Stanislav Szukalski

Just as there are artistic fictions that build or imply worlds in the same way that textual fictions of the world-building sort do, there are also obsessive graphical equivalents of the quasi-delusional alternative history texts. In these, the artists are not simply making a world, but they are revealing a world that is the truth of this one. Szukalski's para-anthropology and para-linguistics are here embodied in a rich graphical and textual stew far more learned and sophisticated than (say) Henry Darger's obsessive projects -- but precisely because of those qualities, rather more perverse. In a sense, all scholarly projects are in certain respects "works of perverted learning". Some, it turns out, are less wide of the mark than others, but those virtues that make them possible are also the vices that, with the slightest of swerves, can make them preposterous,and yet, at times, sublime in their folly.… (plus d'informations)