Linking Memory and Reality

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the eccentric, poetic boxes of Joseph Cornell

After the queues, the scalpers and the heaviest mortaring of publicity ever aimed at an exhibition of modern art, the Pablo Picasso show left New York's Museum of Modern Art Sept. 30; and what could MOMA do for an encore? Very sensibly, it has gone to the other end of the scale, returning to normal institutional life with a retrospective of an artist so unlike Picasso as to be his polar opposite: the American Joseph Cornell. Cornell died in 1972, at 69, but his association with the museum went back a long way (he was one of the few Americans included in MOMA'S introductory show of Dada and surrealism in 1936) and he has now been commemorated with full honors. Organized with exemplary finesse by Kynaston McShine, elegantly installed in rooms whose white arches and tinted ceilings distantly echo the internal world of Cornell's boxes, and supported by a catalogue which now becomes the standard work on the artist, this is the most revealing Cornell exhibition ever held. Having had four months of the Big P's aggressions and Nietzschean sublimities, we may now relax--after a fashion, since Cornell was by no means a consoling eccentric--with the last artist who believed in fairies and owls' grottoes.

Joseph Cornell was not merely American; he was obsessively and essentially so, resembling Edgar Allan Poe in his fixation on a dream Europe that he could never bring himself to visit. He spent most of his working life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y., which he shared with his mother and his brother Robert, who had been crippled in childhood by cerebral palsy. It was a distinct comedown from his earlier years, when his father (also Joseph), who died in 1917, supported his family in elegance by buying and designing textiles. From that domestic seclusion, the gray and long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery: to Central Park in the snow, to Times Square (in the days before it became a rats' alley of pimps and porn), to the now disappearing bric-a-brac shops and bookstalls that used to line Fourth Avenue from the Bowery to Union Square. He spent these sojourns sorting through boxes of old embrowned photos, picking over trays of shells or handless watches, haunting the penny arcades, gazing mildly through shop windows at working girls whom he would never approach --a flaneur, not of self-display but of urban reverie.

If the French surrealist Louis Aragon could call himself, in the title of one of his books, Paysan de Paris, Joseph Cornell was certainly the Peasant of New York, incessantly tilling and raking its cultural deposits and suppressed memories. They presented themselves to him as a vast, intriguing jumble of components, waiting to be grafted onto one another, fitted together, married and mated. He once wrote about seeing a collection of compasses in the window of a shop: "I thought, everything can be used in a life time, can't it, and went on walking. I'd scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes ... Halfway home on the train that night, I thought of the compasses and boxes, it occurred to me to put the two together."

The result of such an encounter (one cannot be quite sure that it was the same one) was Object (Roses des Vents), which Cornell began in 1942, tinkered with for years--as was his habit, there being few precise dates or prompt solutions in his work--and finished in 1953. Emblems of travel, dwarfed mementos, a little box of mummified waves and shrunken coasts, peninsulas, planets, things set in compartments with an air of rigorous sentiment, each of the 21 compass needles insouciantly pointing in a different direction: it is the log of no ordinary voyage. (Even the map on the inside of the lid depicts an excessively remote coastline, that of the Great Australian Bight.) The earth is presented not as our daily habitat but as one strange planet among others, which to Cornell it was.

He had an extraordinarily allusive imagination: forever unpicking its objects, forever recombining them. As the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff remarks at the opening of his brilliant catalogue essay on Cornell as a puritan, he was "a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies--the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles--quavering, iridescent, ephemeral--and the immutable orbits of the solar system, all things linked together by their ideal roundness. You cannot keep a soap bubble in a box, or fit the planets into one; but starting with two of the Dutch clay bubble pipes he acquired at the New York World's Fair in 1939, Cornell was able to construct an entire tone poem about effigies and similarities: an 18th century French planetary map, two wineglasses (distantly recalling Dante's crystal heaven), a cork ball, a fossil ammonite unwinding its eternal spiral, and so on.

There are many aspects of Cornell's imagery which seem fey, precious or backward-looking: the Christmas frosting, bats and moss and dingly dells. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly in his evocations of his own childhood. Yet time and again, even his most gothic fantasies and his most fussily reverential evocations of dead ballerinas are plucked back from the edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion in his divisions and compartments; not without reason did he call himself a "constructivist." What one sees in the boxes is not just memory, but the exact disposition of memory, an entrancingly just division of one's gaze between thought and material.

Cornell had many modes, and they ran from the white abstract grids of his "Dovecotes," filled with one repeated geo metrical motif--a ball, a wooden cube --to his lush romantic tree grottoes filled with exotic birds. But to see him as a reclusive American eccentric, a man working solely out of private fantasy, is to miss one major point of his art: its continual dialogue with the work of other artists, not only the Renaissance and mannerist painters whose images he selectively filched (as in his Medici Prince and Medici Princess boxes), but also those of the 20th century.

There are debts to Max Ernst in the early collages of the '30s, and more subtle references--as in a dialogue between equals--to Marcel Duchamp in the boxes; sometimes Cornell would crack the glass panes that protected his images, in homage to the cracks in Duchamp's Large Glass. But the effect was much more violent, since--in a piece like Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, 1943--it suggested the rupture of a sanctuary, an attack upon Eden. The glass pane of Cornell's boxes, the "fourth wall" of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two absolutely opposite worlds. Outside, chaos, accident and libido; inside, order, sublimation, memory and peace.

Cornell's modernity as an artist expressed itself in other ways too, especially in his use of secondary, filtered material from print, reproduction and photography. A good deal of the future of Pop art nestles quietly in those boxes, and even Andy Warhol's use of the same image repeated over and over was pre figured, ten years ahead, by Cornell. In his rustling, fiddling way, he was a far more inventive artist than is commonly thought.

But in the end it is, and must be, Cornell the poet who engages and holds one's attention. Nowhere in surrealism is there a world quite parallel to his. Cornell had no interest in the revolutionary desires of surrealism, in its Sadean heritage or its dandified will to overthrow the bourgeois state. There is no sexual content in his boxes; he wanted his art to return its viewers to childhood, but a pre- Freudian childhood, an infancy without rage or desire.

Yet what artist of his generation could inject more evocative intensity into his work, or fix it with such deft, concise images?

There was nothing silly or pulpy about Cornell's pursuit of innocence. As Ratcliff argues in his catalogue essay, it had much more to do with the need for redemption than with any fancies about the artist-as-Alice-in-Wonderland. That need could never, by its nature, be satisfied: no guilt, no culture. Cornell was a wholly urban artist, cultivated to his fingertips, and the peace he sought was not pastoral. It was a sense of cultural tranquillity, where all images are equally artificial and equally lucid, permeable to the slightest breath of poetic association, linking memory and reality in a seamless web.

He wanted, in short, to get to heaven in a box.

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