Joseph Cornell – Navigating the Imagination

2.
Echoes the imagined memories that time eclipses

III.
Like the ballerina as the snow angel
on a field of blue glass
caught in the pipe of a dream(scape)
A moment captured in dioramatic solitude
the word (or is it the world) recedes into the floating space between
the ice cube footlights of the stars

Prologue.
When my old (and lost) friend, Stephen Bickford, introduced me to Surrealism, Dada and the art of collage in college, it opened up a whole new vista of art for me. I had really only been to Europe once at that point in my life and had only just begun to discover and explore the whole universe of art. Now, this was something new and more mysterious than almost anything I had ever encountered. Europe at nineteen had been a novice at the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Sistine Chapel, the David at the Accademia, the National Gallery in London, Westminster Abbey – in other words, the old world of classics and masters. A great beginning and a great education which I would never trade, but to discover the avant-garde, the absurd and the sublime, well, this was something that I have never stopped exploring and being fascinated with.

1.
A museum is a box of found objects
the ephemera of curiosity
like a rose as spider web as the sail of a schooner

Four.
has Andromeda risen to the sun
bathed in the stars of 50,000 years ago
or frozen in a dovecote
are the stars the same 50,000 years from now

Prologue Too.
The world is an ever evolving continuum of time, space, memory, objects that are interrelated and have no relationship to one another except as how they are re-imagined and reconfigured by the artist.

Art as isolated engagement with the world, where the world produces and the artist reduces and re-uses. The artist as environmentalist, concerned with nature, but also as scientist, preacher, stenographer, historian – a recorder of humanity with an eye to exploring what is old with what is new.

Dream One.
The man with the old valise, like a steam locomotive, carries his gentlemen’s cabinet of belongings along a parakeet-lined road. The barn owl in his cave, illuminated by the ancient moon, watches, ponders, watches the slow unfolding of steps across the meadow gathers in the shadows of black and white, all color subsumed into a constructed world of peripheral lines receding into a perspective distance. Giorgio di Chirico dances in a shadowless corner.

Epilogue
Joseph Cornell at SF MOMA returns to the box(es) January 6, 2008.