O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Student of Cornell

Once upon a time, there was a young man who lived with his widowed mother and invalid brother on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, N.Y.

Having been forced to drop out of school to become the family’s breadwinner when he was still a teen-ager, Joseph Cornell glumly peddled woolen samples door-to-door in lower Manhattan.

His private life, however, was illuminated by his fascination with ballet, film, literature and art. Between business appointments, he prowled used bookshops and junk shops for miscellaneous souvenirs and trinkets. At home, he combined them into fragile collages and assemblages with mysterious references to the cosmos, historical epochs and childhood games.

Eventually, these works evolved into the familiar boxed constructions--part game, part shrine, part diorama--that made Cornell (who died in 1972 at 69) one of the great, unclassifiable art “loners” of the 20th Century.

The boxes, evoking such precious themes as romantic ballet of the 19th Century and Medici princelings, are usually described as fragile and poetic, the work of a naive, childlike man who lived out his entire life in near isolation, surrounded by the picturesque clutter of his childhood home.

That assessment didn’t make much sense to Dijkran Tashjian, a UC Irvine professor of comparative culture whose 1992 monograph “Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire” (Grassfield Press, Miami Beach, Fla., $45) has just been issued in soft cover ($32).

The notion that “if you find innocence in the box, he must be this sort of person--there’s a kind of biographical fallacy here,” Tashjian says. “My own sense is that no one can be that way. . . . There were sexual implications to all this.”

As he casually propped his feet on the arm of a couch in one of two offices he occupies on campus, Tashjian, 53, discussed the book in a recent conversation laced with his typically wry, self-deprecatory comments and frequent gales of laughter. (His other office, just down the hall, is small and so crammed with books, papers and a Marcel Duchamp-style bicycle wheel mounted on a stool that he rarely receives visitors there.)

In his book, Tashjian notes that many of Cornell’s visual motifs involve “gender doubling, sexual metamorphosis and androgyny.” In addition, his images of women “became openly erotic” as he grew older and sometimes included photographs of nude women cut out from sex magazines.

So did the reclusive Cornell have a sex life?

Tashjian looked somewhat bemused. “I didn’t care about that,” he said. In any case, he added, there apparently are no records of intimate encounters in the bits and pieces of paper--now preserved on eyestrain-inducing rolls of microfilm--that constitute Cornell’s diaries.

Tashjian did find a most surprising link between Cornell’s life and the sexuality in his art: his youthful conversion to Christian Science.

“I could see all those androgynous elements in the work,” Tashjian said. “I knew something about the Shakers. Mother Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers in the late 18th Century, believed in a male and a female god. Christ was the first male coming and Mother Ann Lee was, you know, God the Daughter.

“So I thought, ‘Gee, it would be wonderful if Mary Baker Eddy,” the founder of Christian Science, “believed in a dual god.’ So I trucked myself down to the local Christian Science reading room in Laguna Beach--I had a ball doing this!

“I sat down with (Eddy’s) writings. And, yes, indeed, (in Christian Science) God has this dual quality, both male and female. So one could understand, on a spiritual level, the highest sense of creativity would come by being able to combine male and female.

“So here we have Cornell saying things like, ‘I’d like to be your double’ ” to ballet dancer Allegra Kent, one of many gifted women with whom he identified. “And you can rationalize it on a spiritual level (regardless of) whatever it means in terms of Cornell’s sexual proclivity.”

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Tashjian--who happens to be an alumnus of Cornell’s prep school, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.--first got interested in visual art while doing graduate work in American Studies at Brown University.

He says he had not seen the well-regarded art collection housed at Phillips’ Addison Gallery of American Art until recently, when “American Abstraction from the Addison” opened at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The exhibit, on view through May 2, includes a Cornell piece, “Cage,” from 1949. (“What did I know?” Tashjian joked. “They could barely get me in a classroom, let alone an art gallery.”)

At Brown, he kept avoiding the art-history requirement because those courses involved sitting in the dark to see copious numbers of slides (“I’d go to sleep!”), all of which had to be memorized.

Unable to put off the inevitable, he had the good fortune of studying with Sidney Simon, an art historian who specialized in Cubism, Surrealism and Dada (an anarchic, satirically anti-art movement). Simon offered vibrant commentary and showed a minimum of slides nobody had to memorize.

Jazzed by Duchamp’s puckish attitude and inventive mind, Tashjian was elated to learn that the French Dada artist spent considerable time in New York. Tashjian’s Ph.D dissertation was published in 1975 as “Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde.”

He is one of several essayists for “West Coast Duchamp,” a book about the artist’s effect on the West Coast art community published in 1991 by the fledgling Grassfield Press. When Grassfield founder Bonnie Clearwater asked him to write a monograph on Cornell, Tashjian was already deep into research on the artist for a book on American responses to Surrealism.

Clearwater--who points out that the Cornell volume was modeled after an old illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, a favorite of the artist’s--liked the idea of focusing on the androgyny issue.

Then Tashjian reread “The Gift,” a book by Lewis Hyde--which he describes as “a very intelligent, wry essay on the concept of . . . the erotic properties of gifts”--and came up with a new way of structuring the book.

“A gift binds people together . . . . There’s a tactile sensuousness (involved). . . . It seemed to me that one way to talk about Cornell’s eroticism was to place it in the context of gift-giving. And then you start to see all the homages (in his work). Once you go through his life, you start to realize he was giving these things away.”

Although Cornell actually did give some of his homages as gifts, on both likely and unlikely occasions (to cement friendships with female Surrealist artists, to celebrate a contractual relationship), he usually worshiped from afar.

One of these tributes, known as the “Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall,” is the subject of the final chapter of Tashjian’s book. In this work from 1945-46, photographs of the actress decorate a slot machine, a device Cornell had incorporated in earlier boxes that showcase reproductions of Renaissance portraits of children.

Cornell had just seen Bacall in the Howard Hawks movie “To Have and Have Not,” her screen debut opposite Humphrey Bogart. As Cornell noted in his diary, the film struck him as “pure Hollywood hokum.”

But he admired the teen-age actress’ ” jeune fille awkwardness,” her “very honest and sincere qualities” and her “absolutely vertical line of chin and brow.” In the piece, he surrounded a studio shot of her stunning profile with snapshots of her as a child and shots of her cocker spaniel--an evocation of “the purity of childhood,” according to Tashjian.

As Cornell wrote (in the separate dossier of writings and photographs that accompanies the box), he wanted to summon up the “romantic afterglow” inspired by Bacall. The slot machine was meant to waft the viewer into an imaginary zone containing such elements as childhood, fantasy, the “awe and splendor” of his familiar New York environment and the tropical setting of the movie.

The slot machine itself (evoked by rows of holes, a rubber ball and a chute) would summon up the movies’ “mechanical magic of sight and sound,” Cornell wrote. It would also serve, oddly enough, as a squeaky-clean, all-American machine equivalent for the actress.

Such fanciful and far-fetched connections were “probably the curse of his existence,” Tashjian said. “The problem for him was to keep those connections stable in his head. There would be this luminous moment. And then it would just disappear. He couldn’t sustain it, or retain it. . . .

“He’d take off for Manhattan and grub around and find something and come home. . . and it would turn to dust in his hands. Whatever it was on 42nd Street it no longer had back in Utopia Parkway. . . .

“The work had a deep personal meaning for him, and I’m not sure that anyone else ever found out what those meanings were. . . . You play the source game forever with this guy and go bananas doing it. In both senses of the word: You go crazy and have a wonderful time.”

In fact, Tashjian eventually began to feel an eerie kinship with the artist: “I would pick up a book (of Cornell’s), and sometimes there would be notes in the margins, but sometimes it would have just a scrap of paper (as a marker), and I’d know exactly what he was interested in on that page.”

Maybe it helps to be a fellow pack rat.

“The other day, I was doing something on Diego Rivera’s murals in Detroit for an undergraduate class,” Tashjian said. “Something fell out of a pile, a scrap of paper with with a (library) call number on it. It said Diego Rivera. It was a note to myself from about a year ago that there’s a videotape on Rivera. . . .

“Of course, I lost the scrap of paper the next day. I’m feeling more and more like Cornell all the time!”