Cornell is a lot like Darger, in questions of innocence, sexuality, bricorlage, etc but I think that Cornell knew more, was more self concious, less self contained and maybe sadder. Saefer Joher, the novelist, wrote this long peice on him in the gaurdian, and i was literally crying at the end of it. here It continues to shock me, how little his work is held for most people, it seems to be a cult. Speaking of the cult, I found this story first on Metafilter, nad there were several stories about Cornell told, these are my two favourites:
I have deeply mixed feelings about Joseph Cornell as a person. I do love his art. I was introduced to Cornell when I was 11. The person who introduced me had been told by a renowned art collector that "Joseph likes quiche lorraine and little girls". I walked through an unkempt, dimly lit, dismal front room into his kitchen in back. It was well lit and there was another girl washing dishes. She was about 15 or 16 I think. Joseph said she was from the neighborhood and came to help him with housework. I was relieved not to be the only girl there.
I asked to use the bathroom to get away while the quiche was reheated and the grown-ups talked. the bathroom was upstairs and I explored his house quietly then and didn't see anything weird, no dead bodies, lol. That was a relief. Later that day Joseph took us all on a tour of his house with his basement below, an interesting, creative mess that was well organised in its way, full of box-making gear, hardware, paper, trinkets and all sorts of stuff that he put in his boxes. It felt full of energy in that room compared to the sense of depressing neglect in the rest of the house. He also had a large storage place under the eves. It was packed with his work, hundreds of works, a lot of flat images too.
Anyway, over the years I was used to procure Joseph's art, as was my 6 year old sister and another little girl I knew. The adults using us in this way groomed Joseph to some extent in his 'interests' in little girls, fanning the flames by sending him photographs of us and our classmates, enticing him into the city to see us, getting us to speak on the phone with him. Joseph wrote me love letters in which he couched his sexual interest in metaphors. I was told he used the image of a bird for penis and nest for vagina. His letters were full of birds and nests. He gave me a book by Novalis. "HYMNEN AN DIE NACHT (1800), was dedicated to his first great love Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797. Novalis had met her in Weissenfels when she was barely 13". Joseph said he felt a kindred spirit with Novalis.
He never touched me once. His interest was only in this artistic expression. But I felt violated as a child, not only by the person who used me but also by Joseph. Strange to feel violated by letters and collages, not the sort of thing most people could understand or that I could tell anyone.
I truly hated being used in this way and even though I felt his interest in me was pedophilic/ephebophilic I grew attached to him over the years, felt sad he was being used as well. I accompanied him to his first exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum walked with him in Central Park, made collages for him and made a small box for a Christmas present for him the year he died, which I asked be put on his grave.
When Deborah Soloman came out with her book in 1997 I phoned her and said that Joseph wasn't such an innocent child fetishist as he seemed and she said she knew that. I asked her why she hadn't written about his pedophilia more explicitly in her book and she said had tried and came as close as possible to detailing what she knew. She said there was an uproar by the art critics and her editors when she tried to be more complete about it. She said the art world wanted to perceive Joseph as an innocent because his images appear that way and bring up that kind of child-like wonder in people. I think it's possible to experience that wonder in Joseph's art and also know his dark side. A more informed wonder.
Anyway, all the art that Joseph made for me was taken away and sold, except one birthday collage of an owl, which I sold in 1976 for $6000. That's the money I used to leave America and go to live in India for a decade. I've always been grateful to Joseph for that.
Nyky Shye
Back in the middle '90s, I did some computer work, some word processing and accounting, for an extremely rich woman. The ex-wife of a major American publishing magnate, she lived in a vast apartment on York Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
She was also a bit of a nut case, a bit Collyer Brothers. Despite living in a 17 room apartment, there was random junk and newspapers and cosmetics and God knows what else scattered all over the joint. Complete disorganization.
So she set me up in a little unused room with a card table covered by a table cloth, and the computer, and a chair, and gave me the stuff she wanted me to do.
She left the room, and I sat down at my desk to start working. Suddenly, my foot bumped against something on the floor under the table. I reached down, and pulled up what I thought was a small carboard box, around 10" square.
But it wasn't a cardboard box. It was an original Joseph Cornell diorama, signed and dated on the back and everything. It was beautiful, it had a little glass window on the front, and a collage of birds, clouds and clock faces inside.
An original Joseph Cornell. On the floor with some other junk. Under a table.
I was dumbfounded, and fascinated. Of course for a moment I thought about how completely easy it would be to just take it home; she seemed to have no awareness or interest in it at all. But seeing it was worth about $30K, I realized it might be a better idea just to leave it alone (an understatement). So I set it up on my table, and looked at it with pleasure all the way through my assignment there.
Nicholas West
Four Favourite Cornell Works:
1 comment:
The author of that post is NickySkye, not Nyky Shye.
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