ABSTRACT
Curators and critics have compared R. B.’s work to Henry Darger’s. Like the obscured sexual identity of R. B’s Victorian harlequins, Darger’s naked Vivian Girls are similarly transgendered. Also, like R. B., Darger’s androgynous figures are caught in a narrative loop, although Darger’s story has a trajectory while R. B.’s is episodic. Both display a trait common to many “outsider artists,” who use imagery “to anchor themselves in a world of their creation, and to minimally anchor themselves in the symbolic order through the help of a cadre of friends that can ‘hold’ them in this space, or enable the space to exist” (jagodzinski, 2012, p. 179.). The uncategorizable sexual figures of Darger and R. B. are also linked to outsider iconography of invented signifiers that have idiomatic meanings. In an interview with The Museum of Everything, Higgs (2011) says that the issue of language, or art as a common language, is the challenge of all forms of self-taught art in which the logic of language no longer holds reign: “In each case it seems as if the world produced in these workshops is speaking with a completely idiosyncratic dialect or accent, consequently its subtlety and nuance is specific” (p. 9). In my interview with Higgs, he underscored the difference between the shared language and art historical conventions, and the theories of MFA students, who usually share similar family and educational experiences. People with disabilities are usually excluded and therefore exist outside of these conversations. Creative Growth honors their independence from rules and conventions, allowing for over 162 disparate and nuanced voices to co-exist. “They resist the temptation to create anything homogenous, to mold these individual voices into something that’s more legible” (personal communication, June, 12, 2014). This is particularly true for autistic artists such as R. B. who invent their own language. Many of her notebooks are filled with neologisms, a private language that she will speak fluently when she wants to communicate.
