“Un giocattolo è una trappola per sognatori” [1]

“Jouets surréalistes [2] ”

The “cacciatore di immagini” [3] Joseph Cornell [4] proposed to art a variety of small three-dimensional works reinventing “found objects” as part of a game built by a dreamer's imagination.

Newyorker artist's famous “Shadow Boxes”  remain in the memory of the viewer as echoes of a play table where checkers are perched on an indefinite point of the game. A moment of stillness blocked the strategies of the player who abandoned his pieces in a web. Each object-pawn carries the secret of his moves, the journey to get to the current place in that memory box.

The stopped game is fragmented in space: checkers are lonely lovers in a De Chirico's empty, words and images are distant, but related as parts of a puzzle. “Poesia dell'assenza, poesia di grado minimo, frammenti del mondo perduto” [5] . Cornell's works are games in art, art that is put in play, games in the middle of a long strategy where the player is confronted with itself, with its memories, with the record that draws a bridge between the object and the history into an alchemical-magic way that allows the reification of the artist's emotion in the presence of the evocative madeleine. “These perishables preserved, within a sheltering receptacle, did for vision what the madeleine did for fragrance” [6] .

The game's theme is given by the surrealist lesson that filtered Dada by dream and transformed imagination into an inconscious maze and the object into a “trappola per sognatori” [7] .

The artist succeeded in “fare poesia con sparsi frammenti di linguaggio” [8] stuck in time and arranged like the pieces of a complicated chessgame. Cornell “passa le ore cambiando di posizione alcuni oggetti, disponendoli secondo nuove corrispondenze reciproche dentro una scatola. A volte lo spostamento è solo di pochi millimetri. Altre volte Cornell solleva l'oggetto, come si farebbe con un pezzo degli scacchi, e rimane a lungo immobile, perso in riflessioni complicate. Molte delle scatole mi fanno pensare a quei problemi scacchistici in cui rimangono in gioco non più di sei o sette pezzi. Le istruzioni dicono 'il bianco muove e dà scacco matto in due mosse', ma la soluzione sfugge all'esame più attento. Come sa chiunque tenti di risolvere questi problemi, la chiave di tutto è la prima mossa, che di norma è una mossa improbabile” [9] .

A symbolic slot

The curiosity generated by Cornell's boxes takes the viewer to fantasize playing. “Non c'è forse la storia di quell'uomo in prigione che disegnò una tastiera su un pezzo di cartone, con i tasti bianchi e neri disposti nella giusta sequenza, per poi passare ore suonando quel pianoforte muto?” [10] .

The need for practical or dreamlike interaction is the basis of the work's creation itself: the “Shadow Boxes” are the evolution of the first toys that he creates for his brother Robert. The game assembles compositions and becomes even more evident in slot machines [11] boxes, a series of works where the uncertainty of the case becomes a memory search [12] that defies time with chimes of memory generated by tears of history that magically combine. Boxes represent gears and mechanisms of memory: “quali che siano, devono essere ingegnosi. Il nostro sguardo affettuoso può metterli in moto. Una slot machine poetica che offre un jackpot di significati incommensurabili attivati dalla nostra immaginazione” [13] .

The box art becomes a work and a moment of playful interaction, an amusement park-theater for the lonley viewer that plays by the rules of the artist-inventor in a vacuum of certainty: “L'eternità e il tempo sono le monete con cui l'automa funziona, la parte che tocca a ciascuno, per un'occhiata rapida a quel tutto che è il nulla” [14] .

The fragment is the active token that starts the art of Cornell's playing, conceiving a series of convergences given by a personal filter. The observer-player assists and recreates his own personal amusement park, its “Paese dei Balocchi”, his “Coney Island [15] dentro ogni testa” [16] . Similarly: “il modernismo in arte e in letteratura ha dato all'individuo una libertà senza precedenti d'inventarsi un suo mondo a partire dai frammenti di quello esistente. Ha abolito le gerarchie della bellezza e ha consentito il combinarsi degli stili e l'aprirsi all'esperienza quotidiana” [17] .

Maze's cells

Cornell's game represents a network of correspondences, as if the composition's elements were linked by mathematical laws. The work looks like a tool that shows the result of the relations existing among the parties in a cage for the observer.

“La scatola ha l'aspetto di una tavola fatta per qualche gioco, di un puzzle, forse di qualche calcolatrice simile a un abaco. Le palline si sono fermate a caso, per conto loro, o sono state mosse da una mano invisibile. In ogni caso, questa adesso è la loro posizione. In altre scatole della stessa serie le palline possono essere rimpiazzate da cubi, e la loro posizione varia. / É passato molto tempo da quando le palline erano in movimento, si direbbe. Inoltre, sembra che ne manchi qualcuna. / Ecco un'immagine dell'infinito, non come estensione ma come divisione in parti uguali e anonime. / Come si gioca a questo gioco terrificante?” [18] .

Cornell's net-cage creates space for objects linking them through metaphysical correspondences, almost numerical relations belonging to a science of imagination, alchemy of the fragment. The showcase of trinkets generates a precise structure with compartments. The resulting grid looks like a screen of Excel [19] : the spacing of Cornell's box are cells of a magic beehive that surround the object, block it in time and connect it to others creating a gaming table of correspondences. Places reminiscent the typical grid of the spreadsheet where the user enters data into appropriate spaces: numbers, words, images, graphics. Each media object is translated into binary code, as well as Cornell associates fragments from disparate sources as if it were similar items. Cornell met the ephemeral sensitivity to the emptiness of eternity into a “divina condizione, scuola di metafisica” [20] .

The apparent isolation of each element echoes ritual and mystery; it's a magic practice, made by secret ingredients: “anticamente il gioco simboleggiava il labirinto in cui si spingeva a calci un sassolino bianco e piatto- l'anima- verso l'uscita, il punto di fuga con il suo cielo senza nubi” [21] . The stone is the engine of the Swiss Shoot the Chutes: in the same way, Excel spreadsheet is updated when you change or insert a new data since the numbers are bound by specific functions. The selection of a cell by a double click means “to activate” the game and to make it ready for starting the operation of the mechanism.

Each component is linked to others through a strip that identifies the function, a kind of bar where it records the operation that connects the elements in the grid. The structure identifies scattered fragments by placing them in specific areas: the position of data is located by a network of coordinates identified by letters and numbers that can display the correct address of an object within the “casella nome” [22] .

The idea of ​​Excel table goes well with the theme of the game: letters and numbers as coordinates reminiscent mechanisms of the Naval Battle, a strategy game that Cornell would like as descendant of a dutch surfer's family [23] .

The traveler's monochrome

Laws governing relations among scattered objects, like a puzzle or a chessgame, come from the artist- deus ex machina. The resulting image is a mirror of reality customized by the artist's inner harmonies who, in turn, is locked inside the game itself: “Spazio vuoto e silenzio. La città come una scacchiera sulla quale i pochi pezzi rimasti sono immobili e senza nome. Dentro gli edifici bianchi, ancora spazio vuoto e silenzio. Stanze disabitate, pareti nude, cartelli con avvisi cancellati, corridoi deserti, celle senza inquilini con una x sulla porta, voliere senza uccelli” [24] .

The feeling is just a cage structured as a labyrinth of thought, a prison, but also certainty and protection. Cornell always identified himself with birds, defining flying-imagination as something dangerous [25] : many of his Aviaries boxes are inhabited by parrots, cockatoos and other exotic birds that are distant echoes of magic and nostalgia for islands of peace visited by the power of imagination. The cage is still the point of returning home, a certainty.

The themes of travel and cage are closely linked together in one of the first Cornell's collage dated 1931: Schooner. The work is a craft whose name is given by the title of the collage: it is a particular type of ship used by Dutch and characterized by so-called “topsails”. At the rear of the ship is represented a rose as  engine of the work: it is the symbol of the compass used as a compass of art. Within a web seems to evoke the blades of a rotary engine for the ship's structure. The representation is enigmatic: it probably symbolizes the web of relationships among the various components of the Cornell's works that, like many insects - ephemeras, remained entangled in the spider's web.

The artist, in turn, is a spider-insect, and the creator of the work, as in Cornell's portrait made by Robert Delford Brown in 1969. The network of correspondences among objects is fleeting, glossy and matte at the same time, fragile, but crippling for the object-insect-ephemera that remains in the network.

The skillfully woven “trappola per sognatori” [26] seems to follow the same routes given by the tangle of lines that intersect, run parallel, intersect and depart on the maps. Cornell's interest for maps, maps of the sky, astronomical tracks is perceived by many boxes on subjects of land, sea, star, cosmic journey with a metaphysical track traced by a curious child who freed his fantasy from spaces of the imagination. The objects are stages of a dreaming conquest, surreal elements of a mapping.

Coney Island on board

Cornell's work is an amusement park for fun, a game for children of all ages. Trips created by the artist are the equivalent of a carousel ride so hard and so fast to lose your breath for a period that stretches, but, in reality, is a breath. The instant is dilated, as Coney Island's attractions, creating a sense of disorientation.

The audience inside Cornell's pinball falls and rises through the slip of physical and semantic levels: Shoot the Chutes. Just an ephemera to turn the carousel as a click would be enough to “make active” Excel path's cells that, not surprisingly, is used as a program to create interactive games, quizzes- divertissement for the user.

The “Shadow Box” plant is the result of Cornell's art that scheduled the game, rules, location, and interaction “behind the scenes” [27] as a kind of Macro:“In Excel una Macro è un programma scritto o registrato, costituito da una serie di comandi e funzioni che possono essere effettuate utilizzando un solo comando ed eseguibili in qualsiasi momento occorra svolgere una determinata attività” [28] .

In photography, Macro is a lens used for shooting flowers, insects, details thanks to its ability to focus as close as possible. The investigator intent is the same of the ephemera.

The idea of Cornell- inventor refers to VBA [29] Editor that creates its own list: “una macro è un insieme di istruzioni che il computer interpreta una dopo l'altra e traduce in azioni operative, ne più ne meno come se fossero impartite manualmente da noi. Sostanzialmente, le istruzioni di cui si compone sono articolate in un certo numero di righe che, nel loro insieme, costituiscono quello che nel gergo degli addetti al lavoro viene definito un listato” [30] .

Instructions consist in a list of words- key [31] typed in a specific “environment” said Vba Editor. Similarly Cornell's boxes are translated into lists just as was done by the poet Charles Simic in Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. The list- recipe for the art work is handbook of conduct and regulations for Cornell's Naval Battle at the same time.

Bibliography

R. COHEN, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967, tr. It. a cura di S. Manferlotti, Un incontro casuale. Le vite intrecciate di scrittori e artisti americani, 1845-1967, Milano 2006.

J. CORNELL, Joseph Cornell's Dreams, edited with an introduction and appendices by Catherine Corman, Cambridge 2007

Joseph Cornell, catalogo della mostra a cura di K. McShine, (Firenze 1981), Firenze 1981.

Collage/Collages. Dal Cubismo al New Dada, catalogo della mostra a cura di M.M. Lamberti e M.G. Messina, (Torino 2007-2008), Milano, 2007, pp. 280-296.

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D. WALDMAN, Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object, London 1992.

D. WALDMAN, Joseph Cornell: Master of dreams, New York 2002.

N. WILLARD, The sorcerer’s apprentice: a conversation with Harry Roseman, assistant to Joseph Cornell, “Michigan Quarterly Review”, Volume XXXVIII, n. s. I, Winter 1999, pp. 37-56.