Joseph Cornell: discovery and reinterpretation

ARTWALK

SELF-CONSCIOUS DESIGN has penetrated our lives so deeply that even the most intricately designed objects are discarded with ease. Very little remains precious. Just thinking of the genius of Joseph Cornell, then, is overwhelming.

Throughout the West, Joseph Cornell, dead now for 33 years, is being revived and acknowledged for his brilliant work, and his quiet, quirky cycles of discovery and creation.

No wonder then that one of the country's most important museums, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, has recently inaugurated a major retrospective dedicated to this remembered-again hero.

Cornell worked somewhat like a taxidermist. He picked up what others considered lifeless and discard-worthy and pumped them with a new spirit. In his process too, he was reputed to have been highly organised, classifying objects into types and storing them neatly till he needed them.

He never tired resuscitating what he found: he simply re-interpreted it in a new context. So you might recognise the object, but you were bound to think of it differently. Part of the reason for this was that he created elaborate boxes, which simultaneously framed and elevated the assemblages he would painstakingly make.

One of the many untitled works is one of a large rosy-white cockatoo with face dials arranged like a grid all around the space. Under them, some kind of an electronic device (an alarm clock from the 1960s?) lies in its own allocated niche.

What world is Cornell creating? Perhaps he parodied the interiors of plush homes, with exotic pets and souvenirs from time zones all around the world. Arranged as cut outs, the three-dimensionality emphasises the spatial concerns he had: the room, the interior and its outward façade reappear constantly.

This is not very surprising, because Cornell, a New Yorker born there in 1903, would have seen this pulsating city becoming home to fleeing and visiting artists from everywhere. He probably also imagined the many dozens of studios, many dozens of homes "" the aspiring artist, the accomplished artist and their patrons in this newly adopted city of theirs.

But the boxes frame fantasies as well. Cornell's imagination is the life-force of his works. He allows his mind to guide him to its deepest crevices, uninhibited. What we get out of this is a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Max Ernst.

His work, "Tilly Losch", from 1935, epitomises this, as a giant doll-like girl calmly and even motionlessly descends upon snow-capped mountains in a parachute-cum-sleigh.

It's surreal, bizarre and just a fragment of a story. Who knows? Perhaps that is Alice finding her way to Wonderland without having to squeeze through a rabbit hole? We'll never know, because Cornell mummifies that moment.

If the city itself is present, so is the larger cosmos, and nature itself. Globes, maps, the planetary system, allusions to natural history "" all these figure prominently in his works. He links himself, the artist, with the larger world and its many truisms.

Given how much science was progressing, and changing the very fabric of life, not to mention art making, this reference is as much of an anchor as an exploration.

This and many other works were created from things discarded by people. The compelling power of his works overshadows this fact frequently.

In an everyday life where we know that the seemingly intricately hand-made goods are mass produced in China, there is even less value ascribed to discards. It's as if they deserve to be discarded. Joseph Cornell warns us against our own contemptuous blindness to the stories worn-out objects and materials can potentially carry with them.