DOCSLIB.ORG

Performing Joseph Cornell's Chronotopes of Assemblage Sarah Kathryn Jackson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Performing Joseph Cornell's Chronotopes of Assemblage Sarah Kathryn Jackson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Jsarah1@Lsu.Edu Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2014 Performing Joseph Cornell's chronotopes of assemblage Sarah Kathryn Jackson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Jackson, Sarah Kathryn, "Performing Joseph Cornell's chronotopes of assemblage" (2014). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3574. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3574 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. PERFORMING JOSEPH CORNELL’S CHRONOTOPES OF ASSEMBLAGE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Collage in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies by Sarah Kathryn Jackson B.S., Southern Illinois University, 2006 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2009 May 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people that have helped to make this project possible. I am so grateful for all of the guidance and support. I am truly lucky to have you in my life. First of all to my advisor, my friend, and my mentor, Patricia Suchy. I do not have the words to thank you. I could not have completed this process without your encouragement and wisdom. Thank you for teaching me the importance and magical potentials in embarking on a creative dissertation, showing me that attention to detail and patience pays off. I have learned so much from working with you and am so grateful to be in the same field with you. I owe you all of the gratitude I have. To Tracy Shaffer and Ruth Bowman for their commitment and guidance through this process. Ruth, thank you for taking time from your retirement to be on my committee. Tracy, thank you for taking time from your sabbatical to sit on my committee. I have learned a great deal from both of you over the years both personally and professionally. I can’t thank you enough for supporting me. And, thank you to Susan Ryan and Elsie Michie for sitting on my committee. Thank you to Craig Gingrich-Philbrook who opened my eyes to the power of performance and who has been there for me over all of these years and seen me grow from a young undergraduate into who I am today. I will forever be grateful for the day I decided to my first class with you. To my friends, my comrades, my partners in crime: Raquel Polanco, Rebecca Walker, Benjamin Haas, Travis Brisini, Emily Graves, Ben Powell, Brianne Waychoff, Holley Vaughn, John LeBret, Jade Huell, Ariel Gratch, Lindsay Michalik, Mollye Deloach, Vince Celluci, Pierre ii Cazaubon, Danielle McGeough, Derek Mudd, Brian Leslie, Lisa Flanagan, and Brandon Nicholas. And to all of my SIU friend’s past and present. You all are the best people I know. Thank you to my Métaphysique cast for helping me create our beautiful and bizarre show. To all of my SIU friends who helped create Craig’s magical staging of Métaphysique. To my family for their unbelievable support. Thank you Mom and Dad for your unconditional love and encouragement. I continue to realize how lucky I am to have you as my parents. Thank you for being in my corner no matter what. To my brothers: Ben and Kristian. You are the best big brothers a girl could ask for. Thank you for being my role models and letting me call you at all hours to ask you for advice, listening to me whine, making me laugh, and always encouraging me. To my sister-in-law, Alecia, and my almost sister-in-law Alexis for being amazing, strong, and kind women. And, to my grandfathers, Papa Dewey and Grandpa Jackson. Their value of education, kindness, and perseverance motivated me as a young girl and still motivates me today. I have felt your warm, encouraging presence over these years. To Chris Shipman: my love, my Man Friday. You gave me love and tenderness when I needed it. You helped me to keep my chin up, my eyes to the future, and always reminded me of the magic I felt the first time I saw a Cornell box in person throughout the whole process. I could have never done this without you. As Stevie Nicks would say, “You are the poet of my heart.” To Jack, Adele, and George for their quiet encouragement and talent for making me laugh. And finally, to the soon to be newest member of our little family, Finnegan. She doesn’t know it yet, but she gave me the final push of motivation I needed to get this project done and make it something I’m proud of. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER ONE: AN INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................1 Joseph Cornell’s Creative Biography ......................................................................4 General Artistic Influences and Approaches ...........................................................5 Bakhtin’s Chronotope ............................................................................................13 The Chronotope of Product versus the Chronotopes of Performance ...................14 Cornell’s Assemblage Chronotopes .......................................................................16 Map of Chapters .....................................................................................................22 Significance ............................................................................................................26 Limitations .............................................................................................................28 CHAPTER TWO: THE WANDERING CHRONOTOPE ................................................30 Wandering as Aesthetic Practice ...........................................................................31 From Creative Inspiration to Aesthetic Practice ....................................................35 Poetically Engaging the City .................................................................................36 Wandering: Place and Memory .............................................................................39 Immortalization of Place and Memory through Film ............................................43 Cornell and Creative Cartography .........................................................................46 CHAPTER THREE: GRAMMAR OF THE LEGS ..........................................................49 Wandering New Orleans .........................................................................................50 Collaging Memory ..................................................................................................63 CHAPTER FOUR: THE ARCHIVING CHRONOTOPE ................................................72 The Archiving Chronotope ....................................................................................73 Theorizing the Archive ..........................................................................................74 Cornell’s Archives .................................................................................................76 Dynamic Archiving or the Archive at Play ............................................................84 CHAPTER FIVE: THE FILMIC AND DIGITAL ARCHIVE .........................................88 Film as Ephemeral Archive ...................................................................................88 The Digital Archive ...............................................................................................93 Nebula: The Powdered Sugar Princess ..................................................................94 CHAPTER SIX: THE COLLAGING CHRONOTOPE ..................................................102 Time and Space in Film .......................................................................................103 Cornell as Film Enthusiast ...................................................................................108 Cornell as Film Collector .....................................................................................109 Cornell as Filmmaker ...........................................................................................114 Film Scenarios .....................................................................................................114 The Collage Films ................................................................................................115 iv Cornell’s Collage Process ....................................................................................123 The Heterochronotopicity of Cornell’s Collage Films ........................................124 CHAPTER SEVEN: SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE .................................................126 CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ASSEMBLAGE CHRONOTOPE .........................................136 Theorizing Assemblage .......................................................................................136 Assemblage Performance .....................................................................................138 Métaphysique d’Éphemera: A Performance Inspired by Joseph Cornell ............141 Assembling the Performance
Load more

Recommended publications
  • With Dada and Pop Art Influence
    With Dada and Pop Art Influence The non-art movement • 1916-1923 • Reaction to the horror of World War I • Artists were mostly French and German. They took refuge in neutral Switzerland. • They were angry at the European society that had allowed the war to happen. • Dada was a form of protest. • It’s intention was to provoke and shock The name “Dada” was chosen because it was nonsensical. They wanted a name that made the least amount of sense. • They used any public forum to spit on: nationalism rationalism materialism and society in general Mona Lisa with a Mustache “The Fountain” “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” George Groz “Remember Uncle Augustus the Unhappy Inventor”(collage) Raoul Hausmann “ABCD” (collage) Merit Oppenheim “Luncheon in Fur” Using pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them Artist use borrowed elements in their creation of a new work • Dada self-destructed when it was in danger of becoming “acceptable.” • The Dada movement and the Surrealists have influenced many important artists. Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) became one of the most famous artists to use assemblage. His work is both surreal and poetic. A 3-D form of using "found" objects arranged in such a way that they create a piece of art. The Pop American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, uses assemblage, painting, printmaking and collage in his work. He is directly influenced by the Dada-ists. “Canyon” “Monogram” “Bed” “Coca-cola Plan” “Retroactive” • These artist use borrowed elements in their creation to make a new work of art! • As long as those portions of copyrighted works are used to create a completely new and different work of art it was OK.
    [Show full text]
  • Artist Resources – Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-72)
    Artist Resources – Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-72) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum “Everything meant something to him, and everything was about his work, and everything was special. I mean, he was someone who used things in his work that were sometimes esoteric and sometimes ordinary, but in either case once his glance hit it, it was special,” reflected Harry Roseman, Cornell’s studio assistant in a 1999 interview about his first meeting and studio memories with Cornell. “One thing about being there and knowing him and being with him is this: in how we respond to things we have a choice as to whether to keep our self- conscious coolness and our analytical ability or to go with something. To suspend disbelief. It's a kind of faith, in a sense.” 177 of Cornell’s creations were on view in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2007 retrospective. In 2014, Christie’s auctioned a stellar collection of Cornell box constructions owned by prominent Chicago art collectors Ed and Lindy Cornell, ca. 1940 Bergman. The auction house details the pieces in-depth in a video interview with scholars. London’s Royal Academy celebrated Cornell’s fanciful constructions in the 2015 exhibition, Wanderlust. Over 80 boxes, assemblages, and collages were brought together with the artist’s films to explore his love of nature and dreams of travel. Digital resources include a series of podcasts in which scholars discuss Cornell’s creative identity and his relationship to Surrealism; and a photo tour of Cornell’s studio with curator Sarah Lea.
    [Show full text]
  • California Modernism After World War Ii
    1 CALIFORNIA MODERNISM AFTER WORLD WAR II So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. JACK KEROUAC, ON THE ROAD POSTWAR EXCHANGES Most historical accounts of cultural and artistic developments in the United States after World War II have offered little information about trends affecting artists across the country. In the rush to figure out who did what first and to locate it geographically—usu - ally in New York— the historians have ignored the fluid interchanges between the two coasts, and cultural opportunities offered on either of them in these postwar years.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph Cornell: Films
    Joseph Cornell: Films Joseph Cornell: Rose Hobart What Cornell’s movies are is the essence of a home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. […] The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible unless you look for them. — Jonas Mekas, “The Invisible Cathedrals of Joseph Cornell,” The Village Voice, December 31, 1970. Reprinted in Jonas Mekas: Movie Journal. Joseph Cornell was an artist fascinated by the innocent yet profound spectacle of The Movies: by the pleasures and mysteries afforded by the trick- film, by the exotic travelogue and by the untouchable beauty of the Hollywood starlet. While this deep appreciation of cinema is reflected in his collages and otherworldly box constructions, Cornell’s own work with film—largely unscreened during his lifetime—remains underappreciated to this day. Yet, with his childlike wonder, nostalgic appreciation for found footage, and sophisticated sense of montage, Joseph Cornell’s film work has proven highly influential on later generations of filmmakers. On the occasion of Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, San Francisco Cinematheque and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art present Joseph Cornell: Films, a rare opportunity to see the film work of this master collagist
    [Show full text]
  • KATHARINE CONLEY August 2020
    KATHARINE CONLEY August 2020 Modern Languages & Literatures 21 Sussex Court William and Mary Williamsburg, VA 23188 PO Box 8795 (757) 645-3876 Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795 (603) 443-2462 (cell) [email protected] ACADEMIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS Professor of French and Francophone Studies, William and Mary, 7/12- Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William and Mary 7/12-6/20 Edward Tuck Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth, 7/10-6/12 Professor of French, Dartmouth College, 7/04-6/12, Emerita 7/12- Associate Professor of French, Dartmouth College, 7/98 - 6/04 Assistant Professor of French, Dartmouth College, 7/92 - 6/98 EDUCATION Virginia Women’s Senior Leadership Seminar 2015-16 Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, June 2014 PhD French, University of Pennsylvania, May 1992 Honorary MA, Dartmouth College, 2007 MA French, University of Pennsylvania, 1990; MA French, University of Colorado, 1988 BA cum laude, Harvard-Radcliffe University, 1979 (major: honors English) AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND INSTITUTES (since 1992) Phi Beta Kappa, Dartmouth College, June 2009 Jacobus Family Fellowship, Dartmouth College, 2004-2005 Senior Faculty Fellowship, Dartmouth College, Winter-Spring 2005 J. Kenneth Huntington Memorial Award, Dartmouth College, June 2004 Whiting Foundation Travel Grant: Summer 1996 Humanities Institute on Cultural Memory and the Present, Spring 1996 Junior Faculty Fellowship, Dartmouth College, Winter-Spring 1996 School of Criticism and Theory, June-July 1995 Burke Research Initiation Grant, Dartmouth College: 1992-1995 PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS Books and Edited Volumes: Author: Surrealist Ghostliness. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Katharine Conley / 2 Author: Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life.
    [Show full text]
  • Art 150: Introduction to the Visual Arts David Mccarthy Rhodes College, Spring 2003 414 Clough, Ext
    Art 150: Introduction to the Visual Arts David McCarthy Rhodes College, Spring 2003 414 Clough, Ext. 3663 417 Clough, MWF 11:30-12:30 Office Hours: MWF 2:00- 4:00, and by appointment. COURSE OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION The objectives of the course are as follows: (1) to provide students with a comprehensive, theoretical introduction to the visual arts; (2) to develop skills of visual analysis; (3) to examine various media used by artists; (4) to introduce students to methods of interpretation; and (5) to develop skills in writing about art. Throughout the course we will keep in mind the following two statements: Pierre Auguste Renoir’s reminder that, “to practice an art, you must begin with the ABCs of that art;” and E.H. Gombrich’s insight that, “the form of representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given language gains currency.” Among the themes and issues we will examine are the following: balance, shape and form, space, color, conventions, signs and symbols, representation, reception, and interpretation. To do this we will look at many different types of art produced in several historical epochs and conceived in a variety of media. Whenever possible we will examine original art objects. Art 150 is a foundation course that serves as an introduction for further work in studio art and art history. A three-hour course, Art 150 satisfies the fine arts requirement. Enrollment is limited to first- and second-year students who are not expected to have had any previous experience with either studio or art history.
    [Show full text]
  • SPARKINGS | the New Yorker
    SPARKINGS | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/sparkings A Critic at Large February 17 & 24, 2003 Issue SPARKINGS Joseph Cornell and the art of nostalgia. By Adam Gopnik he monosyllables of condescension form at the back of the throat and T 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 1 of 14 12/15/17, 2:52 PM SPARKINGS | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/sparkings part of the living body of art, which is what happens when artists eat it.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • Wangechi Mutu (March 10 A.M.), 2009 a FANTASTIC JOURNEY Gelatin Silver Photograph, N ASHER MUSEUM of ART at 1 19 ⁄2 X 15 In
    THE INT ERNATIONAL R EVI EW OF A FRI CAN A MERI CAN A R T TRIPLE Ebony Patterson’s CONSCIOUSNESS: Dancehall Politics Diasporic Art in María Magdalena the American Campos-Pons: Context Portfolio Ivory Coast’s Biennale Debut VOL.24 NO.3A | 2013 REVIEWS LaToya Ruby Frazier Self-Portrait Wangechi Mutu (March 10 a.m.), 2009 A FANTASTIC JOURNEY gelatin silver photograph, N ASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT 1 19 ⁄2 x 15 in. D UKE UNIVERSITY Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum D URHAM, NORTH CAROLINA M ARCH 21–JULY 21, 2013 Play and politics are constantly writhing just beneath the surface in Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Though the title brings to mind associations of 1960s and 70s sci- fi, Wangechi Mutu’s Afro-futurist worlds forego phallic space rockets and clunky robots for a darker and deeply feminist terrain. Her collages, sculptures, drawings, and films are populated with powerful female bodies that cross between worlds and span generations. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu’s educa- tional drive brought her to earn a BFA at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and an MFA in sculpture at Yale University. Though she is best known for her collages, Mutu’s full artistic genealogy is represented in A Fantastic Journey, which is a mid-career survey. Sculptural elements installed throughout the exhibition bind the show together. In particular, felt cloth is used throughout the gallery, as wall coverings and sculptural formations. sites, including the local hospital over the daughter. It was not surprising to learn One of Mutu’s iconic transformative fe- course of its final years.
    [Show full text]
  • The Encrypted Object: the Secret World of Sixties Sculpture
    Title Page The Encrypted Object: The Secret World of Sixties Sculpture Joanne Louise Applin University College London PhD nL ABSTRACT This thesis examines the work of artists Lucas Samaras,Lee Bontecou and HC Westermann, specifically the way in which they have been excluded from dominant accounts of 1960s sculptural practice. I explore the ways in which a theory of 'secrecy' provides a framework through which to think about each of these artists. Chapter one focuses on Samaras's use of small-scale boxes in relation to his dialogue with the Minimal cubic structure, whilst the second chapter examines the structures of Bontecou in terms of their 'secrecy'. Working from welded steel armatures, Bontecou developed a unique practice of stretching dirty, worn skeins of fabric over the metal structure, always with a gaping hole backed with black felt, a disturbing void (MA around which the surface is organised and the spectatorial encounter disturbed. Unlike the voracious mode of looking Bontecou's works engender, or the partial, fragmented 'peering' offered by Samaras's boxes, Westermann's works require a type of looking that has more in common with the physical act of 'drifting'. I cast both the viewing experience and the mode of construction Westermann's works demand, in terms of 'bricolage' and 'braconnage' (or 'poaching). The concluding chapter analyses the role of the artistic homage and notion of influence, taking as model the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on haunting and secrecy in relation to the work of Westermann alongside that of Bruce Nauman and Rachel Whiteread. In chapter four I introduce the idea of the 'phantom, as a way of thinking through the problems of inheritance at work in the artistic homage in terms of a series of ruptures, using Abraham and Toroks' concept of the 'transgenerational phantom', in which familial secretsare unwittingly inherited by one's ancestors.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph Cornell Book Release
    * JOSEPH CORNELL* NOVEMBER 17. 1980 JANUARY 20, 1981 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 11 WEST 53 STREET, NEW YORK 10019 956-7501 NU. 61 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MUSEUM TO PUBLISH JOSEPH CORNELL VOLUME IN CONJUNCTION WITH EXHIBITION Joseph Cornell, a broad critical survey of the artist's life and work, will be published in conjunction with The Museum of Modern Art's major exhibition of the same title, on view from November 17, 1980 through January 20, 1981. An introduction by Kynaston McShine and essays by Dawn Ades, Carter Ratcliff, P. Adams Sitney and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, as well as some 32 color and more than 300 black-and- white illustrations of Cornell's constructions and collages, comprise the 296-page catalog. It will be available in the Museum shops in November. Kynaston McShine, director of the exhibition and general editor of the catalog, has written "Introducing Mr. Cornell," in which he describes Cornell's boxes as "reliquaries for the fragment, the souvenir, the talis­ man; ... evocations of hotel chambers, the Grand Tour of Europe, palaces, constellations, and sea journeys." McShine is Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, co-editor of Marcel Duchamp (1973) and editor of The Natural Paradise (1976), both published to accompany The Museum of Modern Art's exhibitions. Cornell's relationship to other 20th-century artists, particularly his early connection to the Surrealists, is analyzed in Dawn Ades' essay entitled "The Transcendental Surrealism of Joseph Cornell." Dawn Ades is a Lecturer at the University of Essex (Colchester) in England and a widely published art historian.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph Cornell
    EN Joseph Cornell 20 OCTOBER 2015 TO 10 JANUARY 2016 »What kind of man is this, who, from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century ›grand tour‹ of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s look on a certain morning of AD 79, and of the cast- iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne? How could he have made that work under the cir- cumstances in which he did? This is a real miracle. His work forces you to use the word ›beautiful‹. What more do you want?« The artist Robert Motherwell on Joseph Cornell, New York, 1953 INTRODUCTION Joseph Cornell was one of the most extraor- explores Cornell’s relationship with the con- TO THE dinary artists of the twentieth century. This tinent of Europe, his deep knowledge and un- EXHIBITION exhibition, which marks the first time that his derstanding of its culture, history and geog- work is presented in Austria, traces the full raphy, and his relationships with many of its arc of his remarkable life and career. It pre- key personalities from the fields of science, sents many of his most important works from natural history, philosophy, astronomy, liter- museums and private collections, including ature, ballet, opera, theatre, music, cinema several that have travelled to Europe for the and art. The exhibition’s title is a nod to his first time. restless imagination and ability to travel met- Born in 1903, Cornell could not draw, paint, aphorically through both time and place.
    [Show full text]