With the recent international DVD release of “Marwencol”, a documentary film by Jeff Malmberg covering the art of Mark Hogancamp, if you’ve yet to pay a trip into the imagination of this curious but nevertheless touching artist, now is most certainly the time. 

After suffering a severe beating outside a bar in his hometown Kingston, NY, Mark Hogancamp, an otherwise low-achieving alcoholic, suffered severe brain damage and lapsed into a coma for nine days. While the miracle is that Hogancamp survived at all, he regained his senses only to find that his memory and motor-skills had been entirely wiped. What happened next was all the more astounding.

Hogancamp had never been what anyone would call "creative;" he’d sketched occasionally, but never actively pursued any serious outlets. That is until he left the hospital after his beating. As a form of therapy, Hogancamp was encouraged to expand on a story he’d started, in which he lived an alternative life in a village of dolls--the Marwencol of the film title.

From there, and teaching himself how to use a manual camera, Hogancamp began to stage scenes with dolls and props which he would then photograph; in turn building new scenery, fashioning highly detailed props and creating incoming characters to mirror those in his actual life. When finally his endeavors were discovered, coming to the attention of other practicing artists and gallery owners, the inherent passion and craft of Hogancamp’s art inevitably fanned greater stages of interest; leading to exhibitions, magazine articles, and this documentary.

Aside from the obvious potential for a tabloid whoring of Hogancamp’s personal adversities and their unorthodox remedies, the true rub when it comes to Mark is his utter naivety. Had any other artist--specifically, one who had not experienced the consequences of such brain damage--sought to emote through the use of dolls, the very frictions of the raw material would have perhaps led to interference, calling for the presence of some kind of irony or irreverence. Primarily because dolls are for kids--but also because a grown man using dolls would be construed as creepy, with its unavoidable suggestion of sexual perversion through association.

Yet w hat Mark Hogancamp is outputting through his work is what is known as "Outsider Art" these days. Once it was termed naive; if you’d been around the French art gallery Salon d’Automne in 1905, when artists including Matisse and Henri Rousseau shared a collective exhibition, the somewhat scathing tag Fauves would have been applied (‘fauve’ translating from the French to mean ‘wild animal’). Across the tracks, musically it’s one of the main reasons Daniel Johnston is famous (that, and the fact the singer-songwriter can conjure a mean harmony apparently at the drop of a hat).

In such art, what is valued is the potential for pure artistic expression, a message from artist to audience unencumbered by rationalism; a fact most curious, given how much we value skill and applied abilities. Yet in our times of knowing, where the language of expression has become so polluted by over-familiarity with expressive short-hands, it seems we still crave to once again feel something that is not so much real, but honest. Pure.

Whereas once we as a paying public used to partake of tours around mental asylums, seeking perverse entertainment from others' plight and, one suspects, a loose-tooth thrill from a raw proximity to mortality (“There, but for the grace of God, go I”), now we recognize, as the brain slowly begins to reveal its fantastic mechanics, we also know to value the experience of emotion--because we know it to be exceptional.

As homo-sapiens, we are constant arguments within ourselves; between lizard, horse and what we take to be human. A maze of conflicting thoughts brought about by our three-staged brains arguing between raw impulse, the possibilities of emotion, and the judgments of that which cannot ever be returned to the box of unknowing: reason. That and the sad fact that memory plus our sentience and intellect means strong emotions once felt are rarely (short of bereavement and losses in love or extremes of misfortune) ever felt with such intensity again. In other words, a feeling had is a repeat emotion halved.

Which is why there is much to learn from the Mark Hogancamp story--he has transcended the everyday to stand as a reminder that, for  all our fleshy machinery and DNA logic, we are still at root emotional beings. And while it is sad to say, but has to be recognized, Hogancamp is now more a glitch in the machine, he is nevertheless a God-like exception which can still prove the rule--that, while the horror and needless act of his own beating should never be forgotten, when placed in context, Mark, as a single example of life’s beauty, is a very precious thing.     

Photos courtesy of Marwencol Press Kit