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Daniel Johnston: he may draw funny pictures of Captain America and sing happy-sounding songs about Casper the friendly ghost, but people are getting serious about the work of Daniel Johnston
Interview, April, 2006 by Stephen Mooallem
Back in the early 1990s, Daniel Johnston's music made him a bit of a folk hero. Diagnosed with manic depression in his twenties--a condition aggravated by LSD use--he was, for most of his adult life, a slightly off-kilter, almost childlike presence. His songs, though, were exquisitely written pop tunes about unrequited loves, comic-book characters, and satanic conspiracies that won him fans like Kurt Cobain and Thurston Moore. His homemade cassette-recordings, many of them created in his parents' basement, became hotly traded commodities--as did the comics-inspired drawings of ghosts, gods, devils, and lobotomized monsters that he made to decorate them.
Now, with an exhibit of his drawings at New York City's Clementine Gallery, a piece in the Whitney Biennial, and Jeff Feuerzeig's award-winning documentary on his life, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, in theaters, Johnston, at 45, seems poised to have his day once again. The work in the Clementine exhibition, culled from private collections, is classically raw-nerved in its directness: It's a virtual Rorschach of Johnston's romanticism of his life as an artist, his fascinations with superheroes and women, his struggles with his evangelical Christian upbringing--and of all the obsessions, delusions, and visions that have come with his mental illness--as well as his immense creativity.
Stephen Mooallem is Interview's senior editor.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
