Joseph Cornell on How to See
Mr. Cornell asks us so nicely to SEE, please. To use not just our rods and cones, or even just our dendrites and axons, but to focus in on the doll’s head or the bubble pipe and see its wholeness and separateness and zoom back out to see its apartness and connectedness. It really is just pure genius. And I love how he asks so insistently, and continually, with every construction.
Here are some of the things that I saw:
- Refrigerator shrines to family life; an archive of the majestic mundaneness of humanity, moving along, every day, to soccer practice and to ballet lessons and doctor’s appointments and the grocery store, but stopping once in a while to look at a four-year-old’s artistic vision of a butterfly or the family home
- My stuff, not just as detritus that’s been blown or dragged into my house, collecting in the corners (though definitely some is that and just that) but as a story about who I am and what I did and where I might go, and where I didn’t go yet
- Archeology digs a shadowbox into the far past and finds things that people made and used and collected and threw away like folsom points and mousterian flakes and piles and piles of oyster shells and antelope bones flower pollen and lake core samples and those are every bit as impressive and full of life and mystery as Stonehenge and Newgrange
And really I knew all that, that’s what I was trained to see as an English major, and as a writer, but that the glorious thing Cornell does is point those rods and cones so what they see shoots right past the frontal lobes and starts fiddling with our deepest dendrites and axons, the ones that can feel a shadow move behind us, and then right back again to the ones that moved us from thinking “i build a nest for baby to sleep in” and “the honey is in the crooked, not straight tree” to “baby nestles into the crook of my arm.”
Shadowboxes are portals, time-travel contraptions, space ships, enigma machines; and they work because they aren’t sleek and perfect and seamless; they work because they’re weird and quirky and held together with wire from hangers and because they’re powered by refrigerator magnets and butterflies and stuff from Bev’s alley. I think you could unlock any mystery with a shadowbox, if you made the right one. Or you could just make the mystery more mysterious. But either way, it’s refrigerator shrines and piles of junk and oyster shells and pollen samples from archaeological digs and what’s happening in Bev’s alley that make up the quirky, crooked engine that powers humanity. A shadowbox lets you peek inside and see it working.
It's a Wonderful Second Life 
Especially the sense that a shadow box had been opened and inside was a portal to an expansive scene that extends beyond the perceived boundaries of the box, or at the very least the sense that processes are going on inside that somehow continue in another dimension outside. There’s also something going on that I try to allow to happen in my own work: the contrast between precision in some details and imprecision in others, like connections that don’t really play by all the rules you’ve created for this little universe, or the contrast . I like the contradictions that creates in the viewer’s mind. I hope that makes some sort of sense.
“connections that don’t really play by all the rules you’ve created for this little universe”
I see the lyric essay/literary collage I wrote recently (inspired by Cornell) as doing this very thing!
And that’s why I write: to create little universes and set up all kinds of rules and then break some of them.