Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 –
December 29, 1972) was an American artist and film maker, one of the
pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by
the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.
He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised
his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded
artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation,
cared for his parents and his disabled brother at home, but remained
aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
Cornell's most characteristic art works
were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple
shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged
eclectic fragments of photographs or Victorian bric a brac, in a way
that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively
fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici
Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.Like
Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace.
Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage,
and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious
objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift
stores of New York. His boxes relied on the Surrealist use of
irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for
their appeal.
Cornell never regarded himself as a
Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists
like Max Ernst and René Magritte, he disavowed the Surrealists'
"black magic", claiming that he only wished to make white
magic with his art..Cornell's fame as the leading American
"Surrealist" allowed him to befriend several members of the
Surrealist movement when they settled in the United States during the
Second World War. Later he was claimed as a herald of pop art and
installation art.
Cornell often made series of boxed
assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble
Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the
Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Object Boxes,
among others. Also captivated with birds, Cornell created an Aviary
series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were
mounted on wood, cut out, and set against harsh white backgrounds.
In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his "penny arcade" portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well-read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.His methodology is described in a monograph by Charles Simic as:Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion....:14 Marcel Duchamp and John Cage use chance operation to get rid of the subjectivity of the artist. For Cornell it's the opposite. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.:61.Cornell was heavily influenced by the American Transcendentalists, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Gérard de Nerval, and 19th-century ballet dancers such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito.Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment