“The very myriad of things insinuates that there is no place that doesn’t have its apparently lost and found objects. When a web of music uses a rondo type approach, however, it makes delicate but assertive room for what would otherwise be frozen or lost, and the music resumes. Cornell, we might say, harmonizes the preterite.”
W hen Joseph Cornell entered the Sidney Janis Gallery on East 57th Street, the artist found a new figure to venerate. Absorbed in the radical adoption of material present in Juan Gris’ pioneering work of Cubist collage, Man in a Cafe (1914), Cornell identified a distinct opportunity for source material– Gris himself. Cornell’s Untitled represents a continuous sense of pop-cultural history. As though a musical score, the completed box by Cornell alludes to a composition ordered by a system of notes – carried through the motif of the bird’s cry frozen in time. In this space of the artist’s own divination, a hierarchy of order is suggested though never confirmed, allowing Cornell’s use of found materials to invoke the faculties of his artistic hand. One may imagine the artist collecting these items to use for his work: the act of Cornell ‘finding and keeping’ printed materials allowing viewers to feel both subject of his unadulterated affection and underlying disdain, the box itself a partial refuge of private rumination amidst public spectacle.
In Man at a Cafe, Gris becomes the first to append an actual object to the canvas, being his newspapers. Similarly, in Cornell’s Untitled, we encounter a collage depicting a crested white cockatoo perched on a section of ‘real’ branch. Behind the precarious animal is a wallpaper composed of clippings from a French history textbook, with the title HOTEL D’ETOILE adhered garishly in large text. Such references from European culture and tourist advertising are less invitations from Cornell for actual travel, they are more an engagement with leisurely cultural pastimes and fantasies informing the zeitgeist. Beneath the cockatoo, several copper rings carefully rest along a white beam, with a small blue ball relegated to the right hand corner. Cornell frames his shadow box in bright blue, outlining further consideration for the central scene he devotes to Gris.
In Untitled, the box becomes a shrine for the narrativization and commodification of history, allowing an inimitable sense of nostalgia to surface through Cornell’s skillful unification of textural and material elements. The artist’s passion for artifacts directly seized and replicated from culture, much like the German wunderkammer, engenders the cabinet of curiosities. As such, Cornell’s shadow boxes stage Victorian aesthetics within the contemporary practice of commodity, adopting a pop-sensibility with the cutouts as blatant references to traditions of manufacture. The flat appearance of the cockatoo insinuates a frozen moment in the bird’s song, suggesting that creative purity is tainted by Cornell’s appropriation of past insignia, generating an ‘emotional web’ which holds the theatrics of the modern era intact.
“His dossier on the artist swelled to multiple folders over the years; combined with the references found in his diary notes and on other papers, it contains tantalizing evidence about the dating and sequence of the Gris works, their embedded allusions, idiosyncratic links between the Spanish artists and the female singers and dancers Cornell admired.”
The son of a textile manufacturer, Cornell developed an early penchant for pattern and print-making, with a burgeoning passion for film. His fascination evolved into collaboration with filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, resulting in the creation of multiple screenplays. Enamored by performers, Cornell meticulously compiled dossier clippings, obsessively following starlets like Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo, and various ballerinas for whom he devoted works to. Cornell’s ventures in film impart a cinematic quality to his boxes, as his three-dimensional reliefs allow the presence of shadows and recesses, much like a film set or stage. What might draw Cornell to Gris is a personal relationship to replication and fragmentation, themes present in both film and textile manufacture. The synergy that Cornell found in such iterative processes directly translated to his shadowboxes, seemingly reproduced from his avid consciousness and spontaneously realized.
