Cornell boxes

Yesterday I finally went to see the Joseph Cornell exhibition at SFMOMA. "Of course you did," the more presumptuous of you readers are thinking, "let's see....wonder cabinets, old photographs, star charts, constellations of subtle correspondences...a world in cobalt blue midnight seen through the eyes of owls, philosophy's own totem. Right. Just tell us where the Cornell boxes are; and those will be the GPS coordinates of B. van Honkytonk."

But that would be a hasty conclusion. As Dr Bloom informs us, the anxiety of influence can make people very shy at parties in the Republic of Letters. I had known of Cornell for quite some time now, but one or two glances were enough for my instinct for self- preservation of imaginative integrity to strongly avert me. It was all too close, could too easily be mistaken by me for the end result of imaginative work I needed to do on my own. This has happened a few other times in other fields: most notably, with the work of Eric Voegelin, whose thought is so close to my own intuitions that I needed to not read him at all until I had formed my own mind on the common topics. Then, when I finally sat down with him, I could learn in peace.

But things have changed, and I knew that now I could really look at Cornell, and wanted to. So I went to the exhibition with Walden the Woodworker, his lady Goldberry, and their friend the 68er. I took the ghost of Walter Benjamin along with me, and his conversation was very enlightening, though he kept cracking jokes as if we were in church; museums seem to make him irreverent. And he wanted to linger over Cornell's notes and annotated photographs and ephemera longer than I did, and we contended somewhat. I won, but he made a good point about the true intelligibility of the product having something to do with understanding the process of its production.

The exhibition really began well before we entered through the revolving door of the museum. Perhaps it was simply that my imagination was roused in expectation, but the world was getting stranger as we drew nearer our destination. We saw a chair stuck half out of a window on the topmost floor of a building; we saw a hawk tearing a pigeon in its claws on the sidewalk just next our car as we stopped at a light; another hawk, so enormous I though it might rather be an eagle, perched atop the corner of a school; and there were other surreal sights, but in the end I decided to stop noticing them, since conversation with the '68er is not to be missed: we spoke of utopia, the wonderful virtues of pinhole cameras, love and libido, and of his wide experience and innovative experiments as an instructor in schools of art and design. But once we arrived, and were climbing the stairs, another odd thing happened: Walden and Goldberry ran into a friend of theirs from the small town where we all met nearly ten years ago, who now lives in Hawaii, and whom they hadn't seen or heard from in years: but Goldberry had been thinking of her that very morning. That's a 7.8 on the Serendipitometer.

We were confronted at the exhibit floor with an incongruously huge photo enlargement of Cornell at work in his shop, but I got quickly through the little crowd milling around that and the curatorial offerings, and into the exhibit. I was right away at home with the Cornell boxes, lingered over them, and didn't feel that the distinctness of my own imaginarium was about to be compromised by the vivid impression nearly all of them made on me, though the impressions were very strong, almost transporting- but sometimes, you have to just let things happen.

The brief time I spent formally studying art history was with a Dutch professor, who specializes in the devotional paintings of the late Middle Ages and the unapparent but undoubted survival of their inner structure in later early modern painting. He has shown that many of them weren't meant to be taken in as a single surface of images, but are put together like a text; one is meant to move through them, to undertake a pilgrimage through their various places, taking something from each until the end is reached. These sorts of pictures are called Andachtsbilder, and my old professor used to English the idea as "engines of contemplation." The boxes, assembled in the age of Freud and Cirlot, and heir to much Romantic musing on night, fragment, ambiguous allegory, do not have quite the itinerarial order or rhetorical clarity that the old Andachtsbilder have. But having learned to read paintings that way was certainly a help in taking in the images, and letting them constellate. And I had my own memories to bring to them.

My mother used to take me often to the city just north of our town, to visit its old and amply furnished museum of natural history. I was captivated above all by the dioramas, constructed when the influence of Frank Chapman was at its height. The stuffed and artfully posed animals were set in realistically sculpted and perspectivally clever foregrounds invested with meticulous detail- as many other denizens as believably possible of the world of the showcased beast were placed within the scene, many of them so hard to find that they were in effect hidden; the backgrounds were enormous oil paintings, rendered on curved surfaces for the most illusory optical effect. I remember matching gazes with the glass eyes of the owl in the barn rafters diorama (the rafters had come from a real barn), stuffed rat in her talons, her feathers warmly grey in the weak yellow glow of electric moonlight; and the great wolves, the bears, the rams; and of those too the ones I loved the most were set in scenes of bluest night. They were all set behind glass framed by dark wooden panelling, reminiscent of a mountain lodge; the panelled walls of the diorama rooms were like arcades of wonder cabinets in which whole life-worlds were contained in the space of a closet.

Cornell's boxes, especially his Great Horned Owl, brought all that back more vividly than I have remembered it for a long time. But too, his more architectural boxes brought back memories of the elderly white Victorian houses which were in my childhood greater in number in the county where I grew up, and more alone on the landscape, than they are now. My father lived in more than one of them, and I loved the bright whiteness of the painted wood, the faceted glass doorknobs like diamonds large as a child's palm, and the exhilarating ambiguity of inside and outside created by the interior windows. And they made scale ambiguous too, because I had seen old hotels and conservatories with similar features of architecture and color, but of course much bigger than those Eastlake houses, and they all tended to blend in my imagination. Cornell's little white wood boxes, with their snippets of text advertising some long-gone grand hotel, and their fusion of elements of architecture and furniture, directly evoked that sense of ambiguity of scale and purpose through similarity of form, like dollhouses, but less obviously, since his boxes aren't scale replicas of anything, and the box is as important as what it holds; a frame which open up possibilities of representation as much or more as it encloses things.

Walter's ghost and I had a long conversation toward the end of my stroll through the exhibition, about what Giddens and Lasch think of as the modern turn toward private subjectivity, and the question of whether Cornell's imagery is too much a private language (Walter's never read Giddens of course and so I have to inform him, and with uncharacteristic stuffiness, he only answers by quoting his published works). There are clearly recognizable themes, interests, open allegories, an assertion or thesis here and there. It would be easy enough to make a case that there is a great deal of repressed and strangely sublimated libido involved in Cornell's boxed offerings: Cornell might indeed be singing a certain well-known Justin Timberlake tune to his very idealized starlets and ballerinas . But posing the question philosophically rather than psychoanalytically: is this kind of surrealism simply a peek inside the somnambulistic skull of what Hegel mocked as the "beautiful soul", the disintegrating dreamer whose images are related by loose and shifting and often specious association, only ever suggestions and promise, and never become the shape of thought or guide of action? Which is something whose spell a politically-minded man like Walter, or myself, would energetically shake off; as would anyone who think life is worth living. Or, is it rather a poetry in which the fleeting beauty of the world, and the possibility of beholding it, is restored to us in representation, though by way of fragment because fragment is part of the truth of our present state? It might be impossible to tell: even that boundary might be blurred by the poetics of Cornell's sur- or magical realism. But I am inclined, if you must know, to the second intepretation.

One theme which is something of an asserted thesis in Cornell's creations is the German Idealism For the Millions-buy your copy now!- which was Christian Science in its heyday. There was even a book written exposing Mrs Eddy's dependence, to put it charitably, on English translations of German philosophers: Mrs Eddy Purloins From Hegel, by a Mr Walter Haushalter, in 1936. And a very great deal was lost in Mrs Eddy's translation of translations, speaking charitably again; but Cornell, I think, intuitively recovered much of it. The singature vision of Hegel and Schelling and Novalis is there: the forms of the natural world as the spirit's movements in the mirror of dream; the whole world within the soul; the soul a star; the star a light from a light so much brighter that it appears as black backdrop to its images: too bright to see, like sun to the eyes of owls, says Aristotle.

I found as we readied to leave that someone had taken my umbrella from the Unattended Stand, and so I was walking in the rain as we left for the car. Which was fine. It's good to let yourself stand in weather undefended every once in a while; and I was in high spirits. Sometimes, you have to just let things happen.