The Great and the Small

PREFACE The Great and the Small

“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose this is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments

of heaven.” George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

I remember� the first time I encountered Joseph Cornell. It was 2004, a few months into my sophomore year of college, and the Museum of Modern Art had just reopened in a gleaming building on Fifty-Third Street. Ascending the ziggurat of escalators to the fifth floor, I wandered past paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse before arriving at the gallery dedicated to Surrealism. Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket from 1940 was installed in the corner of a large plexiglass vitrine (figs. P.1, P.2). Just twelve inches wide, this modest box holds a world. Glass cubes shine like diamonds, like the paste necklace draped across the box’s lid, whose rhinestones form an arc of sparkle below a block of blue text. This text tells the tale of the famed nineteenth-century ballet dancer Marie Taglioni (fig. P.3). While traveling on a Russian highway one snowy night in 1835, Taglioni’s carriage was stopped by a bandit. Unfurling a panther’s skin on the icy ground, she proceeded to dance so beautifully that the robber allowed her to leave unmolested, her jewels still in her possession. The story concludes: “From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.” At this moment, Cornell’s work seemed to capture everything I loved about art: its ability to call forth places and times other than my own, its unabashed investment in the magic of the aesthetic encounter. Unlike the painters and sculptors who preceded him in MoMA’s galleries, Cornell eschewed the hallowed mediums of paint, marble, and bronze in favor of altogether more modest materials. Before my eyes, chunks of glass were transformed into gleaming repositories of history and memory, precious as the diamonds they mimic.

01 KWONtext_FINAL_SRS.indd 9 11/11/20 11:31 AM Yet I could not help but notice that Cornell’s work seemed at odds with its companions in the Surrealism gallery, to say nothing of the preceding parade of ambitious paintings and sculptures. The brutality of André Masson’s bloody fishes, battling amongst haphazard passages of sand and gesso; the startling juxtaposition of taxidermy parrot and mannequin leg in Joan Miró’s Object (1936): these works seemed more concerned with shattering illusions than creating them.1 I was not the first to observe Cornell’s incongruity with canonical narratives of Modern art. Deborah Solomon’s popular biography presents Cornell as a hermitic figure who, despite his engagement with New York City culture, remained ensconced in his mother’s basement, lost in dreams.2 When I returned to the artist years later, I found scholars had done much to complicate this stubborn caricature. Their books have detailed Cornell’s engagement with subjects such as astronomy, cinema, childhood, travel, and Surrealism to establish his place in modernity.3 While sympathetic to the aims of these interpreters, I could not help but notice that these accounts remained structured by the dualistic oppositions—between belief and disbelief, ideal and real—that Cornell seemed determined to overcome. Taglioni’s Jewel Casket is after all an expression of the artist’s belief in the incantatory power of the aesthetic

FIG. P.2 Installation view of the exhibition Painting and Sculpture: Inaugural Installation, November 20, 2004–December 31, 2005, with Joseph Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket at bottom left. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

FIG. P.3 Detail of Taglioni’s Jewel Casket.

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01 KWONtext_FINAL_SRS.indd 10 11/11/20 11:31 AM encounter. Cornell was also a lifelong practitioner of Christian Science, a religion devoted to mending what its followers perceive as the false divide between the material and the divine. Why, I wondered, was the price of Cornell’s modernity the abnegation of his most deeply held principles? How did belief become antithetical to intelligence and seriousness? To answer these questions, this book examines Cornell’s work alongside narratives of enchantment in twentieth-century American art. My title is drawn from Max Weber’s infamous description of modernity as the “disenchantment of the world” in his 1918 speech “Science as Vocation.”4 Weber defines disenchantment as modernity’s loss of a higher unifying power, religious or otherwise. An impoverished rationalism arose in its place, wrenching the world into distinct spheres governed by their own internal logic rather than divine law. Weber’s disenchantment thesis describes this loss of faith as the defining condition of modernity. As a believer, both in Christian Science and in nineteenth-century artistic movements that struggled against the world’s perceived disenchantment, Cornell’s work offers a vantage onto the fraught history of enchantment in twentieth-century America.5 Weber’s understanding of modernity as the negation of enchantment has had significant consequences for the way art historians understand the history and ethical stakes of twentieth-century art, for the structural paradox I discerned within the literature on Cornell also describes the epistemic grounding of many art historical accounts of Modernism. Writing in Farewell to an Idea, T. J. Clark states that Weber’s disenchantment thesis “still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best.”6 Rosalind Krauss likewise relies on this model when describing the options open to twentieth-century artists: “Given the absolute rift that had opened between the sacred and the secular,” she asserts, “the modern artist was obviously faced with the necessity to choose between one mode of expression and the other.” Now, Krauss continues, “We find it indescribably embarrassing to mentionart and spirit in the same sentence.”7 Although distinct in aim and approach, Clark and Krauss’s foundational texts share a confidence in disenchantment as a synonym for modernity. In their telling, Modernism was either a doomed struggle against the pernicious contingencies imposed by capitalism, or it gave rise to an avant-garde that sought to demystify modernity’s most unbearable fictions: the subject, the commodity, the sign, and the very idea of “art” itself. Within such narratives, Cornell’s enchantment can only be understood as escapist and antimodern. Despite the best efforts of Cornell scholars, this view of the artist remains stubborn, as evidenced by a 2015 review of the sensitive exhibition Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, titled “Joseph Cornell: How the Reclusive Artist Conquered the Art World—from His Mum’s Basement.”8 Cornell’s distress at this pervasive misprision was such that he ended a close friendship with Robert Motherwell over the painter’s description of him as “withdrawn.”9 And in the late 1960s, Cornell noted acidly, “The preoccupation with my seclusion in the mass media and critiques is based on misconceptions, repeated parrot-like by those who should know better—until it has acquired the semblance of fact.”10 This dogged misconception, and its continued purchase into the present moment, suggests that a new approach is needed. What is required is an investigation of the epistemological structures undergirding the very concept of modernity, and the facile dismissal of belief as a mere evasion of the real.

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01 KWONtext_FINAL_SRS.indd 11 11/11/20 11:31 AM This book explores the stories that people tell themselves to explain the workings of the world and the consequences of these beliefs. What is suppressed by taking Weber’s disenchantment thesis as the definition of modernity? What ways of being are thereby invalidated as antimodern, narcissistic, escapist, or even primitive, when belief in the enchanted dimensions of life are seen as little more than “embarrassing” artifacts of a distant past? Scholars have discussed this issue from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Political theorist Jane Bennett argues that the disenchantment thesis “ignores and then discourages affective attachment” to the world.11 Stanley Cavell describes the philosophical lens of skepticism, or “the Kantian insight that Reason dictates what we mean by a world,” as a turn against “intimacy with existence” toward “skepticism’s despair of the world.”12 Cornell sought this intimacy, this attachment to the world, however imperfect it may be. Glimpsing a worn suitcase bathed in sunlight, he wrote, “The thought became clear of taking something, something beautiful from a tragic or frustrated life and doing something with it—a system that can be applied to all my work.”13 In her oft-cited essay on paranoid and reparative reading, Eve Sedgwick gets closest to what I understand as the larger stakes of this book. Given the still-prevalent academic impulse to demystify ideological illusions, what do we make of the writers and artists, Cornell included, who attempt to find resources and richness in a fallen world rather than subject it to critique? “What we can best learn from such practices are,” Sedgwick writes, “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”14 To invoke Robert Rauschenberg’s still-potent truism about his desire to exist in the gap between art and life, Cornell asks us to reconsider what we mean by “life.”

Cornell’s persistent patina of otherness—his perceived lack of fit with canonical art historical � narratives—offers an opportunity to consider these questions. It is only from the vantage of those seen as apart from society’s normative structures that we can apprehend the deepest beliefs and fears of a cultural moment.15 To be sure, Cornell was far from an outsider to New York City culture: his circle of interlocutors and collaborators included Julien Levy, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Lincoln Kirstein, Marcel Duchamp, and Robert Motherwell, among many others. Yet his lifelong residence in Queens with his mother and brother, his presumed status as a “self-taught” Surrealist, and his singular artistic preoccupations also set him apart. Cornell’s liminal position between “inside” and “outside” elucidates the construction and instability of these categories at midcentury, throwing into relief all that society was and was not willing to tolerate within its ambit. Following Cornell’s conviction that the most powerful things are best apprehended from the vantage of the small, the overlooked, and the ostensibly unserious, this book focuses on the life and work of a single artist. I understand this intensive focus as expanding, rather than narrowing, my field of inquiry: for me, the best art history grounds abstract questions in the specifics of works of art and in the lives of the people who made and encountered them. Cornell

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01 KWONtext_FINAL_SRS.indd 12 11/11/20 11:31 AM reminds me that a single speck of glitter, a single shard of wood, a single life, can reveal more about the world than the grand, abstract narratives that have been used to make sense of it. Of course history and theory, to name two such narratives, are crucial to apprehending the intellectual and artistic texture of Cornell’s world. Rather than opposing such necessary connective tissue to the intimacy valued by Cornell, we might better think of aesthetic form and historical context as different scales of experience—imbricated and related, but not identical. Although biography remains unfashionable in histories of modern and contemporary art, hewing too close for many to the valorization of individual artistic genius, I nonetheless turn to biography not to decode Cornell’s work, but because I am interested in what it felt like to live as a particular person, with a particular set of beliefs, during a particular moment in time.16 I am interested in how people have survived in the face of suffering and have continued to find meaning in the world despite its overwhelming imperfection. Although this ambition may seem minor or apolitical, I believe that the intense care required to achieve it, and the concomitant acknowledgment that one will never truly recover the fullness of another’s experience, constitutes an ethical posture toward the world, one grounded in intimacy and modesty rather than mastery. The diminutive size of Cornell’s work requests our intimacy, and when we consent to provide it, something miraculous happens. As we move closer, lean in, look inside, his work expands to fill our vision. Sequins become stars; grains of sand expand into vast beaches. Works of art become cosmos. If this is a book about small things in a vast world, it is also an account of the way these things might contain a world—if only for a moment.

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