(Yes,
really! An art exhibition reviewed while its still on!)
“What
a fairyland we find ourselves in”
- Letter
from Cornell to Dorothea Tanning, 1947
Boxing
the Fantastical
With
barely concealed pride this show tells you “Joseph Cornell did not
draw, paint or sculpt, and declined opportunities to train in
traditional artistic methods”. Instead he devoted his energies to
collages and assemblages, specialising in what he called “shadow
boxes” - constructed environments presented behind glass like
cabinets of curiosities. By day commuting to work from suburban to
downtown New York, by night he'd assemble artworks on the kitchen
table when not caring for his disabled younger brother. Though he
knew, exhibited with and was admired by many other artists, he kept a
distance from the art world.
As Ben Luke points out “all this reads as a textbook
biography for an outsider artist — the kind of visionary who never
intends to be an artist, whose body of work is discovered at their
death. But Cornell, though undoubtedly eccentric and socially
awkward, was very much an insider in art-world terms.”
In
fact he was first inspired to create not by some inner compulsion but
by encountering Surrealist art. We even know the date and place - the
Julien Levy Gallery in '31. That Surrealist influence is clear and
acknowledged, with early works dedicated to Ernst and Magritte.
'Object (Soap Bubble Set)' (1941) doesn't just a
feature a pipe but what's clearly a reference to Magritte's pipe. Yet
for all this he never identified himself as a Surrealist. We might
wonder why.
Surrealist
artworks tend to be about bursting the barriers between dream and
wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious, so have a
tendency to erupt with lurid and provocative imagery. They have a
fondness for the Victorian cabinets of curiosities, but use an outer
similarity to the obsessive cataloguing and brown-label tagging to
wilfully juxtapose unlikely objects – affecting order while
practicing its opposite. Plus the sauce on their pudding was a
recurrent fixation with the Freudian id, the sexualised subconscious.
(Think for example of Ernst's
'The Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses', 1928.)
Cornell
called all this “black magic” to his “white magic”. He
participated in a 1936 exhibition titled 'Fantastic Art,
Dada, Surrealism', which handily delineates the differences
for us - his work is more fantastical than surreal. His methods he
described as “creative filing/ creative arranging/as poetics/ as
joyous creations”. In an absolute reversal to Ernst, one of his key
themes is the innocent curiosity of childhood. His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party
serving soft drinks and cake.
'Tilly
Losch', (c. 1935, above), perhaps one of his signature
images, shows the strings on the flying girl without our seeing what
she is attached to. There's a Pinnocchio sense of a puppet that's
overcome its limitations, that she's now pulling her own strings.
There's a sense that, floating legless in her birdcage dress, she is
herself the balloon - as if rising by sheer effort of will. A
three-dimensional figure against a background flat as a theatre
backdrop, she flies free.
But
perhaps what's most illustrative isn't what makes him not a
Surrealist but what makes him not a Dadaist. In brief, his work isn’t
disruptive in the same way. His shadow boxes are constructions not
destructions, not spanners thrown into our reality but hermetic
environments, other places we can peer into. Anti-art statements such
as May Ray's 'Object to be Destroyed' (1923) would
be foreign to him. His works don't come out at you, you peer into
their strangeness.
The
Dada assemblages of, for example, Kurt Schwitters may have some
formal similarities. But they're made from ephemera and detritus, as
if he's been rummaging through the waste-paper basket of our culture.
What to Schwitters was mere material with Cornell became something
closer to muses. When Schwitters uses, for example, bus tickets he
simply uses them. Whereas, in something we'll come
onto later, Cornell employs the iconography of travel. As Robert Hughes said of him “To others, these deposits might be
refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a
jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another.”
It’s
a concept which lends itself to the romantic notion of the
super-sensitive artist scouring junk shops waiting to encounter
inspiration. At times the show plays up to this, referring to his
seeking out “keepsakes”, its web page describing the works as “charged with personal
histories” - as if his thriftstore acquisitions came complete with
a kind of psychic history only he was attuned to. The opposite,
perhaps, of Duchamp's depersonalised shop-bought readymades. Instead
he seems to have accumulated material which he diligently if
eccentrically catalogued, then used as a kind of cross between an
image repository and a palette board. (See here for some visual examples.)
In
this way the glass front is not incidental, not just a way of keeping
things together or preserved, but central. Notably he often uses
glass within the boxes, incorporating drinking glasses or phials. As Victoria Sadler comments “these boxes remain sealed, the
glass lids fixed and closed. The worlds Joseph created always
remaining out of reach, untouchable.” In this way these products of
the imagination are much like the imagination, vivid but untouchable.
Like any peepshow, the peeping's as important as the show. Fittingly,
Jennifer Hamblett's film of 'Beehive' (1940/8)
merely lets light play on the work and, with a remarkable similarity
to the films of the Quay Brothers, this flickering suggests
imperceptible movement.
The
World of Shadows
A
Cornell exhibition is a must for quite a fundamental reason. His
works aren't flat collages but objects, which means reproduction
(including all the illos here) don't fully capture them – you need
to go to a place where they are in order to really see them. As one
example, at the same time the boxes are enclosed doors, windows, cut
holes and other apertures appear all over them. 'Untitled
(To Marguerite Bleach)' (1940, below) presents a book with
cut-out chambers. It's reminiscent of a child's view of reading, as
they start to decipher the alchemic symbols they find they have the
power to make objects appear in your mind. (Its similar to the way
children's books will sometimes drop images into text, a little
drawing of a dog or a ball replacing the word in a sentence.)
And
where else in Modernism do we see this interplay of text and image?
Of course in Cubism. If the association with Surrealism is
understandable and instructive, if not entirely accurate, some of the
other connections made for Cornell are fanciful. (For example, the
odd splodge of paint fallen on one or two works supposedly
prefiguring abstract expressionism.) Yet with Cubism there's perhaps
more of a connection than is generally acknowledged. 'A
Parrot for Juan Gris' (1953/4, below) is dedicated to the
Spanish Cubist painter. Clearly its a playful take on the theme.
Cubism arose as a solution to the 'problem' of rendering
three-dimensional objects on flat canvas. Here Cornell finds a
child's solution by adding on the third dimension. At the same time,
Cubists often incorporated collage elements, such as Picasso's 'Still Life With Chair Caning' (1912), which is precisely
what he does here. The parrot is in relief, its relief claws
clutching a relief branch. Yet it's sat atop an actual piece of wood.
The parrot suggests we see the box as a cage, yet the newspaper
lining behind it also suggests a drawer.
Similarly,
'Habitat Group For Shooting Gallery' (1943, below)
has (at upper left) a drawn perch which then continues into the real
thing. Detritus lies at the bottom of the box as though these were
real birds in a cage. Yet the presence of actual objects in the box
can only emphasise that they're merely cut-outs. They're even tagged
in a (functionally useless) numbering system, as if illustrations in
a book. Not particularly visibly in this illo, the glass of the case
is cracked in the centre – the notion this might be a bullet-hole
reinforced in the work's title. The bird behind this, and another to
his right, are rendered in black-and-white. Yet flecks and blobs of
colour are splattered onto the wall behind them (some yellow still
clinging to the upper bird's tail), as if the colour has been shot
away from them, as if they've been robbed them of their radiance.
Cornell
frequently used bird images, even titling a 1949 exhibition
'Aviary'. And as the indicia points out these were
often parrots and cockatoos – birds capable of mimicking human
speech. Let's remember he was influenced by Ernst, who devised the bird alter ego Loplop. Yet for Ernst Loplop represented the overcoming of
inhibition, free will in flight. Cornell's birds are more ambiguous –
are they confined to those boxes, or does their shadow world
represent escape from our space? Here the box seems penetrated,
perhaps infected by the outside world. (One theory is that it's a
wartime work, representing how war's shadow fell even on Cornell's
basement studio. Generally he doesn't seem a social or political
artists – his cosmology is entirely private. But there may be
something to this.)
The
Mind Might Travel
Cornell
barely left New York State in his life, never venturing further than
the East Coast. Yet as the show says “the imagery of travel
permeates [his] work, from maps and postage stamps to timetables and
hotel advertisements.” Europe we're told was “to him an ideal
realm not so different to a fairy-tale land”, and indeed there's a
whole series of works devoted to hotels he never stayed in, often
with images purloined from their glossy brochures. 'Naples'
(1942, below) is a memento of a town he never visited. Perhaps what
matters is the distance, and for me that brings an irony. New York
itself has been celebrated in so much music and art yet I have never
clapped eyes on the actual place, making it easy for me to see it in
this semi-mythologised way. Yet of course what it meant to Cornell
was subway rides to work.
It
would be tempting to believe that he saw such postcards and hotel
brochures as a stimulus to the imagination, and wanted to dream of
places unfettered by the undoubted tawdry reality of cramped beds and
tip-hungry staff. And yet that would imply a cut-off point, beyond
which it wasn't a benefit to know more. Better to have the appetiser
then stop eating. Yet he seems to have read of foreign places as
voraciously as he was able, and his knowledge was detailed and
accurate. In an anecdote on his meeting Marcel Duchamp, they
discussed the streets of Paris at some length, only for him to then
astonish the Frenchman by saying he'd never been there.
Cornell's
quoted as saying that he remained a virgin, thinking sexual activity
would rob him of the ability to create. Travel was surely similar,
and the signs are that he knew this. When success in later life (he
gave up the day job in 1940) brought invitations abroad he always
declined them. And he was as interested in people and places of the
past, for example reading of Romantic ballet dancers he could never
hope to see perform. They're evocations rather than descriptions. The
show puts it succinctly: “above all, he longed for the state of
yearning itself”. In the wanderlust which titles the show, the
wandering is just something to pin the lust onto.
And,
always socially awkward, people were as distant to him as places.
Think of how many pieces seen already have been dedicated to someone.
He produced a series of votive works to famous women, called by the
indicia “intense shrine-like portraits”, blurring the Catholic
devotional with Hollywood glamour. Surrealism fixated upon the female
body, while for Cornell it's always the face. They resemble youthful
crushes on distant film stars – obsessive yet strangely chaste.
Twigs
For Forests
If
Cornell remained in part an outsider artist, this is most evident in
the way his work involves microcosms of the world. For example
'Palace' (1943, above) employs twigs to stand for
a forest. But its clearest in his many cosmological pieces. These
tend to be based on Orreries, clockwork models of the solar system
popular among the Victorians. For example 'Celestial
Navigation' (1956/9, below) employs key-rings as the
arranged spheres and plants flags on a scrap of driftwood like a
cratered moon. In others white balls become planets.
In
one sense he's playfully upending the certainty of that clockwork
precision, the Victorians' hubristic assumption that they knew how
the whole process ran. Notably he keeps the reassuring dark woods of
the cabinets, even as substitutes the objects within. Yet he retained
a Victorian view of science, from a time where lectures doubled as
shows. He preferred its antiquated term 'natural philosophy', viewing
science as human curiosity on the wing rather than any kind of
formalised discipline, and called his studio a laboratory.
And
he never lets go of their sense of order, even as he plays with it.
Several works have blue sand, either on their base or held inside a
lower draw. And sand might seem a virtual symbol of unpredictable
disorder, the way we use sandcastles as an image of impermanence. Yet
captured in a draw the sand seems more to represent the tides,
themselves a measure of the moon. 'Penny Arcade, Pascal's
Triangle' (c. 1965) makes the link between Orreries and
their perfect geometry with arcade games.
Please
Don't Touch
As
said earlier, a Cornell show is something that must be seen, in every
sense of the phrase. However there’s a paradox at the heart of his
work, and it cuts right across this show. As mentioned, his shadow
boxes contain unattainable otherworlds. Yet at the same time they can
be interactive to the point of being tactile.
'Object
(Compass Set)' (1940, above) is but one of many works
described as “compartmentalised constructions, the treasures
revealed gradually as they are unpacked”. While a work like
'Untitled' (1939/40), a series of images on what
resemble circular playing cards, is an endlessly rearrangeable
collage. The point of these works is they don't have a 'correct'
combination, their state is permanent flux, like an irresolvable
jigsaw. (Presumably why it couldn't even have a fixed name.) In a
similar example 'Untitled (Musical Box)' (1947) is
a scaled postage parcel which “contains unknown objects that, when
handled, produce random sounds”.
But
perhaps most egregious of all is 'Museum' (1949)
of which we're even told “here the usual advice of museums to look
but not touch is inverted. Only by handling the scrolls can their
contents be discovered”. It is little short of a taunt to be told
this then have the promise unhonoured. You long to let your fingers
discover those inner chambers, pull out layers and look beneath them.
Deprived, you feel like a child whose nose is pressed up against the
window of a closed toy shop. The solutions they find, supplying
videos demonstrating the white-gloved opening of the objects or sound
recordings of the Musical Box, are inadequate workarounds and just
make the sealed-off prospect of the objects themselves more enticing.
Which makes the exhibition an exercise in both revelation and
frustration.
Weren't
these objects made for use? Like the toys in 'Toy
Story', if they could talk wouldn't they tell us they'd
rather be worn out through use than aridly preserved? The curators
would doubtless reply that the gallery doesn't even own these works,
and they'd be unlikely to get loan of them if they intended allowing
us punters to get our grubby mutts on them. This is of course part of
a wider problem where artworks have lost their primary purpose and
become more investments, and true enough we don't want all
exhibitions put on hold until such time as capitalism is brought to a
close. But perhaps more of a middle way could be found, where
reproductions of some of the works were assembled (like copies of
bronzes are sometimes cast) and left out for use. This might have
also given the show more of a 'playpen' atmosphere, which would have
suited Cornell's work. They could even have served soft drinks and
cake.
'The
Life of Ludwig II of Bavaria' (1941/52, above) contains a
book of that name, but also photos, objects and ephemera connected to
him. Some of the connections are literal, others more tangental. This
is a person as you might think of them, rather than write a biography
of them, an unsettleable jumble of impressions. And, by gathering his
work, accumulating his multi-chambered cabinets, the show responds to
Cornell in a similar way. The 'atticy' upper gallery at the Academy,
a nest of nooks and crannies, is as fitting for Cornell as the vast
expanse of the main gallery was for the recent Anselm Keifler exhibition. There's a thousand
juxtapositions, then escape hatches and rabbit holes that lead you
from that reading into something else. Despite its undoubted flaws,
this is the best chance you're likely to get to see inside Cornell's
private world.
More,
and slightly more informative, videos here.
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