Cornell outside the box

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Charles F. Stuckey

Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay ... Eterniday, essays by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Richard Vine, Robert Lehrman and Walter Hopps, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2003; 272 pages, plus DVD-ROM, $60. Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, by Diane Waldman, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; 152 pages, $45.

Two new titles have set out to enrich the already quite fine body of literature devoted to one of America's most beloved artists--Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay ... Eterniday, about which more below, and Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams. The latter boasts 40 color plates and the sort of well informed text to be expected from Diane Waldman, one of the pioneers in Cornell scholarship in the 1960s (the other being Walter Hopps). In essence, Master of Dreams is a mature recapitulation of Waldman's long-out-of-print 1977 monograph on the artist, based on extensive interviews she conducted with him and his associates as she prepared a retrospective exhibition for the Solomon R. Guggenhcim Museum in 1967. That text needed updating, since Cornell studies as a whole were transformed after 1978, when the artist's heirs donated the bulk of his enormous archives to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art as the core of a Joseph Cornell Study Center in Washington, D.C. (The center's founding curator, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, who is preparing a catalogue raisonne of Cornell's works, last year became the chief curator of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.) Including a biography of the artist by Hartigan, the exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with Kynaston McShine's still unsurpassed 1980 retrospective of Cornell's works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York drew heavily on the new materials. Following McShine's catalogue, the most important contributions to the Cornell literature have been Mary Ann Caws's anthology of the artist's papers, published in 1993 (Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind) and Deborah Solomon's exemplary biography Utopia Parkway, The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, published in 1997, neither book adequately illustrated.

Hopps (whose name, along with McShine's, is curiously absent from the acknowledgements in Waldman's new monograph) provided "commentary" for Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay ... Eterniday, with 200 color plates by far the most lavishly illustrated general monograph on the spellbinding box constructions and collages. The book's more ambitious texts, however, are provided by Hartigan and Richard Vine. With nifty illustrations from the Cornell Study Center archives, Hartigan's essay breezes over no less catch-all a theme than Cornell's duality, from compression/magnification to repetition/variation" in a mere 20 pages. Vine, an A.i.A. editor, gives the most learned account yet of the direct and indirect ways Cornell was guided by Christian Science. But what makes Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay ... Eterniday a milestone is the DVD-ROM slipped into a pocket in the night-sky pattern endpapers at the back. For all its extravagant illustrations, the book as a whole can well be understood as a "package" for the distribution and storage of this interactive DVD, something like a free bonus, its costs generously underwritten by the Voyager Foundation, created by Washington, D.C.-based Cornell collector, Robert Lehrman. (The Foundation has nothing to do with the Voyager company that issued pioneering art history CDs by Albert Boime and Emile dc Antonio in 1995.)

I found hours of material at my fingertips: for example, I could watch nine of Cornell's films in their entirety, and I could browse the covers of some of the books and phonograph records collected by the artist, as well as Cornell family memorabilia and a selection of the ephemeral materials from the files he compiled over decades and stored in the workshop at his Utopia Parkway home, in Flushing, Queens. Although it includes items from a variety of museums and private collections, for the most part, the DVD is a sampler of the visual resources at the Joseph Cornel] Study Center, in the way that Caws's 1993 book is a sampler of Cornell's private texts archived there. And the DVD contains much more besides: 248 works by Cornell (including 141 boxes) are illustrated, categorized and cross-referenced. They are also linked with extensive documentation, including 235 different source items and commentaries by 16 of the artist's devoted advocates, most of whom had personal recollections of conversations with the artist. While such cross-referencing stresses many of Cornell's priorities, some sort of search function would have been a considerable help in accessing the material.

The opening screen of the DVD shows a close-up of a sunshine-showered Cornell in his garden (tinted blue, like a cyanotype). A white line then cuts into the photograph, as if to suggest spiritual revelation, prompting the image of Cornell's head to quickly diminish in scale and disappear, making way for the primary DVD icon, a smiling sun face (like the one from the Il Sole food label Cornell sometimes incorporated into works). The sun face glows inside a blue sphere, suggestive of a fantastical marble, that leads to the Welcome, Introduction and Help sections of the DVD. The night-blue background screen for the sun face is suddenly filled out with orbit lines, six stationary faceless blue marbles and a dozen miniature images of Cornell artworks moving in circles. The unlabeled marbles reveal themselves to be entries to the DVD's major sections: Cornell's Life, Cornell's Studio, Cornell's Work, Cornell's Universe, Interviews and Index. Click any marble and a new screen appears with more blue marbles or soap bubbles or twinkling stars representing sub-subsections. Overall the navigation tends to be rudimentary and tedious, involving far too much backtracking. Too often clickable icons are placed all over the screen rather than concentrated in one quadrant for simpler access.