A Poem inspired by Joseph Cornell

If you have a spare minute and 46 seconds, listen to the rhymed, anapestic tale of Stabbity Rabbit's misadventure with Joseph Cornell.

Sneak Peak!

Tomorrow is opening night of Hotel Cassiopeia at San Diego State University. Click on the picture to catch the first glimpse of the show. We hope to see you there!


A special thank you to Zwink Photography

Charles and Joseph: Fractured Lives

What happens when a life-changing event happens to someone in the transition between childhood and adulthood? For Charles Mee and Joseph Cornell, it led to the creation of beautiful and fragmented art.

Joseph Cornell's father died when he was 13, thrusting him prematurely into the role of head of the household. He would assume the burden of supporting his mother, Helen, and his disabled brother, Robert, until their deaths. Only a few months after his father died, Cornell was sent away from his home in New York to a boarding school in Massachusetts. The trauma of the separations he experienced during his thirteenth year no doubt affected the way his life unfolded. He never married or had normal relationships with women. Could this be due to the trauma he experienced during puberty? It's no wonder that much of his art is devoted to memorializing childhood - it was when he was happiest.

Charles Mee's life also changed drastically when he was a young teenager. At 14, the athletic, fun-loving youth was stricken with polio. He spent months recovering. During this dark time, he began reading; a teacher brought him Plato's Symposium to keep him entertained during his hospital stay. His future as a football player was set aside and Mee discovered the painful reality of how people with disabilities are treated, even by their family and friends. Mee has said that his work is fragmented because his life has not been ordered and intact.

These two collage artists - one with images, one with words - have left works that allow us to view the world the way someone has when his life has been broken and pieced back together.

A Note from Assistant Director Juan Hernandez

Joseph Cornell’s life, the World of Cornell, is a landscape rich in images, personalities and dreams. Through this vast palette of concepts we have taken these ideas and brought them to life through the performance. In our production of Hotel Cassiopeia, we have taken the idea of the Cornell boxes and his eccentric form of art and have created and advanced the development of the characters to fit a more clearly defined idea of a Cornell art piece. Through the randomness of the items found in Cornell’s boxes, it can be seen that they bring into being a state of harmonious unity and equality of significance. With this idea, we bring to life the world of Joseph Cornell and are introduced to people who were important to him.

Throughout the rehearsal period, we have created a very comprehensible set of characters. From Joseph’s journey through his life to the imaginative creation of the Astronomer, Herbalist and Pharmacist, we get a colorful canvas in which Joseph lived.

A Note on the Play

Joseph Cornell never married, never traveled far beyond his home in New York, and never graduated from high school. He did, however, fill his life with poetry, biographies, films, operas, and ballets. He ate too many sweets, corresponded at length with friends, and volunteered at the Christian Science Reading Room. Though Joseph Cornell was not a formally trained artist, he was an avid collector and an ardent observer, and these traits heavily informed his art. His eclectic and detailed collage shadow boxes secured his place in art history.

Cornell was born in 1903 to a comfortable, happy home. His childhood was filled with magic shows, wax museums, and trips to Coney Island. In 1917, Cornell's father died, abruptly ending his childhood and thrusting him into the position as head of the family. A devoted brother and son, Cornell supported his mother and spent most of his life caring for his brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy. Although his familial responsibilities were numerous, Cornell managed to follow some of his own desires and create an inner life. After long days working at a Manhattan textile studio, Cornell would roam the streets, wandering into junk shops and flea markets to find little treasures he could take home and file away in his basement. His "dossiers" grew to include pictures, ticket stubs, magazine clippings, and other bits of ephemera on a variety of subjects. In 1931, Cornell discovered the Surrealist collage art of Max Ernst. He immediately went home, raided his collection of old books, and made his first work of art.

Cornell's art continued to evolve over the next few years, eventually culminating in the shadow boxes that are his legacy. Cornell's work is abstract and dreamlike, similar to the Surrealist work he was inspired by. The popularity and success of Surrealist art paved the way for Cornell, though he never really fit in with the sexual and irreverent aspects of the movement. Cornell wanted to create something "healthier". He drew upon his religious beliefs, his love of all things French, and his worship of beautiful dancers and actresses. He idealized childhood, creating works that exhibited his love of innocence, purity, and chastity. He created memorials to the past, giving him a tangible piece he could hold onto forever.

Hotel Cassiopeia is not meant to be a literal or historical recreation of Cornell's life or art, but instead a representation of the man and his work. The characters in the play depict some of the family members, artists, and friends that he knew intimately, as well as people he never met. The play enacts scenes that are similar to real situations Cornell experienced, as well as those we only imagine he did. The play's collage structure deliberately reflects the work of Joseph Cornell. Charles Mee created Hotel Cassiopeia from interviews, Cornell's diary, letters, writings about him, clips from his favorite movies and music that he enjoyed, and bits and pieces from the internet.

Why the title, Hotel Cassiopeia?

“Because,” says Mee, “Cassiopeia the constellation lasts through all eternity, while a hotel is where people check in for a couple of nights.” So, check in for the evening and capture a little piece of the eternity that Cornell tried so hard to preserve.

Lauren R. Beck
Dramaturg

Untitled (The Hotel Eden), c. 1945

In the later half of the 1940s, Cornell moved away from his early Surrealist inspirations and began making art that was more closely tied to the current movement, Abstract Expressionism. The Aviary boxes, with their clean, white walls, have a stark look that differs from his earlier boxes. Cornell was delighted when Willem de Kooning once admired the "architecture” of the series. The boxes in his Aviary series hint at Cornell's long obsession with birds. He loved watching them play in the birdbath in his backyard and his mother often would chastise him for letting birds eat crumbs off the kitchen table. There are many possible interpretations for the birds housed in the Aviary boxes. The curvaceous, feather-clad singers could symbolize the beautiful female performers he pined for. The fragile, flying creatures may have reminded Cornell of the innocent spirit that he often admired in children. Or perhaps the birds represent Cornell himself - a lonely creature, trapped in a cage.

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), 1945

After Cornell saw Lauren Bacall's first movie, To Have and Have Not, he became infatuated with the beautiful young actress. "The chiaroscuro lighting" combined with the "absolute vertical lines" of Bacall's face fascinated the artist and inspired him to create a work that celebrated his image of the actress as a purely innocent creature, ignoring the sexuality she exudes in the film. The Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall is a game with a little ball that rolls past images of skyscrapers and Bacall at different ages, carrying viewers through time and space. The faces of Bacall appear behind blue-tinted, segmented glass, evoking the silent films and 'peep show' penny arcades of Cornell's past. Cornell wanted the viewer to "travel inclined runways - starting in motion compartment after compartment with a symphony of mechanical magic of sight and sound borrowed form the motion picture art - into childhood - into fantasy - through the streets of New York - through tropical skies, etc. etc." Cornell once said that he preferred film to live theatre. The cinematic close-up shot of a beautiful woman, like the one in the box, provided the illusion of intimacy, while allowing him to maintain a chaste distance.

Rose Hobart Cornell's first film

Rose Hobart was Joseph Cornell's first film. To make this film, Cornell cut up the film of East of Borneo, B-movie made in 1931 starring Rose Hobart. He then put together a new film using some of the scenes from the original. The original film was 77 minutes, but Cornell cut out all of the action scenes as well as any scene that did not feature Hobart, reducing the film to 20 minutes. It was during the screening of this film that Salvador Dali famously overturned the projector and later said, "My idea for a film was exactly that... I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." To learn more about this film, read the article by filmmaker and curator, Brian Frye. To watch Rose Hobart click on the picture below.

Utopia Parkway Internet Art

Have you wondered what kind of website Joseph Cornell would have made if he had had the internet? Neither have I! But, someone did. Visit Utopia PKWY to see a work of internet art inspired by Joseph Cornell's house on Utopia Parkway. If you take some time to explore the site, you will be rewarded with haunting music, bizarre video footage, and more. Read the description below for the rationale for the project.

"Utopia PKWY is the street in Flushing, Queens, N.Y.C. where Joseph Cornell lived for most of his life. The home itself (which is the interface for this work) was like a meta-grid of sorts, a Cornell box writ large. The house was not only home to Cornell himself but also to the thousands of objects, papers, and flotsam that he constructed his works from. Cornell's studio was in the basement and he lived on the upper floors with his Mother and disabled brother Robert until they passed away. Tony Curtis would arrive at this humble house in a limo and Andy Warhol had been to tea...it was in essence an uber-box where the uncanny and impossible conversed with the everyday and banal...cages under cage." -- the artist

Taglioni's Jewell Casket, 1940

Cornell created this box to memorialize the 19th-century ballerina, Marie Taglioni. Under the blue glass tray of glass ice cubes is a mirrored level containing necklaces, sand, crystal, and rhinestones. The words on the inside of the lid tell one of the legends surrounding the dancer: On a moonlit night in the winter of 1835, a Russian highwayman stopped Taglioni's carriage and ordered her to dance for him "upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars." In memory of this occasion, Taglioni "formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket." Cornell's work is often trying to preserve something - an event, a performance, a person - that cannot be preserved. Just as real ice melts, memories fade into eternity.

Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) 1936

Cornell's first shadow box was the Soap Bubble Set. It is often seen as a family portrait. In this interpretation, the little doll's head is Joseph, the egg symbolizes his mother, the four blocks at the top are the four Cornell children, and the pipe is his father. This fits with the future patterns of Cornell's work; he was trying to preserve a piece of the past. The unseen bubbles can have many meanings. Are they meant to recall childish innocence or perhaps the fragility of life? The glass panes that divide the compartments create a feeling of separation, but the picture of the moon behind the work reminds the viewer that all things are connected in the vastness of the universe.