 1973, contained thousands of haunting drawings that revealed the vastness of a world no one knew existed.
“I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”
Henry Darger
Darger’s tragically unrelenting childhood deeply shaped his art. After the death of his parents, he was taken to an orphanage and later sent to an asylum, where he was abused for years until, at nineteen, he finally managed to escape.
Even in adulthood, Henry was considered highly eccentric. He rarely spoke to anyone and survived on a meager income, collecting anything he could, from garbage cans to holiday cards he might reuse.
Days before his death in a care home, his landlords discovered in his room drawings up to nine feet tall and diaries thousands of pages long.
Henry Darger, Untitled, Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing and collage on pierced paper, 24 x 106 ½ in. Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York /Photo: James Prinz, Mid-twentieth century..
The Story of the Vivian Girls, his primary work, consists of an intricate series of vividly coloured paintings. He didn’t create them entirely from scratch. Instead, he used collages and tracings from found imagery (children’s books, colouring books, magazines, and newspaper advertisements). He often used these cutouts as models, tracing or enlarging them with carbon paper to populate with borrowed figures the vast, surreal scenes.
In his Realms of the Unreal, a battle between Good and Evil rages. The evil, non-Christian Glandellinians abuse and enslave children, while the Good fights to liberate them. Within the battle, Darger portrayed himself as the leading general of the righteous side.
Through this monumental work, he sought to condemn and avenge the abuses he had suffered in youth. He built a world to escape his own and succeeded in expressing, through creation, the rebellion he could never enact in life.
His drawings, stories, and diaries were not born from any lust for money or fame, but from a fervent desire—some would argue a need—to bridge the world he truly inhabited with the one he was forced to live in. And no art could be more honest, or more genuine, than that.
“I had a very poor nothing like Christmas.
Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good New Year, and now…
I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel I should be.”
Henry Darger
Needless to say, Darger was not the only outcast to create within a liminal realm of invention, a space shaped in resistance to the failures of the real world.
Judith Scott is now an internationally acclaimed artist and sculptur, but before that, she was simply an unappreciated misfit. From a very young age, an unbridgeable difference set her apart from the rest world.
Born with Down syndrome, she was also deaf, though no one noticed. Declared “uneducable” by her teachers, she was sent to an asylum, where she remained for thirty-five years.
For decades, she lived in complete silence. Never speaking, nor spoken to. It almost seemed as if she didn’t exist at all.
After too many hopeless years, her twin sister Joyce decided to enroll her in the Creative Growth Art Center for people with disabilities. Judith had never drawn or painted before, yet something stirred within her. Watching another student working with threads and fabrics, she quietly approached, gathered the materials, and began to wrap, tangle, and cocoon objects in colorful threads.
She became a sort of magpie, collecting small, forgotten items —chair legs, bicycle wheels, and twigs— and transforming them into mysterious sculptures. Each piece took her weeks, sometimes months, to complete. She worked in utter absorption, as if weaving her inner world into being.
No one taught her. She copied no one. It all came from within.
Nobody could fully understand or explain what she was doing, yet everyone felt its power.
Judith Scott, Bound and Unbound, Brooklyn Museum, 2014–2015