Art Book: Shadowplay Eterniday

Published in 2003 to celebrate the centennial of Josph Cornell's birth, Shadowplay Eterniday is one of the most beautifully designed books I've come across.  It's apparent on every page that the editors and contributors not only possessed great respect for Cornell as an artist but also had a deep personal affecton for him as a man.  It's a loving tribute to the most enigmatic of the Surrealists, an outsider who lived his entire adult life in a middle class home in Queens, New York, probably the most unlikely location on the planet to find an artist of his stature.

Cornell's entire career was something of an anomaly.  There was nothing in his upper middle-class background or in his education that had anything to do with art.  On the one hand he could be viewed as a recluse who had no deep personal relationships other than with his mother and his brother Robert, an invalid who suffered from cerebral palsy, both of whom lived with him in Queens.  And yet paradoxically, while never promoting himself or traveling outside New York, he became a major figure in the art world and during his lifetime had major retrospectives at both the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Though he was much too shy and sexually inexeperienced to have any romantic relationships, he did manage to form friendships with several of the actresses and ballerinas he so admired.

While he also made a number of avant garde films, Cornell is most widely known for his boxes.  These glass fronted displays normally contain a number of disparate elements, most of them taken from the artist's extensive collections of bric a brac that he accumulated compulsively in his wanderings through New York City.  When placed together, however, the assembled boxes become self-contained universes and represent far more than the sum of their parts.  If often playful, they have at the same time far deeper meanings that require a great deal of time and patience to fathom.  Along the way, the use of found objects in the creation of the boxes made Cornell a pioneer of appropriation art and an unlikely confederate of Marcel Duchamp who in his "readymades" also sought to transform everyday objects into works of art.  In fact, Duchamp's idea for the Boîte-en-valise owed much to Cornell who even assisted in the design of the valise itself.

If the contradictory elements of Cornell's life make it difficult to get a grasp on the man himself, there's a quote on page 37 of the present volume that's extremely helpful.  

"'You don't know how terrible it is to be locked into boxes all your life,' he [Cornell] told dealer David Mann, 'you have no idea what a terrible thing it is.'"

This is really key to understanding not only Cornell's art but his life as well.  He apparently saw himself as a prisoner trapped in a strictured environment from which there was no escape much as the actresses and other figures to whom he paid tribute were sealed within the containers he created to hold them.  The boxes thus became a metaphor for his own existence.

Shadowplay Eterniday contains three relatively brief essays as well as a biographical sketch and a bibliography.  The first essay, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, is a general introduction to the artist's working methods and provides some idea of the scope of his accomplishments.  The second and by far the most interesting, by Richard Vine, traces the influence of Cornell's strongly held Christian Science beliefs on his oeuvre.  The third, by Robert Lehrman, is a collector's musings on several seminal works with which he has long been acquainted.  The real heart of the book, of course, is the catalog of the artworks themselves.  The reproductions are of the finest quality and are sometimes accompanied by details of the pieces shown.  Though Cornell's three dimensional works invariably lose something of their essence when reduced to a two dimensional format, the excellence of the illustrations does go a long way in helping the reader appreciate the complexity and mystery of the originals.

In an unusual touch, the book contains a DVD that "delivers an encyclopediac compedium of the artist's work and source materials, the insights of numerous scholars and critics, access to Cornell's experimental films and interactive opportunities..."