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Wringing of hands over a misplaced pipe

CORNELL
CONTINUED

Until the late '40s Cornell was a familiar face in New York art circles. When he invited people to lunch, it was inevitably to the the Automat, where the food is dispensed in glass-covered boxes. One of his greatest thrills was riding the old elevated trains, speeding past tenement windows and glimpsing the interiors of rooms—rooms, he wrote once, of "an unexpected and confusing bareness . . . that etched the fragment of action of the occupants so strongly, like a memory of childhood. And it was all over in less than a split second."

Though Cornell went out a great deal, he never stayed late. A friend recalls that he always had to be home by 8 p.m. to tend the furnace. For years he shared the Utopia Parkway house with his widowed mother and his invalid younger brother. They are both dead now and he lives alone. 

In the '50s Cornell increasingly acquired a reputation for being a recluse, a strange, inaccessible man. Even his boxes became more elusive. He frequently changed dealers and had to be coaxed into exhibiting his work. He no longer appeared at his own openings.

But he was always at home to carefully selected visitors. These privileged few could hardly wait to compare notes to find out how much of the house each was permitted to see. Most stayed on the first floor. Some have managed to go upstairs, though they may have had to fake a trip to the bathroom to get there. A handful have been to the garage where Cornell stores scores of boxes. Almost no one has made it to the basement where Cornell works. I got just past first base—the garden table under the quince tree in the backyard.

Cornell did talk to me there for a few hours. He speaks freely with long Proustian digressions that meander back and forth in time. In his conversation, as in his boxes, real and imagined places and events flow together with a dreamlike logic. Actual things seem suddenly remote and unfamiliar, while stray wisps of a dim past become real and immediate. A French symbolist poem may remind him of 19th Century mail transport in balloons ("I suppose you could call it balloon mail,") and this may lead to a discussion of today's Happenings, which he has not seen but suspects are not too far removed from the things he saw as a child at Coney Island, splendid things which might strike him now, he says, as being "as moronic as Fascination," the game played today in Broadway amusement arcades. Cornell freezes at the sight of a notebook and when I listened too attentively he drifted into another subject.

Perhaps the main thing I learned from my visit was how painstaking Cornell is, precisely calculating his effects so that his boxes, compressing infinite quantities of time and space, become microcosms in which a moment has been captured for what seems an eternity.

The objects in these carefully staged dramas seem to communicate with each other in an eloquent sign language. Cornell resents any deep reading of his boxes for symbolic interpretation. But when pressed, he allows that the spirals, circles and driftwood connote the "cosmic, elemental world of infinity." Then he adds, "But how does one know what a certain object will tell another?"

Going through the house on the way out, we paused in the dining room to examine a box that Cornell was reworking. It may take him from one week to 15 years to finish a box to his satisfaction. In this one he had nailed a clay pipe to the right side—where it struck a jarring note. Upon looking at the box once more, Cornell remarked that he would have to redo it, that it appeared forced. He was vexed because the arrangement had neither the spontaneity nor the inevitability that he strives for. In the living room I stopped to peruse a colonial ancestral portrait and studio photographs of Cornell's father, brother and sister. While we talked on, Cornell's expression became increasingly preoccupied and somber. Wringing his hands, he suddenly said the box in the dining room was all wrong. "I should never have shown it." He appeared to be on the verge of tears. Abruptly he hurried me into my coat and I was out.  

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Transcription Notes:
right side of page is not related to Cornell