Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination

"Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," opened last week in Washington DC. I put up a few pages about the art exhibit on The Crow’s Nest, but thought I’d zero in on some particular works that might be of special interest to the readers of the Crow’s Voice.

Cornell (1903-1972) collected bits and pieces from junk shops and antique stores and recombined them in collages and box constructions that resemble 3-d collages. The finished pieces can look romantic or funny or very modern, so he’s kind of hard to pin down. He’s often grouped with the Surrealists or Dadaists, such as his friend Marcel Duchamp. And you can see a lot of elements in his work that turn up later in artists like Jasper Johns (repetition and variation) and Andy Warhol (homages to celebrity.)

Cornell also experimented with book forms (the Smithsonian show featured a small accordion-fold book of Cornell’s) and altered books, cutting niches in medical texts or foreign language books to hold objects such as marbles or spools.

In the early 1930s he produced a series of newsletters/almanacs called "Goop Joe’s Poultry Pages," kind of a personal zine to entertain his sister who owned a poultry farm on Long Island. The pages combine newspaper and magazine clippings and photographs with typed text in some of Cornell’s earliest attempts at text collage. There are some great pictures of poultry (and monkeys and moose) but the real charm of Goop Joe’s Poultry Pages is when it verges on the absurd.

Visit the Crow's Nest to read more about the exhibit
http://home.earthlink.net/~sestemont