Celebrating Cornell’s Constructions

Joseph Cornell made art as if he were a musician playing guitar without touching the strings. Born in 1903, he lived most of his adult life on a Flushing, Long Island, street with the angelically apt name Utopia Parkway. There he fashioned precious-junk boxes and collages that combine the wonder of childhood with the cosmic awe of old age.

Recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art received a gift of six of his shadow-box constructions and 15 collages from the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Now they’re on view for the first time, mixed with an equal number of MOCA works by other artists in the Assemblage tradition. The installation comes with the rather prosaic institutional title “Joseph Cornell: Connections to the Permanent Collection.”

Meaning no disrespect to the efforts of the show’s curator, Brent Zerger, juxtaposing Cornell with loosely related artists doesn’t exactly do the latter a favor. The situation is roughly analogous to having an exhibition of the French Rococo genius Antoine Watteau in which his extraordinarily evanescent poetics are set against such of his contemporaries as Boucher and--extending the comparison--modern calendar artists like Vargas and Petty. It’s a formula pretty well guaranteed to make everybody but Watteau look vaguely vulgar.

(Maybe somebody should do a Watteau-Cornell show. They are historically separated soul brothers. Both practiced in established artistic modes with such subtlety, lightness and grace as to give form to human feelings so delicate as to seem impossible of embodiment. This shared touch gained each the rare status of unclassifiable uniqueness.)

Still, on balance, the combinations of the present show are probably more interesting than seeing the Cornells isolated. If they dramatize otherwise insignificant shortfalls in artistic bystanders, well, tough.

Cornell’s work leaves an aftertaste of rich elaboration. This is reflected by contrast with Mark Niblock-Smith’s “Silent Tear,” a kind of crown-and-waterfall of crystal beads. It reminds us rather jarringly that among Cornell’s greatest virtues was creating a sense of fullness with an absolute economy of means. Cornell’s “Hotel de l’Etoile,” for example, consists of little more than the title lettered against a background of corroded midnight blue. Its impression of encrustation comes from a wealth of overlapping associations, not a lot of stuff.

If artists like John Baldessari and Louise Nevelson look heavy-handed and heartless in Cornell’s company, others are illuminated. The juxtaposition of a near-abstract Cornell and a Mark Tobey reveal surprising affinity. It also proves that Cornell’s magic didn’t derive from his mastery of traditional artistic skills. Tobey was a much better painter.

The vibes of an untitled Cornell collage carom around the room lighting up other works like a pinball machine. Its central icon is a Life magazine-style photograph of a pretty girl. Her face bears a rather astonishing resemblance to that of the black cat she holds, as both stare into the camera. Edges of the composition are festooned with colored illustrations of birds.

Across the way stands a little assemblage by Mike Kelley. It consists of two vintage letters offering condolences to someone whose pet cat died. Below rests a cardboard carton filled with the cat’s effects, it’s litter, comb and so forth. Although the piece has some of the satirical overtones of Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One,” it’s a nice piece of sentimental empathy from an artist who often prefers to moralize.

The piece sends one back to the Cornell across the way, and the realization that it isn’t even slightly sentimental. The birds in the piece remind us that the surpassingly beautiful cat is a natural predator that’s been domesticated and--by extension to the girl--so are humans. The observation is more anthropological than judgmental, but it does remind us that Cornell was aware of life’s darker depths.

From there, it’s not far to pieces by Wallace Berman and Christian Boltanski, artists who dwell steadily in the shadows of things ominous. Cornell visits the mystery of these precincts, but he doesn’t live there. His poetry covers greater ground.

His collage “The Distance to the Moon” shows a goblet filled with clear liquid floating in a limpid sky of feathered clouds. A reverent paean to purity, it’s gently tempered by humorous awareness of such transcendence growing from popular art.

The work is placed rather pointedly near James Rosenquist’s “Noon”--a painting of a carefree blue sky whose sun is the business end of a flashlight. It’s nice to see attention attracted to Rosenquist’s lyric side.

If all this proves anything, it’s probably that any show featuring Joseph Cornell is a good trip.

* “Joseph Cornell: Connections to the Permanent Collection,” the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave.; to Sept. 14, closed Monday, (213) 626-6222.