Cornell’s Little Boxes

Diane Waldman’s Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams  traces the artist’s career through the assemblages of found art, toys, and images he created.  While structured to explore Cornell’s life through the major themes of his work, Waldman returns to Conrell’s interest in technology and its connection to his perceptions of the past and the nature of art.

Cornell tried to recreate a dreamlike version of the past and a romanticized picture of art.  Technology, for Cornell, became part of both cultural and personal memory and his work tried to capture the original sense of wonder that accompanied each advance in photography and film.  He used blue- and amber-tinted glass to give some of his assemblages the appearance of daguerreotypes

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Early film fascinated Cornell, who used the repetition of images to suggest the serial photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Easkins, and created dioramas that resembled the wondrous silent movies of George Melies.

Cornell’s fascination can best be described as technological nostalgia–the same spirit that keeps vinyl LP collections going, the same spirit that made me giddy when Adventure and other old Atari games were reissued.  Cornell used specific artifacts–such as penny arcade games and dime-store odds and ends–to depict his childhood.  In the case of photography and film-making, the techniques themselves–abstracted from any personal or even meaningful content–became symbols for the past.

Interest in Cornell has grown recently.  In addition to Waldman’s book, Cornell’s work inspired a series of prose poems by Robert Coover, a collection of fiction and poetry edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, and even a Cornell do-it-yourself kit.  Samples of his work can be found at the WebMuseum.