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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The monosyllables of condescension form at the back of the throat and hover in the staging space just before the lips: "twee," "fey," "camp," even "cute." The art under inspection, after all, has that form technically called mushy stuff in syrup: old French hotel ads and stuffed birds and soap-bubble pipes hermetically sealed behind glass, evoking vanished Victorian worlds of Curiosity Shops and steamer trunks and natural-history-museum displays of long-refuted principles. They ought to have dated; they ought to date; they are, in a way, about being dated. And yet something keeps the visitor locked in place, looking, and turns his mind to the warmer, though still not quite satisfying, words of romantic praise: "haunting," "mysterious," "dreamy," "sublime."
The objects that cause this odd rhythm of stop and look and stop to think again are the shadow boxes that the American artist Joseph Cornell constructed for forty years in the basement of his mother's house on Utopia Parkway, in Queens. This year is the centenary of Cornell's birth, and his boxes continue to hold their own in the American imagination. Since his death, in 1972, it is not so much that Cornell's fame has grown, which is what happens when critics water a reputation, as that his work has become part of the living body of art, which is what happens when artists eat it. It was strange to find how big a part Cornell played in the imaginations of young artists during the nineteen-eighties, when the Abstract Expressionist painters, for so long more central and cosmopolitan, seemed irrelevant, stagy, and stuffy, and when even the autistic genius of Warhol seemed to belong to a Beaux-Arts past, with its faith in painted things stuck on a wall.
Only Pollock, of the artists of the great or big generation, seems today as large as Cornell. The Cornell literature, which can get very literary (a clue, perhaps, to his popularity), continues to grow: he has already been the subject of a fine biography, Deborah Solomon's 1997 "Utopia Parkway," and in the past two years there has been a new, illustrated life, by Diane Waldman, and an elaborately produced collection of literary tributes, edited by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and called "A Convergence of Birds." (Last year, there were two gallery shows, one of collages at C & M Arts, and one, extended through this winter, at the Allan Stone Gallery.) Cornell's small art looms so large, in fact, that one is occasionally inclined to take the side of the big boys against the recluse, just as there must still be a Longfellow fan out there who has heard quite enough about Emily Dickinson, thank you. It does look twee, or at least awfully easy. Cornell, like his beloved Saint-Exupery, gets the mushy-stuff pass that only one or two artists per generation are permitted. Art critics and historians try to solve this problem by searching for the conventional signs of avant-garde reassurance--you see, his boxes are really boxes, you know, primary structures, with, like, appropriated ironies inside--and by making his art into yet another mock-in-the-box. Yet no one has ever really looked at it as anything but desperately sincere. The mushy bits, the parrots and constellations, are, beyond all argument, the potent bits.
It is in the biographies and, particularly, in the diaries and letters that have been published in the past decade that a sense of the man emerges. When you read Cornell while staring at his art, two words eventually come to mind and stick there to help explain what makes the art last, makes it matter: "weird" and "real." For weird he was, weirder than we like to admit. A sweetened Cornell has grown up in our memory: an innocent outsider who made his boxes from his reveries about ballerinas, and whose poetic art exists in a state of "childlike wonder." This is not false, exactly, but it is incomplete. The ballerinas and actresses he worshipped, sometimes from very close up, were...
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