A Scream of Freedom: Mark Hogancamp’s Marwencol
Mark Hogancamp, Saving the Major, 2004 (printed 2018), digital inkjet print. © Mark Hogancamp. Courtesy of the artist and One Mile Gallery.
In the midst of the exhibition Mark Hogancamp: Women of Marwencol and Other Possible Histories at Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery in Keene, NH, is a photograph of a soldier rescuing another in the mud. Reminiscent of Robert Capa, the image’s power lies in its artful composition, grittiness and cinematic scale.
Yet something is amiss. In another image—of a woman in black stockings gripping a briefcase—leg and wrist joints give it away. These are photos of dolls, not people. The body language, however, is eerily human. A woman grips a gun in one hand and a teddy bear in another. Blood-spattered soldiers lie dead in the snow.
The exhibition of noirish photographs documents Hogancamp’s imaginary town of Marwencol, set in World War II era Belgium. Here, toy soldiers and Barbies engage in war, intimate relationships and subterfuge. Most of the large-scale photographs are ambiguously narrative. Some, as in the case of The Women of Marwencol series, are compelling portraits. One work—Malmedy Massacre, Bruce Willis, Hogie—combines 72 gridded photos on the wall like a comic book and dramatizes the mass executions after the Battle of the Bulge.
Mark Hogancamp isn’t on Instagram; he has no artist statement. He is as likely as not to show up at openings or answer press inquiries because he prefers the solitude of home where he can focus on making. And making has become as essential to him as breathing.
Marwencol would never have been built at all were it not for one night in 2000 when five men brutally beat Hogancamp outside the Luny Tune Saloon in his hometown of Kingston, NY. When he awoke from a nine-day coma, he couldn’t eat or tie his shoes. He didn’t remember his prior marriage, his Navy service, his alcoholism or his love of cross-dressing. It was only after Hogancamp returned from the hospital and saw his collection of women’s shoes that he learned it was his mention of cross-dressing at the bar that had motivated his attackers.
“If the attack had never happened, I would probably still be a drunk, drinking a half gallon of whiskey a day,” Hogancamp explains in Welcome to Marwencol, a book about his experience written with Chris Shellen. Yet the attack “took other things too: drawing, guitar playing, dancing, walking, talking. I can’t remember any Christmases or graduation. It’s all gone. That guy is gone…I do believe that I died that night.”
Hogancamp felt angry and exiled from the world when his state-supported therapies were cut off, so he responded by making a safer, smaller world of his own—in the yard beside his mobile home he built a World War II era town. Marwencol has a bar, town hall, Nazi headquarters and more—all humbly constructed from found materials. A band of five SS soldiers (stand-ins for his attackers) repeatedly capture and torture Hogie, Hogancamp’s alter-ego. Anna, Hogie’s lover, the time-traveling witch Deja, and other well-heeled women frequently come to his rescue.
“What he’d created was a customized form of therapy,” Shellen writes, “that would help him recover from his emotional and physical wounds, and…change the course of his life.” As Hogancamp explains in the book, “I [was] creating my own town so I could be in control of something, because I didn’t have control of anything else.”
Art as therapy is a recognized practice. In Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma, Daniel Wojcik describes the paintings of Gregory Van Maanen—a vet suffering from PTSD who found art to be “medicine and prayer created for the purposes of healing and helping humanity.” Creating “allows for the possible expression and processing of the sensory memories of traumatic events in ways that verbal communication cannot.”
Hogancamp describes his work similarly: “It’s good hearing from people who’ve been helped by my story…by my town. That’s why I did all this—the art show, the documentary, the book. ‘For duty and humanity.’” And for Hogancamp, process matters more than outcome. “[His] art is a way to manage self-destructive behavior,” says Brian Wallace, director of the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery. “He is self-aware of the parallels between self-help and self-expression.”
Yet “Mark’s work is so original, so intense, and so beautiful, even without knowing his backstory,” explains Tod Lippy, who was the first to publish Hogancamp’s photographs in his magazine Esopus in 2005. Marwencol is a reminder of the power of art; it is not just a path to survival, beauty or meaning, but questions, disturbs, delights and moves us.
Mark Hogancamp, Picture 104, Digital inkjet print. © Mark Hogancamp. Courtesy of the artist and One Mile Gallery.
Hogancamp’s miniatures are also in conversation with contemporary artists such as Laurie Simmons, Jennifer Shaw and David Levinthal. In contrast to Levinthal’s heroic, polished images of toy soldiers and cowboys, Hogancamp’s photos are gritty and specific. He takes time to create bullet holes and flesh wounds, to age uniforms and to stock each character’s bag with personal items like cigarettes and magazines.
Ironically, Marwencol’s war fantasies unfold in the same landscape cherished by Hudson River School artists. While Frederic Edwin Church painted clouds at his hilltop home Olana, Hogancamp sprawls in the mud, photographing Nazi’s along the Hudson and tanks in front of his mobile home. There are also parallels with self-taught artist Henry Darger. Both he and Hogancamp are world builders dramatizing the battle between good and evil, and both are provocative in their portrayals of gender.
“Mark inhabits his female characters; he’s tuned into the problem of binary definitions because that model doesn’t work for him. He almost got killed because he dared to reveal those contradictions to the wrong people,” says Wallace. “His World War II world is very slippery. It lies in an in-between zone—between binary terms such as male/female, good/bad, Axis/Allies, war/peace, real/imagined.”
Wallace was the first to exhibit Hogancamp’s work in 2006 as the curator at SUNY New Paltz. In 2010, Jeff Malmberg’s acclaimed documentary Marwencol was released, helping launch Hogancamp’s second life as an artist. And 2018 marks another key moment in the story: In December, Steve Carell will portray Hogancamp in Robert Zemeckis’s Welcome to Marwen. Seeing Marwencol’s characters brought to life on film through stop-motion animation promises to be a unique, immersive translation of Hogancamp’s vision, for as the artist writes, “The characters tell me what to do…With my camera, I’m trying to take something plastic and make it look real because, in my head, it’s real.”
Michelle Aldredge is a writer, designer and founder of the arts blog, Gwarlingo. She has been named a “Top 100 Artist, Innovator, Creative” by Origin magazine. She is also co-author of Mirror Mirrored: A Contemporary Artists’ Edition of 25 Grimms’ Tales.