Self-Portrait, Vivian Maier, 1953

What does it mean to create without showing anybody and when does this urge to ensnare and tuck away the world around you become more of a burden than an achievement? Is there greater purity in creating art that dies with you? Fifty years after the acclaimed painter Fransisco Goya's death the walls of his home were ripped apart revealing his infamous 'black paintings', his Pinturas negras. Not distinctly unlike any other works Goya had produced in his lifetime these oil paintings along the interior of his walls were bleak and sometimes violent depictions of humanity. Yet what makes these works interesting lies in the fact that Goya by all accounts was one of the most successful artists of his time, what purpose do these paintings serve? They sat decaying until someone bought the house and stripped the walls. Goya had a habit in his mural commissions to work not in frescas but paint oil directly upon the walls of churches and cathedrals. This method of course is not considered sustainable and over time the murals became grotesquely distorted. The black paintings similarly were done by way of oil directly onto the walls. Some critics believe this intention to be Goya's attempt at creating work that dies with him. The mythos surrounding Maier and her motivations seem to at times get in the way of the work itself making it difficult to see her on her own terms. Amongst the over 150,000 negatives she produced in nearly five decades of work a common theme throughout is her self-portraits pictured in buses, bathrooms, and rearview mirrors seemingly invisible to the world around her. Contrasted with her candid portraits of passing couples on street corners of Chicago and New York in such proliferation to the point where these people are treated like something to be studied. I find the confrontational gaze of Maier unsettling considering we think of the self-portrait as something explicitly to be shared, at least the modern interpretation of a 'selfie' is with the sole purpose of vanity. The early history of the portrait is drenched in the history of wealth inequality and gender bias in the art world. The portrait was tightly restricted to those considered to be nobility, which in many cases meant exclusively male landowners. Early female portrait painters of the European Renaissance and Baroque era like that of Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun are all pictured with canvas and brushes in view. This commonality is not merely a coincidence but an intentional creative decision to remind the viewer of their capabilities as an artist independent of an instructor or 'handler'. Maier's portraits feel like proof of existence, nevertheless, she is often pictured camera in hand. We photograph what we deem valuable, particularly that which is finite. This truth applies even among snapshots. With that interpretation in mind perhaps at least unconsciously Maier is hoping that someone might uncover these photos even if she doesn't wish to take the initiative to share them. I don't think this is necessarily an unnatural urge, speaking again on the purity of your creative practice there's more mythos in being uncovered long after your passing than taking the initiative to present your work as an extension of your identity, ripe for criticism. There's a lot less stress in letting an archivist do the work of popularizing your name. Or perhaps she feared her work would naturally be stolen under her feet. Historically people of color and women have had to fight intensely to merely convince critics that the work they present as their own is in fact of their own ability. Generally, critics are much kinder to a deceased artist's legacy given that there's no room for said artist to defend themselves. Speaking on another artist, Henry Darger, who also happened to be from Chicago and was largely a recluse creating elaborate watercolor paintings and lengthy novels the longest of which was titled In the Realms of the Unreal, a manuscript over 15,000 pages long details a fantasy world involving authoritarian human-like figures named Glandelinans engaged in a vicious conflict mirroring in its imagery that of the crusades of early Christian art. The heroes of this story are the Vivian girls, children who seem to act as guardian angels working to subdue the Glandelians. Darger's story is largely black and white in terms of plot with clear interpretations of 'good' and 'evil'. An interesting caveat of Darger's world is the existence of Christianity and catholicism as the dominant religion of the Vivian girls. Given that Darger's main social outlet aside from work in which he acted as a janitor for various hospitals in Chicago was attending Mass at his local church he heavily referenced the lore of catholicism and its saints in his writing. Darger's work was only accidentally uncovered by his landlord after being institutionalized in a charity ward for the elderly. Despite decades spent constructing this intricate world Darger only references himself as an artist once in his diaries and does so in a seemingly bitter fashion writing "To make matters worse now I'm an artist, been one for years, and cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture." This reads as something of an admission of guilt as if his artistic sensibilities are an unwilling facet of his life. Much like the struggling artist archetype is glorified with that of Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo we see the unwilling artist as one of the same. Someone called to create not out of glory but an unsatiable passion that dictates their better judgment. Comparing Darger to Maier you begin to get a sense that Maier's reluctance to share her work was out of disdain for being labeled as an artist, as if this word held a negative connotation. Perhaps this guilt stems from a childhood where she was constantly expected to prove herself as is common for the children of immigrants Maier's mother was of French descent and her estranged father was of Austrian origins she felt a responsibility to not waste her opportunity documenting a world that had no interest in holding her hand, especially exercising effort in breaking into a field that has a reputation for being partisan to male participation. Spending the majority of her adult life as a caretaker in service to the wealthy by all accounts of the children Maier watched over she was considered temperamental and awkward. Rejecting the feminine ideal of being the perfect wife and mother. On many occasions as pictured in some of her self-portraits, she'd drag these children through back alleys and shambled tenements in a fit of mania, perhaps enacting her form of reparations. By some accounts primarily from the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, she'd adopt various accents, names, and life details seemingly at will, at times contradicting herself in the span of the same conversation. Maier passed in relative obscurity living out of a shoebox apartment in the Roger's Park neighborhood of Chicago's northside. Her work which included boxes of negatives, audio recordings, and 8mm film was auctioned off post-humously. The importance of Vivian Maier as an inspirational figure lies in the belief that you shouldn't feel the need to prove yourself as qualifying the subjective criteria for what it means to call yourself an artist. You think therefore you are.