Joseph Cornell's birthday was a few days ago. (1903-1972) This might be meaningful to only a few of us who share his eccentricities. He was an American original who did surrealist assemblages.
It seems that the older I get life looks more and more like a Cornelian box with disparate objects and ideas either coming together or learning to coexist. Or, better yet, they are clashing in a way that a certain music is being made beyond our hearing. In my warped mind I imagine some distant connectivity. It is as if the chaos of imagination is seen in its nakedness with a network still in its nascent form . What we perceive as amorphous may contain a form as yet unrecognizable.
The thing about Cornell that is so appealing is the prominence he gives to his intuition. He throws in a pipe or a toy bird or a pocket watch face or a tiny glass container, all without any rational justification. I love that. Life’s junk, unjunked. The discarded, given another go round and each object decontextualized, seen anew.
My late wife, Peggy created over sixty of these. Each was like a visual poem with images juxtaposed and made concrete.
His constructions were always confined within an area about the size of a cigar box. Each one was its own universe. Not unlike the way we try to create our own small world as we live out each day. If our planet were reduced to rubble his shadow boxes might be among the artifacts uncovered by visiting aliens trying to piece our baffling civilization.
To further expand on this way of thinking it is a fact that he lived his entire adult life on Utopia Parkway in Queens, NYC. Before I was born my father had a drugstore on Utopia Parkway in Flushing so in my mind, I am imagining that Cornell got some of his little glass vials from my father's store. Why not?
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