Joseph Cornell's 'Poetic Theaters'
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 24, 2006; Page WE24
As the artist John Baldessari once said, "As soon as you put two things together, you have a story."
That line has been rattling around in my head recently, thanks to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which had quoted it in connection with Baldessari's hand-picked reinstallation of works from that museum's permanent collection. Yet it's equally apt in reference to another exhibition, "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
  "Untitled [Blue Sand Fountain]" is meant to be upended like an hourglass. |
Take Cornell's "Home, Poor Heart, You Cannot Rediscover If the Dream Alone Does Not Suffice, Holderlin," for instance. The collage from about 1963 -- Cornell rarely dated his work -- consists of two images: the first, apparently, a slightly cheesy, embossed Christmas card depicting a snow-covered woodland scene with two white birds; the second, a print of a Victorian-looking woman, cut out with great care and superimposed atop the wintry landscape.
Cornell's work doesn't get much simpler than that.
Known for his sometimes intricate found-object box constructions and collages, the artist was a notorious pack rat, as evidenced by the show's "Wonderland" section, a display of the artist's source material that aims not to re-create but give a little taste of Cornell's home/studio. My favorite thing? A box of soft, gray and vaguely dust-bunny-ish fluff labeled "mouse material." "Everything," the artist liked to say, "can be used in a lifetime."
Still, there's something about "Home, Poor Heart" that belies its simplicity. There's an implied narrative -- and all the power and mystery of the storyteller's art -- that doesn't exist in either of its component parts. A flavor of longing, of sadness, of ineffable loss and the struggle to replace something gone forever. For that reason, Cornell's collages, along with his even more famous boxes, often feel more like trajectories than static things. They don't sit still, but rather travel through, or "navigate," the imagination, as the show's title suggests. You don't so much look at them as read them.
Or maybe watch them perform. Cornell himself described his work from the 1930s and 1940s as "poetic theaters."
Two of the boxes on display even offer a tiny light show: "Renee Jeanmaire in 'La Belle au Bois Dormant' " is illuminated every hour on the half-hour for one minute, while "Untitled [Owl Habitat]" glows for a similar interval at the top of every hour. Although you can't touch anything here, many of these works were made to be handled. To be browsed through, as with "GC 44," "Portrait of Ondine" and other portfolios of loose papers, photos and cards. Even, occasionally, to be upended like an hourglass, as with Cornell's "Untitled [Blue Sand Fountain]," or listened to, as Cornell collector Robert Lehrman demonstrates with the jingle-bell-like marbles and cordial glasses of "An Image for Two Emil(y)ies." That performance can be viewed in a film clip included on the multimedia DVD-ROM that comes with the book "Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay . . . Eterniday." Computer stations in the gallery allow visitors to virtually play with some of the artist's other, equally interactive objects, opening drawers, removing and replacing vials, etc.
The point is that you don't just engage with Cornell's art with your eyes. There is a sense of wonder, a mental/emotional connection that makes moving through this show slow going (that is, if you give each of the 177 artworks, including several short films, its due). As you do, you may come to understand why curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan uses words and phrases such as "improbability," "dislocation" and "tributes to the open-ended" to describe Cornell's art. Like magic, the show startles and confounds in equal measure.
If it does one thing, it is to dispel the notion -- and pretty quickly, at that -- that Cornell's art was something accessible or trivial, like a collection of toys for grown-ups. For the record, the artist strongly objected to that characterization (despite his fondness for twee, doll-size silverware). Sure, there's an intimacy to his work, but it's sometimes one that borders on the creepy, as with the artist's almost obsessional tributes to performers such as actress Lauren Bacall and dancer Tamara Toumanova. Or his collages focusing on the female nude, which, in their attitude of slightly fevered reverence -- the artist never married, and his relations with the opposite sex are a matter of speculation -- lie somewhere between religious devotion and raw lust.
As suggested by a companion exhibition, organized by the Archives of American Art and including correspondence with other celebrities, Cornell was fascinated by celebrity, if not quite in the manner of a stalker, according to Liza Kirwin, curator of "Exquisite Surprise: The Papers of Joseph Cornell." Intensely private, the artist also got along famously with children, creating little presents he would leave for the neighborhood kids -- a la "To Kill a Mockingbird's" Boo Radley -- under bushes.
That combination of the gentle and the intense, of non-goal-oriented play and almost scary fixation, is what characterizes the work in "Navigating the Imagination." (According to Hartigan, those who knew Cornell described his gaze as alternately penetrating and focused upon his own lap.)
Perhaps Cornell's assessment that one could use everything in a lifetime was overly optimistic. He certainly left enough boxes of trinkets and gewgaws behind that he never got around to incorporating into his art (property now of the museum's Joseph Cornell Study Center). But on a less literal level, nothing was off limits.
In his voyage through life, Cornell rarely ventured far from his home on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y., where he lived for much of his life with his mother and infirm brother, only vicariously traveling the world through the picture postcards sent to him by globe-trotting friends. At the same time, no corner of his vast imagination was left unexplored, no matter how reminiscent of sunny childhood -- or how dark and lonely.
JOSEPH CORNELL: NAVIGATING THE IMAGINATION Through Feb. 19.
EXQUISITE SURPRISE: THE PAPERS OF JOSEPH CORNELL Through Feb. 28.
Both at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F streets NW (Metro: Gallery Place-Chinatown). 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-357-1729).http:/
Public programs associated with "Navigating the Imagination" include:
Dec. 2 at 4 Lecture and concert: The 21st Century Consort plays music that recalls Cornell's art. $16-$22. Call 202-357-3030 or visithttp:/
Dec. 10 at 3 Reading by Charles Simic, author of "Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell," followed by a book-signing.
Dec. 16 from 1 to 3 Family Day: "Mirrors of Identity." Create shadow boxes using cigar boxes, found objects and family memories. Registration required. Call 202-233-0667 or e-mailsaamprograms@si.edu.
Jan. 27 at 2 Film screening: "Joseph Cornell's Movie Palace." Selected films by Cornell will be screened in their original format. Free tickets will be available one hour before the program from the G Street information desk.
Jan. 28 at 3 Lecture by Cornell collector Robert Lehrman.
