The resulting hybrid, part shrine and part game, manages to appear simultaneously commonplace and exotic. This gizmo looks like it ought to do something, but what? Cornell said he aimed to honor Bacall with a “portrait of a machine that belongs in a penny arcade-as genuinely as American as herself-but one with a shiny clean look, fumigated of Hollywood booze, cigarette smoke and slow-motion mugging.”
In that quote, as critic Dickran Tashjian points out in “Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire” (144 pages. Grassfield Press, Miami Beach. $45), Cornell has supplied a clue: he aims to pay homage. Cornell, who was born on Christmas Eve, loved giving gifts. As Tashjian observes, “Cornell sensed that a gift had the power to join donor and recipient together in mutual desire.”
There was a lot of stage-door Johnny in Cornell, who carried a torch for a string of actresses and dancers, from Lois Smith to Allegra Kent. Most of them he worshiped from afar, and sometimes very far. A fair number of this lifelong bachelor’s inamoratas were dancers from the 19th century, such as Cleo de Merode. The compleat “secret admirer,” he lived chastely with his mother and invalid brother in a modest house in Queens, N.Y., where he worked in the basement like some squirrelly inventor. He liked movie stars, too. He confessed to seeing Hedy Lamarr in “Come Live With Me” five times. But out of his infatuations he managed to kindle visionary works. With gift-giving, or homage, as their common theme, works that feature everyone from the photographer Lee Miller to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria begin to come a little more into focus. And even a little is a big help with this extraordinarily elusive artist.
Cornell, who died in 1972 at 69, was one of the true odd socks of American art. Though an heir of the French symbolists and a lodge brother of the surrealists, he was always a cat who walked by himself. While his example has inspired a host of collagists and constructionists, he looks even more unique with the passage of time.
Part Victorian shadow box, part reliquary, part Barnum sideshow, a Cornell box joins disparate objects that, once united by his organizing genius, achieve mysterious consonance. He furnished his boxes with objects scavenged from Manhattan junk shops and thrift stores. He was particularly fond of children’s toys-rubber balls’ dolls, wooden blocks-but his use of these objects, while often nostalgic, is never innocent. On the contrary, much of Cornell’s work is disturbingly erotic and frequently sinister.
In “Dime-Store Alchemy” (77 pages. Ecco Press. $19.95), the poet Charles Simic supplies an enlightening analogy: “If you love watching movies from the middle on, Cornell is your director.” A collection of prose poems, his book is the literary equivalent of a Cornell box. It includes poems inspired by specific Cornell works as well as poems that speak directly of Cornell’s artistry. Part poet, part critic and part fan, Simic makes many shrewd, imaginative connections, as when he writes of the box containing the portrait of a Medici prince, part of a series that Cornell called “Medici Slot Machines.” “The name enchants, and so does the idea-the juxtaposition of the Renaissance boy, the penny arcade, and the Photomat in the subway … A poetry slot machine offering a jackpot of incommensurable meanings activated by our imagination.”
Plainly homages to Cornell’s memory, both Simic and Tashjian’s books double as gifts to their readers. But it is Simic who takes the prize. His poems do not merely explicate Cornell, they match the old magpie’s creations. When he writes, “All things are interrelated … unsuspected revelations await us around the next corner,” he is describing not only Cornell, but his own work as well.
