Image rights expired. See duchamp’s “Boite en Valise” here

Marcel Duchamp, Boite,Series E, 1963 Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Helen Danforth Acquisition Fund photography by Erik Gould

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Joseph Cornell:Navigating the Imagination is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Ma. through August 19, 2007. The show then travels to The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oct. 6 – Jan. 6, 2008. An illustrated book will be available later in 2007. There is also an interactive feature at the PEM site.

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Duchamp’s Boite-en Valise

I was surprised recently by this Duchamp piece in a show at the RISD museum. The show was a small selection of gems from the permanent 20th c. collection (including a wonderful late Phillip Guston painting). I came across one of these boxes – Marcel Duchamp’s “Boite-en-valise” (Box in a Valise). Duchamp’s original title was “œde ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rose Selavy” (by or for Marcel Duchamp or Rose Selavy). From the paragon of “art is an idea”, Marcel Duchamp, a beautifully crafted object. The tiny urinal (”Fountain”) is adorable. He made about 20 of these.Joseph Cornell collaborated with Duchamp on the edition. Speaking conceptually, we know it was Duchamp who whispered in Donald Judd’s ear: “have somebody else make your art”. The Duchamp/Cornell connection is interesting because it seems to work against the conventional idea of both artists. Considered together, they kind of scramble the master narrative. At the least, this connection adds color and nuance to the story. Bruce Metcalf writes that Duchamp’s “Fountain” “poses a nasty problem for craft” (”The Problem of the Fountain”, Metalsmith, summer, 2000). We know that what may have started as a prank – submitting a signed plumbing fixture for a group exhibition – was the forerunner, if not the underpinnings of conceptual art and that this had existential implications for art and craft.

Marcel Duchamp was a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and placed inside a Joseph Cornell box (apologies to Winston Churchill). He is also convenient shorthand for any 2^nd year art school student – someone to wrap the 20^th century around, and he is still essential vocabulary for most contemporary art discourse. Here are some sample thoughts on Duchamp and the implications of his work for crafts from various authors:

Arthur Danto : “As a member of Dada, Duchamp was deeply opposed to the idea of the Great Artist as cultural hero. He felt that the overheated adoration of the artist had had disastrous political consequence. So he was anti-art, which meant that he despised the artist’s eye and the artist’s touch or hand. Handless creation was a Dada ideal–thus the ready-mades. The consequence was that craft dropped out of the concept of art, the way beauty did when Dada set out to destroy beauty. That opened the way for the artist to turn the making of things over to others, as in the case of Koons or, for different reasons, with Donald Judd. The art was in the idea, whoever executed it. In Judd’s case, there was a kind of machine-shop aesthetic he made it possible to appreciate. He knew he could not make edges and corners the way machines could. But of course there is art where we admire the touch–as in Guston or de Kooning. These enter the meaning of the work. The beautiful thing about pluralism is that there is no one way of doing anything. I subscribe to an aesthetic of meanings rather than an aesthetic of forms. My interest is in finding the meanings and explaining how they are embodied in works of art. That is what my writing is mostly about.”

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolphe: author of “Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime”:
“what was left of nature as an interest went out the door for many people when art became wholly a matter of recycled images within a fixed system a la Duchamp, Warhol, appropriation and institutional critique and so on, which is to say when we became subject to a wholly anti-aesthetic discourse. But beauty has always been something philosophers and critics have wanted to avoid. Everyone’s always wanted to get past the beautiful as quickly as possible so as to get on to the really serious issue where you didn’t have to talk about beauty and could instead talk about politics or identity as we’d say nowadays”

Does craft have to be anti-aesthetic to fit into the discourse, and isn’t much of craft, well, sort of aesthetic and beautiful? Is the anti-nature, anti-beauty stance necessarily anti-craft? Gilbert-Rolphe says that the current art discourse is still stuck in the 70’s. I think that may be so and that a discourse that revolves around craft may lead us on to the next place. I firmly believe this.

Valery Oisteanu on Joseph Beuys and Duchamp (Brooklyn Rail),
Beuys’ hallmark use of non-art elements, which included fat, felt, earth, stones, and copper and iron sheets, among other so-called symbolic “survivor” materials, took the basic idea of the readymade from Duchamp and pushed it beyond the notion of the “found object.”

“He took up the torch of ‘art for the mind’ from Marcel Duchamp and carried it forward, using symbolic narratives from his own survival of wartime ordeals, while radically challenging consumerist culture, materialism and instant gratification. He was an evolutionary revolutionary, teacher, funny man, shaman and poet.”

Walter Hopps (in “Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday”): “Cornell and Duchamp admired each other and they both understood the curious walk beyond conventional media that the other was involved with. What’s the world to make of a Readymade by Duchamp? What on earth is the world to make of a glass-fronted box containing a cut-out colored repro of a parrot? It’s neither painted nor drawn. I see Joseph Cornell as one of the true pioneers at mid-century.”

The 1998 exhibition “Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…in Resonance” and its accompanying book published by the Menil Foundation, Houston, explored the friendship and working relationship between the two artists. The show presented other box editions by Duchamp and Cornell’s Duchamp Dossier, a collection of small objects, notes and ephemera related to their relationship that was discovered after Cornell’s death in 1972. “Both artists were intrigued by the connection between art and the found object, and they shared a fascination with replicated images and the process of reproduction. They had parallel interests in optical devices, ephemeral mediums (such as glass, dust, paper), filmaking and graphic design.” The Duchamp dossier (illustrated below) is exhibited in the PEM Cornell show, its contents spread out in a glass case.

Parrot for Juan Gris, Winter 1953-54; “rejuvenated” June 24, 1957, box construction, 17 3/4 x 12 3/16 x 4 5/8 inches, The Robert Lehman Art Trust, Courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehman, Washington, DC, Photograph by Mark Gulezian/QuickSilver, Washington, DC, copyright The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York,

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“Objects by Joseph Cornell: Minutiae, Glass Balls, Shadow Boxes, Coups d’Oeil, Jouets Surrealistes”(Cornell’s title for his first one man exhibition in 1932).

For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea that Joseph Cornell is the father of us all (the studio furnituremakers anyway.) The idea comes in and out of focus. On the one hand he seems too 19^th century, too Victorian in his obsessions and his sensibilities. And what about Wharton Esherick? But then I remember that his initial inspiration came from collage, a very ‘modern’ art that still works in a post modern or pluralistic art culture. Cornell was in no way a craft artist. He was an artist, like Beethoven, Dickenson, and Max Ernst, who came at their respective modes of expression without academic training or apprenticeship. (Thanks to Lynda Roscoe Hartigan for this insight.) I think I may be closing in on Cornell a little after having seen the wonderful show of his work at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Ma. My love for Cornell comes mainly from books and pictures. I don’t think I had actually seen more than 3 or 4 of his boxes. This show has 180 works, including collages and cases full of his collections of ephemera, which he called dossiers.

My own metaphorical interests as an artist have tended to landscape and nature, from the American Luminist painters and the American sublime to japanese gardens, especially the tightly constructed haiku of the courtyard garden, to land art, arte povera, Eva Hesse. As far as I can tell, the urbane Mr. Cornell was not particularly inspired by pure landscape, although the sublime was certainly within his purview and he could perfectly conjure nature when he wanted to, as in “The Owl”. “A mounted cutout of an ornithologist’s illustration of an owl, set in a halo of bark and lichen, looms against an earth-toned backdrop in a wood box stained dark brown. The impression of a nocturnal, woodsy habitat is unmistakable, even as these qualities direct us to two very different versions of the environment being reproduced in the box: the owl’s natural habitat and a natural history museum’s diorama of the bird’s original setting.” (Lynda Roscoe Hartigan in “Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday”, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Walter Hopps, Richard Vine, and Robert Lehman)

In the Japanese garden, the mind, or eye, takes a journey. The eye follows a three dimensional path, unlike the experience of looking at a painting where the eye follows a 2 dimensional surface. With Cornell’s boxes, the eye likewise moves from object to object, constructing or reading metaphor in a 3 dimensional space. Many of the boxes were intended to be manipulated ” balls slide down ramps, sand falls into wine glasses, drawers are to open and close ” and this kinetic quality adds another layer of meaning.

Cornell didn’t paint or draw. He assembled.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan describes Cornell as a maker:“Like other sensory resources, the sense of touch establishes neural connections and responses that affect learning styles and emotions. Accumulating and sorting meant that Cornell regularly handled his source materials, committing their contents and location to memory and deriving a visceral charge from their tactile properties. The crumbly roughness of bark, the buttery-to-brittle tooth of old paper, the cool chalkiness of clay pipes, the silky nap of genuine velvet, the industrial hardness of piston rings. In fingering things, Cornell became a connoisseur of texture.”

“In the absence of art training, he learned by doing, and he frequently referred to himself as a maker rather than as an artist.”

“Cornell could be described as anti-intellectual in his suspicion of academic inquiry and theory, and his thought process was attuned to the associative realm of poetry. While the word poem is concrete, the concept of poetry itself is abstract. Clearly Cornell was at ease with abstraction, expressing and synthesizing qualities apart from the materials he used.”

We are required to have a facility for abstraction in order to read his boxes. I overheard a woman near the beginning of the show saying repeatedly to her husband: “what is that?” as she moved from box to box. I saw her again later in the show and she had stopped asking questions and was moving along with an excited expression as though she had just seen Santa Claus. Her ability to read in images had finally kicked in. The sheer amount of material in this show makes for a wonderful immersion in Cornell”s world, which was simply the entire world as he knew it. He was said to be shocked when meeting supposedly cultured and accomplished people, at how little they knew of ballet, astronomy, the history of art and literature. All the classic pieces are here along with many variations: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Princess’s, the aviaries, the ballerinas, the women he obsessed over like Lauren Bacall and ballerina Tamara Toumanova, the sand fountains. There are letters on display to and from Allegra Kent ( “dear Joseph” ), a fabulous Ballanchine dancer who became Cornell’s friend. My wife noticed a collage that was dedicated to Allegra Kent’s daughter. There is one group of very simple boxes that are just abstract room interiors, with the feel of a backyard garden shed. They are heavily gessoed and painted white, with one window at the back that looks out to a night sky. One of them comes with alternate backdrops and photographs are displayed of the variations. These simpler boxes appeal to my minimalist aesthetic sense. They pare down the proposition inherent in all of Cornell’s work: interior/exterior, the world/what is beyond the world.

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), 1945-46, Box construction with blue glass, 20 ½ x 16 x 3 ½ inches (52.1 x 40.6 x 8.9 cm) The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection, Photo by Michael Tropea, © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York.

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Like any great artist, Cornell was unique. Imaginatively, and within the discourse, he was of his time and place, although his time extended back to at least the early 19^th century. One aspect of Cornell’s life that is often passed over lightly is his Christian Science faith. It explains his search for cosmic unity and his “white magic”, as Richard Vine puts it (”Eterniday: Cornell’s Christian Science Metaphysique” by Richard Vine in “Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday”). It also explains the gulf that exists between Cornell and his artistic heirs.

Richard Vine: “Cornell’s reputation is now global, his name one of the touchstones of twentieth-century culture. But what can such a devotee of the infinite mean to the present? Does Cornell-with his contemplativeness, formal modesty, and Christian faith – have any relevance to a contemporary art scene far removed from both his gentle dream-realm and the relative politesse of mid-century art commerce?

“For better or worse, many current practitioners share at least one attribute with Cornell. He was the first American artist to attain such pre-eminence without benefit of traditional art skills. He did not (to any significant degree) draw, paint, or sculpt. Though his sometime mentor, Duchamp, arguably transformed all subsequent cutting-edge work into a species of conceptualism, the French born mage could and did manifest fine graphic abilities at every stage of his career. Cornell’s total reliance upon collage and assemblage, upon the found image and hoarded object, helped to clear a way – in viewer response and in critical theory – for today’s ubiquitous appropriation and installation artists.

“Yet a gulf lies between these heirs and their formal ancestor. Recent appropriation – when one thinks, say, of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, or Mike Bidlo – is a commentary not on the relation between past and present (since the distinctness of the past is largely ignored) or between the worldly and the divine, but an all-in-the-present sport played with signifiers. The very purpose of the game is now to show that all vehicles of verbal or visual language (including those supposedly freighted objects and images that once enraptured Cornell) are actually neutral, devoid of inherent qualities, since they acquire their meaning only relationally. Signification, in accord with the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), is thought by these practitioners to arise not from harmony (the affinity, allusion, and likeness that for Cornell generated “from nowhere something miraculous”) but from variations and difference between one form and another.

“Cornell, when using images of the Medici prince and princess, exploited both their precise historical aura and their universalist effect. But a Walker Evans photograph, when reproduced by Levine, surrenders its function as social documentation and becomes strictly a marker in a debate on originality. Prince captures ad images and old jokes only in order to demonstrate the power of his own ironic discourse over them. Bidlo paints a “Picasso” not as an act of homage but as a challenge to now discomfiting claims of authenticity and genius.

“In installation, as has been the case from the very inception of the genre in the 1960’s, objects are likewise spiritually denuded. The consumer items and debris brought together by artists such as Jason Rhoades, Portia Munson, Chen Zhen, Nancy Rubin, often carry a heavy charge of social commentary; they are selectively torn from and sometimes represent their ethnic and economic contexts. But any suggestion of transcendence, of linkage to a world beyond time, would be antiquated and futile. The underlying goal of such works, beyond aesthetic shock, is to enmesh us in the here-and-now, alert us to its inequities, and spur us to action on the premise that justice must be secured in this world, since there is no other. Clearly this is an agenda completely at odds with Cornell’s wistful awe before the Divine Mind and his almost animistic regard for the evocative, soul-stirring potential of humble cast-offs. As the philosophic vision has gotten bleaker, its physical site has grown larger. The box is now a room, where Cornell’s little treasures have become bulky, scattered construction parts. The components are sometimes great fun, gaudy implements of entertainment and spectacle, but never do they serve as touchstones of potential redemption. “We had the experience”, Elliot wrote, “but missed the meaning.”

“Cornell inhabited a fallen world, but one sprinkled with tokens of a better time, a higher place. Christian Science gave him earthly solace – a cosmic model that, in his handcrafted art, became eternity in a box. His “white magic” was realized when a work, to his eyes, embodied – or at least implied – total simultaneous existence, all fragments orchestrated into harmony with a spiritual end, a state of pure timeless being. The works are quietly admonitory, showing us that such a state, though impossible in the world, may be apprehended through the world, which is therefore achingly precious for what it conveys. Now, more than ever, we need him as we need all major artists as an elevated corrective to the profane.”

Joseph Cornell: Duchamp, 1942-53, Paperboard box with notes and correspondence, photosets, magazine and newspaper clippings, printed reproductions, drawings, objects, and ready-mades by Cornell and Marcel Duchamp and exhibition announcements, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, photo by Graydon Wood, copyright The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York

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I’m not trying to prove influence – only to suggest affinity, or to borrow a term from literary criticism, indebtedness. My case for the affinity between Cornell and contemporary craft artists is as follows: 1) Cornell’s search for spiritual order allies him with the 60’s utopian counterculture roots of the craft movement, which is still carried in the DNA of many craft artists working today (see Andrei Codrescu’s comments in my earlier post “The Mann”). The search for spiritual order might be seen, (emphasizing the word might), in the DIY stream of contemporary craft. 2) Cornell’s facility with visual metaphor and poetic abstraction make him a natural forebear of many craft artists, who understand the difference between appropriation and metaphor. 3) I suspect that many craft artists will know and love Cornell as they might love Matisse – a great artist who worked in a pre-Duchampian mode (which is why the “Boites-en-Valises” are so interesting.) But Cornell was embedded in the advanced art of his day, and well regarded by his contemporaries. Today’s craft artists work in an atmosphere where the lines are blurred or non-existant between traditional categories of art, craft, and design. I think Cornell can help us find the future for crafts – not in technology or media, which are just tools that artists will naturally pick up – but a future with expanded meanings and richer metaphors.

Perhaps together, Duchamp and Cornell can be our favorite uncles. Uncle Marcel, the clever one who shows us that an idea can be a work of art, that a craft object has ideas in it, and that we should never hesitate to question the status quo. Uncle Joseph is the strange one who delights us, scares us a little, and confirms what we knew as children: that there are worlds beyond the one we live in now.

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Thanks to the RISD Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Reproduction of Marcel Duchamp works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society, New York.

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