In Which Joseph Cornell Cannot Be Taken At Face Value

Constellations

by ALEX CARNEVALE

After a long detour of dreams, I've learned to love reality a little better.

- Pierre Reverdy

1911. Joseph Cornell's father develops leukemia. Six years later he dies deeply in debt.

1918. The Cornell family moves to Queens.

1945. Cornell asks Marianne Moore to recommend him for a Guggenheim fellowship. She does so reluctantly. He doesn't get it.

1962. Cornell wants to incorporate nudes into his work. He asks his friend Larry Jordan take nudes of young women, including those of his daughter. He returns the photographs in 1970, not wanting them to be found after his death.

1949. The Hugo Gallery presents La Lanterne Magique du Ballet Romantique of Joseph Cornell.

1965. Joseph's brother Robert Cornell dies. A friend says of Robert's battle with cerebral palsy, "He had the minimum amount of body that would contain a soul."

1941. Cornell writes, "A suggestion of that wonderful feeling of detachment which comes over me so often — a leisurely kind of feeling that seems to impart to the routine events of the day a certain sense of 'festivity.' This feeling which I started off the day with was increased by an unexpected letter from Tamara Toumanova written with deep feeling and sincerity. She sends a ticket for her performance of Swan Lake this Thursday and invites me to her dressing room afterwards. Have never seen her dance but she has told me before that it is one of her favorites."

1943. World War II arrives, and Cornell works in a defense plant.

1929. Cornell moves into a house with his mother and brother in Flushing, where he resides for the majority of his adult life.

1962. Cornell meets a waitress on Sixth Avenue named Joyce Hunter. All his thoughts are soon consumed by her. She is a single mother who takes a job as the cashier at Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not Museum in Times Square.

1964. After he nervously begs her, Joyce Hunter moves in with Cornell.

1950. Cornell writes, "Lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving for New York."

1921. Cornell takes a job as a woolen goods salesman for the William Whitman Company. He works there for the next ten years.

1952. He meets the artist Robert Motherwell, who complains that you can never have a conversation with Cornell: "It's always a monologue."

1951. Cornell writes to Mina Loy:

I had a beautiful early morning in the back yard under the Chinese quince tree — very early, in fact not much after five; and I could not help but think of you, looking up at the moon, when the first rays of the sun turn into silver. A long time ago, you may remember, you told me that your destiny was ravelled up somehow with the lunar globe, but even aside from this I have always experienced something wonderful evoked in this mood.

1966. His mother dies in the Hamptons. "What a beautiful child she once was."

1958. "Subway ride home 'people' etc too obsessive. People on subway — preoccupation with faces." Cornell sits for hours in cafes and train stations, picking at a danish, nursing his tea until it gets cold, staring.

1964. Joyce Hunter moves out of Cornell's house. She and her friends take nine of his boxes. Instead of prosecuting her, he makes a box depicting her as a winsome rat with tiny pink babies.

1925. Cornell becomes a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Great Neck.

1958. Cornell hires assistants to begin cataloguing the vast store of boxes housed in his basement. He is absolutely compulsive about the order of them, calling his collections of clippings and illustrations of birds "extensions," and the folders that contain them "dossiers."

1956. Cornell's fascination with young women becomes more important to him. He writes, "Jackie as much personal diary when too harassed to enter properly the events seeming flavored so beautifully by preoccupation as vs. personal obsession but these multiple overtones could not get captured in words." Robert Motherwell later has to prevent an usher at a movie theater from calling the police when Cornell gives her a bouquet of flowers.

1938. Julien Levy holds Cornell's first solo show, and some of his boxes are included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

1962. "Loneliness is stronger than sex."

1944. Cornell has a nightmare about his frail, incapacitated brother Robert. "Dreamed that a crow flew right through the windowpane without breaking it and lighted upon Robert's chest. Took him into the bathroom and opened the window for him to fly out."

1969. He asks Allegra Kent, a ballerina, to gift him a book on erotic art because he is ashamed to buy it for himself. She does so, but thinks it weird.

1940. He works for Vogue and House and Garden, contributing some freelance design.

1951. Robert and Joseph Cornell visit their sister Elizabeth at her farm. They continue to go there often in the summer.

1956. "Satie music. This seemingly almost miraculous accomplishment amidst vile days of sluggishness — expressing lethargy."

1963. The poet Charles Henri Ford — Cornell's friend by way of correspondence — brings Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist for a visit to his house. They are absolutely flabbergasted.

1964. Joyce Hunter is found murdered in a West Side hotel room.

1966. "My recent reading: Gadda's Pasticiaccio, Foucault's Madness and Civilization. Sontag's Against Interpretation. I had not been au courant with the pieces as published. They are the most meaningful things I've come across lately." Cornell pursues strange, intimate correspondences with the young daughters of his friends.

1972. Cornell dies a virgin.

1959. "Recurrent obsession to make objects move."

1956. The dancer Carole Schneemann occasionally goes out to Flushing in order to visit Cornell. "He would have everything set up like a little tea party, and it would be enchanting, like something out of a poem. But he'd get very upset if I said anything real."

1948. Objects by Joseph Cornell is shown in Beverly Hills.

1966. Letter to John Ashbery: "I have certain dossiers capable of a high potential for someone like yourself but it needs a very close rapport and empathy — they are past my own labors and have been so for a few years now."

1957. In a letter to Ford: "The sunset mingling the past and present with a special grace."

1967. "What seemed special at the start of writing all this may seem commonplace, taken for granted by many."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. Visit our mobile site at http://thisrecording.wordpress.com.

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In Which We Give You A Body

Encounter

by KARA VANDERBIJL 

I have a hard time with art galleries, whether they are very small rooms on the way to work or large museums packed with artifacts. I would like to enjoy my time in them but for the most part, I do not. I have never had a satisfying experience in an art gallery and I would not say that it is the gallery’s fault or even particularly my fault. Why speak of fault at all?  

Art is about embodiment, and the space between the walls where the paintings hang protected and my body is large. I cannot be what I am seeing or do anything about it. I must blindly consume, pronounce a judgment, feign a stronger emotion than I am feeling. This appreciation is dismembered; much like standing in a crowded room, when I do not have enough hands to touch every person around me in greeting, enough mouths to speak to them, I cannot give enough of myself to this experience. I am paralyzed, made unbodied.

What do I mean when I say embodiment? I mean quite simply that the objects we create are incarnational. They are ideas become flesh, dwelling among us. They are real and not deceptive, although they are incredibly disruptive. To create an art object is to endow a beloved or feared thought with arms and legs and a will of its own and watch it build and destroy worlds. This has nothing to do with whether or not it is “good” by any standard. This has something to do with an old, bearded God reaching upside-down across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and touching a human into life. “I know you, come to life,” he says, “now go do.”

Art is incarnation. The only gallery I have enjoyed visiting is the Villa Borghese outside of Rome. Many of Bernini’s sculptures live in this manor, where only small groups of people are permitted to enter at a time. Apollo and Daphne, one of Bernini’s best-loved works, stands in the center of a room. You can walk up quite closely to it and look at the folds of stone cloth and the dimples where Apollo is pressing his fingers into Daphne’s flesh.

Apollo wants to rape Daphne. He has been chasing her through the woods, and when she realizes that she will not be able to outrun him, she calls upon her father to transform her into a laurel tree. As Apollo wraps an arm around her waist, he discovers bark where there was once soft skin. Her fingers and arms turn into branches. Her hair sprouts into the very wreath of leaves that Apollo will later use to decorate the heads of victors, of men become gods...

Only what is incarnate can be violated.

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Being a body narrows you. Genetics predetermine the star of your face, the hills and valleys nourished below. I cannot be all things, as a body. As a mind, I can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. But my body is a full stop, a contained space, an impermanent expression of creative energy.

Art objects, too, are narrow. “Writing is a little door,” said Susan Sontag, “Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.” An art object is a slice of the world, a representative, perhaps male or female, of one race or another, a tightly-packaged experience. I want this object to be all things but to ask it to contain more than it does is to deny its very being. As an embodiment, it is bound by its curves and contours.

When I ask, “Why doesn’t this art object embody an experience that is important to me?”, and become angry, it is a bit like shaking a child and screaming, “Why aren’t you a bird?” I may marvel at the fact that this object could have been any number of things, so long as I recognize it for what it is, give it credit for the beautiful disaster that is its embodiment.

Criticizing an art object, faulting it for its lacks and limitations, is a violation; a small one, yes, but a violation nonetheless.

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“What about bad art?”

Irrelevant question.

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Dance, then, is absolutely pure. And isn’t it ironic that it is this form of art, this form of expression, that causes the most panic and self-consciousness? We dance in small, dim spaces, mostly hidden from view. The act has been called frivolous, childish, dangerous, yet there is no form of embodiment more intense than dancing. Here, various incarnations touch, interact, share a moment in time. If anything this is the only place where art can be panoramic: bigger than itself, more than a single voice, experience or expression.

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Tastes and preferences change over time. If I am starving, I will eat what is put on the table in front of me, even if the meat is tainted or the fruit is rotten. Given the choice, though, I will eat what is satisfying, nutritious. Given a myriad of choices, I will eat what is popular, easily acquired.

Like so many people, I am secretly starving for companionship. I will listen to what voices I can get, at the press of a button, at the recommendation of a web site. I will not necessarily go looking for the relationships that truly fulfill me. Then, poorly satisfied, the words mal-absorbed into my system, I will complain that what I found was not what I was looking for.

When I learn that an object is poisonous, I know I should stay away from it. But it doesn’t take much pride for me to continue consuming it, believing as I do that my body is above corruption and violation.

I ask, “What will this do to me? What will I do with this?”

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Is it important that I identify with an art object? In my view, I am simultaneously the most beautiful and the most foul being imaginable. This double vision applies, too, to art; what enamors me can in its own time become frightening. What is delicious can be too rich, too much for me to handle. I am not always ready to encounter what I observe. Like my relationships, the traumas of which mold and shape my personality, my interactions with art have taken me out of myself, made me intensely uncomfortable. The ones that have not done so, the ones that have been too cloying, too reassuring, I have not been able to trust.

This is, after all, a personality flaw.

But in the same way that I would not want a friend who would not tell me true — even if it meant that I had to see myself in a garish new light, hang in a different, less-visited corner of a gallery — I do not want to surround myself with art that does not occasionally put me on edge, or break my heart.

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It takes two to create: myself, and the strain of thought inside of me that won’t be still until it has been given a body. 

Kara Vanderbijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Tumblr. She tumbls here and twitters here.

In Which Joseph Cornell Transcends Personal Nostalgia

Inside the Box

by ALEXANDRA MALMED

The American artist Joseph Cornell's sister recounted that his first experience with the cosmos was one of fear. After examining the winter sky from a window in their childhood home, Cornell began to physically and visibly tremble. He was overcome with a gnawing anxiety concerning the concept of infinity.

Cornell spent his life in New York, where he filled his notably isolated days with walking and journaling. The altar-like boxes that he composed using bits of paper, postage stamps, things made of glass, and natural objects (egg shells, dried plants, and shells) echo this life of solitude and incessant collecting. In his studio he categorized his accumulations of oddities by type (compasses, feathers, glass spheres, tiny jars, etc), and kept them in small boxes until their proper placement in one of his safe-haven-black-holes of assemblages became apparent. The objects that he collected, mostly through scouring secondhand stores, were literally fragments of other people's memories.

And yet Cornell somehow saturated the objects with his own spirit, so that once vagrant things became personal and sacred. I have had a few small paper jewelry boxes of things: a thinning beaded bracelet that I wore every day for three years, a wooden “moon ball” that a boy gave to me during the very rainy winter of my freshman year of college, a tangled, ropey scrap of my baby blanket, a gifted and still unwrapped ginger candy, the skeletal remains of a daisy chain I made at the Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Taos, a milky, fake-looking rock from a mountain by my parent’s house, and a piece of ivory card stock, embedded on one side with the peeling remnants of a pressed pansy and, on the other side, a drizzling of spidery, frantic birthday wishes for my first birthday. The message on the card is illegible save for the word MAGIC.

When I was younger I often worried that someone would find these boxes of treasures, assume that they were weird collections of trash, and throw them away. But now I think that Cornell’s use of such otherwise banal objects proves that these entities can emanate some sort of power (or at least significance) that exceeds mere personal nostalgia.

Early on, Cornell developed a fascination with astronomy and became familiar with celestial maps and the studies of Galileo and Copernicus. In addition to maps (his favorite) and drawings of the sky, he collected over 100 books on astronomy throughout his lifetime. Eventually, he went on to introduce astral images and concepts from this self-education into his collages and three-dimensional assemblages. This stayed with him.

And so the majority of Cornell’s boxes, ostensibly "about" astronomy, also concern his fear. As we look into the intimate dream worlds of his boxes, we become aware of the potent relatedness of our internal fear and our external surroundings. Fear and the external are universal and, it turns out, distinguishable but indivisible.

Our fears tend to feel more isolating and more personal than anything else, and yet by acknowledging and sharing them, we can (even if just for a moment) overcome them. The boxes, which rarely contain traces of palpable autobiographical imagery, feel personal and even vulnerable despite the strength of their lyrical compositions. Cornell's use of astronomy — a practice, concept, and colossal physical presence — communicates a certain level of unspoken trust to the viewer. Revealing fear’s looming internal presence to another person is perhaps the most intimate of all gestures.

I have come to defenselessly love only a few people in my life. I can clearly remember the individual moments in which I knew that each of these friendships could turn into something involving real, exposing love. The individual people have very little in common, but my recollections feel mostly the same — perhaps because each took place during a very vulnerable exchange of words concerning our fears.

Last summer in a dark underground bar in Santa Fe a near-stranger severed the thick mindlessness of catching up by telling me about his once-suffocating lifelong relationship with anxiety. I immediately felt as though I no longer needed to maintain the jovial, untroubled acquaintance shield that I seem to wear more often than not. I no longer felt the need to take slow, careful sips from the can of Pabst we were sharing. We later admitted that that neither of us really likes to drink.

I was stripped of the usual feeling of intimidation I felt around him and wanted to physically push my weight and warmth againt him because words didn't feel convincing enough to tell him how much of my life I had spent feeling the same way. Thus feeling of closeness to him has stuck to me — relentlessly, and in a very significant way — despite time and the languid stretches of land between New Mexico and New York.

The act of demonstrating the concept of infinite space and time within the boundaries of a box — a structure that references art history (compositional grids, museums), shelter, and human confinement — was important to Cornell. Doing so is, perhaps, a means of suggesting the possibility of incarcerating or at least binding our innate fear.

The images he uses of constellations were cropped by necessity, and yet even these small clippings of cosmic images communicate the idea of something that is boundless. Cornell’s journal entries reflect this concept: he tended to write about small, precise day-to-day moments that, for one reason or another, had a profoundly transformative effect on his life.

Cornell’s employment of astronomical images and concepts was not hindered by his fear — in fact, his boxes seem to confront the very notion. Ultimately the boxes are actually able to diminish fear’s magnitude and power by placing it in the context of other internal realities of the human mind — namely, imagination and knowledge. Take the box Cassiopeia 1, in which Cornell subtly brings our attention to every aspect of the stars. Here we have frayed, thinning fragments of paper marked with the "dark cloud." The Australian Aboriginals paid careful attention to not only clusters of stars, but also to the sky’s use of negative space in the formations of the Taurus’ stalwart head and the very beautiful but vain Cassiopeia.

Cornell was deeply fascinated with feminine beauty — despite his reclusive, lonely existence, he was frequently consumed by periods of slow, deep longing for numerous ballerinas and Hollywood actresses. History and mythology are referenced, of course, in Cassiopeia 1, but they are re-appropriated within the context of the box.

Between Cassiopeia and the Taurus is a picture that seems to offer a hand in explaining stellar lineups in a high school textbook. But then even science becomes merely an element of a poetic collage, because all of this is surrounded by the heavy presence of a creeping, peeling ivory wash. This white emphasizes the medium of paint and the artist’s hand. It connotes decay, flatness, change, perhaps even earth itself. It provides a smothering contrast (in both subject and appearance) to the dreamy, wispy navys-and-blacks in the piece. It does not feel clean, empty, or spare, as white often does. It seems to be hiding once-exposed layers and secrets of the box. And there is so much of this thick, severe white.

Cornell was said to have spent great expanses of time looking for images in chipping paint on New York walls, just as one does with Magic Eye posters. That he was able to utilize the same method of subjective seeing, be it of images in flaking paint on forgotten surfaces or in that which he was most afraid of — the infinite cape of a sky with its snags of cosmic points, is perhaps the conceptual nucleus of his work. Cornell would see, then create, then demonstrate the possibility of infinity within the small and the possibility of reining in the boundless.

Alexandra Malmed is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages.

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