(Source: outofthesilent)
Crazy House the website is going to be an imaginary house where you can have your own room. It will focus on art by people with disabilities and/or outsider art (whatever that means).
Follow if you are interested in someday rooming in the Crazy House or owning part of it. I'm hoping to buy the domain and hosting with other people to make it more stable, so please tell me if you are interested, but people would not have to pay to be inhabitants of the Crazy House.
awf.vivian at gmail
fourloves • crazy house questions
The Crazy House Project
Follow if you are interested in someday rooming in the Crazy House or owning part of it. I'm hoping to buy the domain and hosting with other people to make it more stable, so please tell me if you are interested, but people would not have to pay to be inhabitants of the Crazy House.
awf.vivian at gmail
fourloves • crazy house questions
The Crazy House Project
[stuff]Crazy House is the name of a book by Henry Darger, an outsider artist. Outsider art is a hard-to-define category, but many people labeled as outsider artists have psychiatric or developmental disabilities.[stuff]Count me in, I can probably help buy the domain. drop me an e-mail…
(really not into the name tho)
It’s not a word I usually use but I do know people who identify with it, and while I think it’s important to examine language I also think a discussion of what language is ableist isn’t always applicable to art, especially art by disabled people who may not always have the background or ability to choose the least problematic language.
(tw: mention of child abuse and institutions)
Henry Darger lived in an orphanage from 1900 to 1905, and an institution for “feeble-minded children” from 1905 to 1908. He tried to escape multiple times and finally succeeded when he was 16. As far as I can tell from Google Maps, he walked about 150 miles to do so.
Darger’s enormous body of visual art and fiction stemmed from his obsession with child abuse, which some critics have used as an excuse to label him as a potential abuser himself. After all, he lived alone, hoarded newspapers and magazines, and never talked to anyone! Other people have put forth the more obvious explanation that he was obsessed with child abuse because he had witnessed and experienced it when he was growing up, and this is why he was compelled to create narratives about children defeating beings that wanted to kill and torture them.
The reason I am writing this (and I apologize if you already know, since he is a figure of interest for a lot of people) is because I don’t think there is anything legit about saying that Darger, whose entire life was affected by what he encountered as someone with a psychiatric disability label, used an “ableist slur” when he named his book Crazy House in reference to the fact that the house is possessed and evil. Obviously I’m not saying that you are taking issue with Darger’s chosen title, because you’re only taking issue with my use of the title of his book to mean something else. But part of the reason I like that name is that art doesn’t always use the right words and people who make art, especially people who are isolated, don’t always even know the right words, but that shouldn’t disqualify them from making art.
tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
I would like to visit my favorite museum, PS1, because it is basically what I imagine the Crazy House would be like if it were a real house. It used to be a school (hence the name) and a lot of it doesn’t look like a school anymore but the boiler room still looks like a boiler room and there are things there!
Sal Melman, Central Governor, 2010
