THINKING BIG AND SMALL:
Joseph Cornell, the Great Boxer
Mary Ann Caws
One of the ways to deal with the
everything large and the personal small was exemplified by a great artist
who could neither paint nor draw, but who invented a way to manage much.
Joseph Cornell in his self-constructed boxes reached both out and in.
Keeping what others might see as trinkets: a snippet of a ballerina’s
dress, a few rhinestones, a marble, a piece of wire, he made them into a
world.
To be sure, this had something
of the star-worshipping about it. He adored the singers, the performers,
the dancers of the nineteenth century in particular, and treasured every
instance of their memory. The simplest and smallest item was for him a
synecdoche of a whole system of stardom, a relic of a time and space he
could salute in all its variousness and whose figures of yore he could
make into figures of forever, far past their own context and his. Memory
boxes, we could call them – for him, they were shadowboxes of a continuing
performance, theatres in miniature.
So, for example, to celebrate
the dancer Toumanova, he constructed a romantic ballerina box, out of a
black velvet jewelcase studded with a rhinestone set like a necklace, and
a text about an incident in which she was stopped – on a cold and snowy
night – by a bandit who demanded she dance for him. It is quite as if she
were to continue to dance for all of us, under the stars whose gleam the
rhinestones suggest. In another box, called Toward the Blue Peninsula:
for Emily Dickinson , a perch and a drinking bowl seem to keep the trace
of a bird, whose flight through the window into a field of blue seems
probable: this towardness in the title has already signaled to the viewer
the departure. Additionally, a wire mesh is torn open, again like a trace
of escape.
Do they feel enclosed, these
boxes? Nary a fleeting glance at claustrophobia, they are rather worlds
unto themselves, spacious enough for memory and for living in the moment.
Do they have imitators? Yes,
but something strange transpires. The comeafters or emulations – in
preference to the term imitation, if the latter seems to retain a
pejorative tinge – are somehow never up to the real thing. I cannot
explain that, but can only salute its truth. A Cornell box is something
essentially other from any other box, no matter what it contains.
Are they uniform in size or
feeling or in any way? No, they are of all sizes, but in general rather
smallish, like treasure houses of the imagination each keeping what it can
and must and wants to. You look into them, and they grow.
Anything interesting about
their history, these boxes? Yes, this. When Cornell had finished with one,
say, sold it to someone through a gallery, or gave it to a friend, he
might say he wanted it back to check or fix the frame. But strangely, the
box was wont not to be returned to the owner – as if Cornell were always
to be the owner...Like owning a world, like making a personal statement
about it and about his memories. He could lend them, but that did not mean
losing them forever.
No, let me put that better.
About his memory, for now that we can see his many creations as a whole,
it is as if they formed a constellation, inseparable into its parts. From
the early pharmacy bottles with their glass globes of keepsakes, through
the flat geographical valises with their maps, through the aviaries with
their bird feathers and perches, the soap bubble sets with their clay
pipes for blowing the transparent containers of a child’s dream, and all
the other receivers of his imagination so reaching out to ours, each of
the elements of every series has this miracle about it. It is at once a
living piece of everyday time, now gone by, a museum holding of that past,
and a personal commitment to the particular celebration of the particular
moment.
As for the future, it is
guaranteed – so far as anything material can be assured. Within those
boxes dwells a time personalized, a space miniaturized, and a memory
believed in. Nothing – nothing – seems trivial, somehow. And in these
separate worlds – communicating as parts of his creation -- nothing
seems isolated, set apart, even as each thing is framed. Among sets, these
are singular. Among artists, he is unique, a creator of worlds like no
other.
Each box feels full, with its
own personalized vision. No creation seems as clearly to exemplify
Mallarmé’s mental theatre: a performance taking place uniquely in our
imagination, developing our own expansion of an idea, taking it as far as
we can, within the boxes where we see enacted the narrations we supply,
and beyond them, into the world they open out to us, if we know how to
see.
© 2004 Mary Ann Caws
Mary Ann Caws is a
Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at
the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the author
of many works of scholarship. Her many areas of interest in XXth Century
avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets André Breton,
Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre Reverdy, René Char, Virginia Woolf and the
Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell and Joseph Cornell.
Conceptually one of her primary themes has been the relationship between
image and text. She wrote many works of scholarship such as The
presence of René Char (1979), (The Eye in the text : Essays on
Perception, Mannerist to Modern (1981), The Surrealist Look : An
Erotics of Encounter (1997), Bloomsbury and France : Art and
Friends (2000), Robert Motherwell with Pen and Brush ((2003).
