Upon my return...

I was fortunate enough to spend last week in San Francisco "working".
And there are a few things I saw and would like to report back on...


Untitled (Hotel Eden), Joesph Cornell

Most importantly, the long awaited opportunity to view Joseph Cornell's work in person. Cornell, an aeemblage artist, spent most of his life (1903-72) in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, NY with his mother and cripled brother. From there, this reculsive surrealist, would set fourth on voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets. To others, these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of lost memory, the trinkets of the universe waiting to be grafted into narrative vingettes that bring stories back from the abyss.

The exhibition contained a few hundred objects that included completed assemblages, framed collages, scrapbooks filled with dancers, retired advertisments and the faces of silver-screen starlettes, and storage box upon storage box each labeled something like "glasses", "springs", "birds", and so on. It was almost too much. More than 40 years of dreams and navigation, were propped behind plexiglass in room after room of the SF MoMA. Among the remnants of his life it's not difficult to imagine the kind of divine lonliness and near absolute introspection with which he must have existed.