(Ed. Note: Originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.)
Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.
– Joseph Cornell
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
– John 14.18-20
Joseph Cornell and the Incarnation of Memory
“Assemblage.” “Avant-Garde.” “Surrealist.” “Found Object.” These are all words that one often hears in relation to Joseph Cornell, one of the more cryptic figures of 20th century American art. Most of Cornell’s artistic output involved the construction of small boxes in which different objects would be arranged opposite one side paneled in glass like a window. A stuffed parakeet on a branch next to a window filled with corks, beneath them the innards of a music box framed by bars of soap still in their flaking turn-of-the-century wrappers. A battered enamel doll in full Victorian garb peers from behind a sprout of bare twigs flicked with white and silver paint. An owl perches resolutely behind a plate of blue glass, curtains of textile poised theatrically on either side. Though this all sounds a bit random, each box really tells its own story, obliquely linking together a set of disconnected elements by forcing the viewer to take on the role of storyteller and to complete the work that Cornell’s finished pieces only start.
These objects were most often the leftovers of Cornell’s addiction to browsing the scores of curio shops dotting street level Manhattan, cluttered with forgotten knick-knacks, chipped and peeling bric-a-brac, and fading faux-Victorian what-nots left over from the jazz age. And in these found objects Cornell found little stories, each one imposing on his work their own weight of memory. This trinket must have belonged to a little girl on 9th street, that bit of magazine was read several times in a dentist office around the corner, that bit of watch was worn by a door-to-door salesman. And thus his boxes found a wide audience in people enchanted by their playfully mixed messages. (Cornell’s knack for expressing the unconscious and unspoken came to a hilt in a screening of his first film, Rose Hobart. After the viewing, Salvador Dali angrily attacked the projector while claiming that Cornell had “stolen the idea from his subconscious.”)
Critics often comment on the similarities in many of Cornell’s boxes, as he seemed to be attracted to birds, images of childhood, and arranged objects to evoke a sense of innocent wonder. But what ultimately binds Cornell’s work together is his fascination for finding things that have been lost, and retro-fitting them into storied poses that enshrine their sanctity as artifacts of memory. Cornell tunes us into the theatrical and poetic nature of remembering, his boxes the abstract equivalent of grainy 16mm family holiday footage, or the picture albums one stumbles across in grandma’s attic. Such artifacts, or found objects, require us to fill in the blanks and imagine some sort of narrative context for what we are seeing.
Advent and the “Incarnational Memory”
I find always find Cornell fascinating this time of year, with Advent right around the corner. It seems that most of what can be said about Cornell can also be said about this stage in the Church calendar. Here are several examples:
1. Cornell is all about montage, about the way in which completely different images or objects can offer up new meanings when creatively juxtaposed. The experience of a Cornell box is invigorating: we are confronted with things we hadn’t considered in tandem and then are pleasantly unsettled when we realize just how well they work together. This is precisely the way in which Advent throws us off balance. God and babies, divinity and stables, virginity and birth, praise and poverty, then and now, promise and expectation. All these juxtapositions are balanced in the incarnation, poised at the center of Christian theology as a narrative of impossible, yet unsettlingly appropriate tensions.
2. Cornell is all about story. Like the incarnation, Cornell sets loose the storiedness of the world and its objects. Cornell’s boxes are themselves the grounding context for his little bits and bobs, allowing us to read them asdramatis personae of open-ended storylines. In the same way, Advent defines the parameters of all Christian self-perception, telling us where the story begins and ends and how it is that we can participate in its conclusion. All of us found-objects are now composed within this narrative, placed just so in the drama of redemption.
3. Cornell is all about memory. The pleasure of negotiating Cornell’s found objects has to do with their antiquity. They are like relics that have been brushed off and showcased in Cornell’s little museums. We process each of his works of art as if we are wandering through a gallery of objects from long ago, imagining a past context for these items removed from our own. And Advent calls us to this same sort of imaginative self-reflection, to read the disparate elements of our own lives within the broader context of the incarnation. In this way, “memory” takes on a grand significance at Advent, as we stand looking through history at the incarnation by means of the recollections of canon and tradition, our vision backlit by the promise of his second coming.
Advent is a time of juxtaposition, storytelling, and the most profound sort of theater. During this time the drama of redemption, its contours defined by the poetry of the incarnation, leads us to a mode of reflection that Cornell seems to understand in his own way.
The Art of Advent
In one of his many journals, Cornell mused: “Nostalgia ok for Wyeth in isolated New England…What is the answer for New York City?” In other words, Wyeth’s stark and symbolic naturalism is fitting for rural America, but does that approach work for the big city? How can we remember a place like Manhattan in such a way that celebrates true nostalgia, rather than a set of memories that falsely glamorizes the past? What a prescient vision of what American art and advertising would become even in his own generation, which saw the rise of Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame.” Cornell’s interesting response to this question can be found in his numerous attempts to answer it by means of his many boxes. Implicit in his work is criticism of a culture coasting on fumes of illegitimate memories.
But perhaps there is an even better answer to Cornell’s question is to be sought in Advent, which empowers a true and abiding interpretation of the past and present. It is an unimpeachable nostalgia. Cornell’s world, like his little boxes, was ultimately private, personal, and afraid of straying too far from home. His artwork is individual, isolated, and intended for private reflection. In contrast, Advent isn’t just a Cornell box writ large, but an entire world waiting to swallow up our own. The art of Advent is then the art of fitting in, of being sensitive to the compositional strategies of the narrative of the incarnation that, like Cornell, has an odd sense of juxtaposition.