Joseph Cornell

bluepeninsula
Originally uploaded by Randuwa.

An additional thought on Jospeh Cornell's work. As delighted as I was by the exhibit at the SAAM, one moment in the museum continues to peck at my mind. I was moving from one set of works to another when I passed a couple in the their mid-50's. The man in tow mumbled to the woman, "So these are Cornell's boxes?"

The comment has made me ponder the hidden power in these "boxes". Take this one, for example, titled "Toward the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson)". This is not a box, it's a world. It's a world of confinement and of limitations: the cage, the sterility, the cloister. And it's a world of possibility, of hope, and of escape. The wire mesh is broken, the bird is gone. Where? That's your call. The window is open and blue beyond it beckons the traveller to a new world, and new dimension, guided by the ghostly set of Cartesian coordinates suggested by the shadow from the wire mesh.

Cornell was so like Dickinson in ways that must have resonated passionately with the artist. Both never to marry, both to live in their family homes (their cloisters), both to treat "ideas like stars", and create art from the intensity with which they viewed the world around them, the world beyond their windows. It was said that Dickinson lived out the adult years of her life only wearing white, and jotting down her enigmatic verse on small scraps of paper, like the two pieces snipped and resting in the bottom of this "box."