Who do you think you are calling an Outsider?

ARTISTS are often characterised as philosophers engaged in a pursuit of truth and beauty, or as obsessives unselfconsciously scribbling out the drama of their humanity.

Actually, we are all a bit of both: we are all part Enlightenment rationalist, part holy fool and the fashions of arthistory rebound between the two archetypes.

In the past decade or so, the labels in art galleries have grown longer as audiences demand to " understand" this irrational business of painting and sculpture. A little explanation eases the discomfort of the ambiguity central to much good art. Curators and public alike enjoy an idea that can be explained or "worked out". It's a tendency that has, in recent times, leaned too far towards the intellectual: art as puzzle, with galleries littered with visual puns and illustrated philosophy.

So, I welcome Tate Britain's new room dedicated to Outsider art - produced by artists working outside the mainstream art education system and market - which opens next month.

Outsider artists are free from the selfawareness that comes from knowingly operating within art history. I look forward to trusting my heart's response, without having to worry too much about what it means. My subconscious is the best-qualified visitor to a display of the spontaneous outpourings of the untutored.

I trace my own artistic impulse back to the taproot of my childhood drawing games, pernickety warscapes created to a soundtrack of machinegun noises and the screams of pilots trapped in flaming cockpits. The new Tate room will include a work by my favourite artist, Henry Darger. He also gave his imaginary world a soundtrack as he worked. When his landlord overheard a conversation coming from his room and knocked on the door to remind him that visitors were not allowed at that hour, Henry replied, "It's just me here," then added, "I told you to keep your voice down."

He was talking to one of the imaginary characters in his 15,000- page story, The Realms of the Unreal, which he is believed to have worked on from 1910 until just before his death in 1972.

It is an epic tale - told in pictures, words, hundreds of paintings and collages - of religious war, child cruelty and stormy weather. The prose has the same breathless rhythm and made-up names of the unedited childhood imagination that I remember hearing my daughter relate, as she narrated the goings-on of her doll's house.

Darger spent most of his adult life recounting and illustrating a vast metaphor for his sad emotional history. The Realms of the Unreal describes the story of "the Vivian girls", caught up in the Glandeco-Angelinian Warstorm, caused, we learn "by the Child Slave Rebellion"; it is the product of a traumatised man mediating his soul's survival through a lifelong typescript.

For me, this devout hospital janitor represents the pure creative drive that is present in all artists. Mostly, though, and to varying degrees, we have to tailor our raw neuroses to the context of the art world. I find one of the biggest challenges is to square my almost bodily desire to make things with my knowing metropolitan culture.

Though Darger was aware that one day there might be an audience for his work, and he had some knowledge of art history, the self- taught recluse never had to divert his creativity away from his primary task, that of transporting himself away from the pain of the real world.

It is unlikely that anyone saw Darger's work while he was alive.

Fortunately, his neighbour and landlord, a graphic artist, recognised what they had come across as they cleared his room after his death. From floor to ceiling there were huge piles of newspapers and comics, balls of saved string and shelves of Catholic kitsch.

On the desk in front of the chair in which he slept as well as worked, they found the albums containing the paintings, many of them double-sided and 12-feet long.

Most of the works are colourful panoramas populated by little girls and soldiers of American civil war vintage. These he traced from comics and children's books, spending a large portion of his income on having cuttings photographically enlarged so that the tracings would fit the scale of his scenes.

THE compositions and colouring are lively and inventive and show none of the repetition characteristic of much Outsider art.

What perhaps most fascinates and sometimes appals viewers is the frequent depiction of the little girls naked and usually with penises.

This, I interpret, as Darger's subconscious need to identify with the girls who represented his vulnerable yet brave feelings. I understand his whole oeuvre to be Henry Darger, every character a sub-personality. He even gave his name to some of his creations - the good Hendro Darger and the bad General Judas Darger.

Each scene looks like a playing-out of the intense emotions that stem from Darger's past. When he was three, his mother died in childbirth and his lame father, unable to cope, sent him to an orphanage. His by then aggressive behaviour soon landed him in an asylum for "feebleminded" children, with the diagnosis: "Heart is not in the right place." He ran away and walked across the country from Lincoln Illinois to Chicago (a journey which perhaps lead to his obsession with storms and whirlwinds). In Chicago, he found a job as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, which he kept all his life.

His Chicago gravestone reads: "Henry Darger, Artist and Protector of Children." Yet, early commentators assumed a suppressed paedophilia in the few paintings that show the littlegirl subjects in scenes of horrific torture, crucifixion or disembowelment. I prefer a more reflective reading, of a man who identified chiefly with girls, the Vivian sisters in particular.

His sibling heroines - seven Catholic princesses - feature in the work on display at the Tate. In their crimsonand-yellow uniforms they are pure and sweet but also fight like battlehardened veterans.

I love Darger's work, not only because of its inventiveness and beauty, but because I, too, constantly return to themes of childhood, gender and war. We have shared an escape route from difficult times. But, while I only retreated to an imaginary world for a few childhood years, Darger lived almost exclusively in his Realms of the Unreal. He never needed to ask, why make art? Darger had to make art; it was his way of living his life.

Henry Darger's work features in Outsider Art, one of the new BP British Art displays opening at Tate Britain on 13 September, admission free. The display includes 20 works on loan from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection; an accompanying book, Monika's Story, by Monika Kinley, is published next month.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.