Hey Joe—An Homage to Joseph Cornell

HEY JOE An Homage to Joseph Cornell Curated by W. David Powell June 13 through July 29, 2012

Rochester, Vermont

Hey Joe, the Genesis Chance encounters, serendipitous confluences and shared interests led to this show, which pays homage to the great assemblage artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). Inspirations and events in my life over a couple of years finally crystallized as the idea for an exhibit after meeting Middlebury photographer and art historian Kirsten Hoving in March 2011.

During Vermont Week at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, my studio was down the hall from hers, and in order to reach mine I had to pass by her doorway.

On the first full day of that session, when other artists had not even unpacked their equipment yet, I found Kirsten shooting arrangements of old toys and books. And she had already covered the walls of her brightly lit space with the output of her previous afternoon’s work at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury. Kirsten’s room already looked like a curated gallery exhibition.

I saw right away that we had common interests. Photographs of nineteenth-century books on optics were pinned to the walls. At the time, I was working on pieces for an exhibit at Central Booking Gallery in Brooklyn, and I suggested to Kirsten that venue, which specializes in science-themed artworks, might be interested in her work. (Indeed, she later showed there and participated in a panel discussion with scientists and fellow artists.) Then I showed her my studio, which was filled with the source materials for my collage work, including nineteenth-century scientific texts and mid-century children’s encyclopedias.

Kirsten revealed herself as a Cornell scholar and the author of Joseph Cornell: A Case for the Stars. Surveying my book collection, she observed, “You know, these are some of the same books that Cornell worked from for his collages.”

Intrigued, later that evening I called my friend and fellow collage artist Peter Thomashow of Strafford, Vt., and borrowed his copy of Kirsten’s book. Indeed, it contains pictures of some of Cornell’s source materials that she had studied at the Smithsonian Museum’s Cornell archives. Though a longtime admirer of the artist, I had not been aware that our inspirations overlapped.

At the closing of the residency I began to contemplate curating an exhibit that would feature some artists I know whose work reflects the legacy, in one way or another, of Joseph Cornell. I discussed it with Kirsten and asked if she would write an introduction.

I immediately thought back to the previous December, when I’d met Hanover, N.H.-based collage and assemblage artist Varujan Boghosian at a party at Peter’s house. We were talking about Walt Whitman and I told Varujan about a photo I’d seen of the poet posing with a die-cut paper butterfly perched on his hand. The conversation led to him asking if I had paper. I said, “Well, yes, I have paper.” Varujan said, “I’ve got paper. Lots of it. Come by my studio sometime and I’ll give you some.”

When I took him up on the offer in February 2011, Varujan proved to be both charming and generous. He gave me whole folios of line engravings from early nineteenthcentury science and math books and showed me works in progress in his White River Junction studio that was brimming with pages from old natural history books, children’s coloring books, handwriting practice books and other “paper” from many sources.

I was invited to come to breakfast any time with Varujan and his neighbor Marcus Ratliff, also a collage artist, who had

Rosamond Purcell, Krystalnacht (detail), 2012 Polaroid Land Print

recently given up his design studio in New York after years of designing catalogs, books, posters and invitations for galleries and museums there. Marcus and Varujan meet almost daily in a local coffee shop in White River, and Peter joins them whenever possible. Living much further away, in Underhill Center, my attendance at the breakfasts is infrequent. We have come to refer to ourselves as the Rio Blanco Riders.

In the spring, I asked my fellow scissor- and glue-wielding friends to participate in an exhibition that would be a tribute to Joseph Cornell. It would be a celebration of the art of collage that I had now begun to plan in earnest.

In June 2011, Peter, Marcus and I decided to pay a visit to Rosamond Purcell in Somerville, Mass., to see what might work in the exhibition. Rosamond is an artist whose “assemblage of decay” work we all admire. She was enthusiastic about participating and, through her, we learned about the artist Robert Seydel, whom Rosamond had known for years but who had recently died — just before Siglio Press published his Book of Ruth. Rosamond felt he would be good to include in the Cornell homage, and for good reason: Seydel’s book contains the collages and correspondence of his alter-ego, Ruth Greisman, who had a lifelong (imaginary) crush on Cornell. Thanks to Lisa Pearson, founder of Siglio Press in Los Angeles, I got permission from Seydel’s sister to show this reclusive artist’s rarely seen work.

And so “Hey Joe” continued to grow organically.

Siglio Press, which specializes in books “that live at the intersection of art and literature,” had also published The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. This was their first publication. I had been a fan of Brainard’s work since I was in art school and knew he’d had a studio in Vermont. I thought that Brainard’s

collage work would be a good fit, so I got in touch with poet Ron Padgett, who had been Brainard’s friend since their youth in Tulsa, Okla. They had worked together on the White Dove Review, a high school literary magazine, and had the audacity to solicit work from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and receive it. Ron is the artistic and literary executor of Brainard’s estate and he arranged for me to borrow some of the artist’s work from Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

A collage exhibition would be inconceivable without the inclusion of my former teachers from Vermont College of Fine Arts and fellow collage artists Michael Oatman and Todd Bartel, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Cambridge School of Weston, respectively. Both artists’ practice is almost exclusively collage. They, in turn, introduced further artistic connections that I had not known before planning this show. For one, Michael and Todd both had studied under Alfred DeCredico at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Varujan had known him when he was at nearby Brown University. In addition, Todd had previously purchased some collages for a private collector — including work by Varujan and Michael, as well as Cornell and DeCredico.

Among us all, Varujan is the only one who had contact with Joseph Cornell. In 1963, Varujan was invited to show at Stable Gallery in New York. Cornell had showed there previously and the director, Eleanor Ward, thought he would like

Varujan’s work, so she sent him a catalog. Cornell loved it.

After the show closed, Varujan sent him a box construction.

Cornell in turn sent Varujan a thank-you note containing a picture of a butterfly, a fragment of a Greek letter and other ephemera. This began a correspondence between the two that lasted for more than two years.

After Cornell’s death in 1972, and his estate was settled, executors returned Varujan’s construction, almost 10 years after he had given it.

Though their works, influences and media are varied, each of the artists in the show is indebted to Cornell’s vision, consciously or otherwise. The unfolding of collage artists’ work is by nature that of chance encounters with the existing residue of culture. They create new configurations that generate fresh meanings and preserve what would otherwise become ephemeral detritus, lost to the dustbin of history.

I want to thank all of the artists in this show for their participation. I am grateful to Anni Mackay and BigTown Gallery for acknowledging the importance of this show. Her enthusiasm and support were crucial to the realization of Hey Joe. Thanks also to Lisa Pearson at Siglio Press, Ron Padgett and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and to Kirsten Hoving for the initial inspiration, as well as for the catalog essay.

—W. David Powell

Peter Thomashow, Simple Eye (detail), 2010 Assemblage

A Case for Joe In 1941, the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) filled a little wooden box with bits of dried flowers, a fabric rose, hairpins, a rhinestone pin and three artificial pearls.

On the lid he glued a typed label:

Little Mysteries of the Ballet Into a souvenir-case guarding its sealed treasure of costume fragments from “La Spectre de la Rose” — how explain the intrusion of an earlier day, accented with a renegade blonde hairpin loosed from the chevelure of some Cinderella in her midnight haste ………Reward.

Physically small enough to hold in your hand, conceptually large enough to encompass a host of associations, this assemblage box offers a prime example of Cornell’s gift for setting off “sparkings,” as he called them, between seemingly unrelated items and ideas. Befitting his interest in Cubism, he used fragments (in this case snippets of a ballerina’s costume) to stand for the whole. But unlike a Cubist work, where, say, a few strings can evoke a complete guitar, Cornell’s fragments extend beyond the evocation of a specific object to an exploration of how things can take us on mental journeys over time.

The idea of the “souvenir” fascinated Cornell, and given his Francophile leanings, he of course knew that the word means both “memory” and “to remember” in French. In his little ballet box, as he noted, Cornell encased a token of a ballerina of an earlier day. Which earlier day? The day in 1831 when Theophile Gautier composed the poem, “The Specter of the Rose”? The day in 1940 when he saw Tamara

Toumanova perform the Fokine ballet based on the poem in New York? The day he obtained pieces of the ballerina’s costume and immortalized them, and her, in his assemblage box? The imagined day Cinderella dropped something—a shoe, a hairpin? Perhaps a day when thoughts about his own past intruded on his present? All of these days at once?

Constructing a reliquary to the past seems a charming notion, but, as is so often the case with Cornell, he keeps that charm from becoming saccharine with an unexpected twist: the hairpin is a “renegade,” and by extension so is the young girl who dropped it. And, that final word, “Reward,” positions the renegade blonde hairpin as both an object to be recovered and an outlaw to be captured.

Throughout his long career, Cornell perfected the art of incongruous juxtaposition, orchestrating chance encounters between toys, maps, constellation charts, seashells, sand, corks, bits of chain, clippings from books, thimbles, cutout cardboard birds, wine glasses, plastic lobsters, marbles, glass figurines, old photographs, and more in shallow, glass-fronted wooden boxes. The accompanying subject matter stretched from natural philosophy to Emily Dickinson to opera to astronomy to Lauren Bacall to celestial navigation by birds to gravity to Renaissance princes to Juan Gris to soap bubbles to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Cornell’s creative process turned on suggesting conceptual links between unlikely things, and he sought words to describe what happens when apparently unrelated objects suddenly participate in a conceptual dialogue. Words such as “unfoldment,” “crystallization,” “quickening,” “compounded interest” and “cross-indexing” found their way into his notes.

His method was one of piling up associations to create

visual poems that exceed the sum of the individual collage and assemblage elements, and the fact that many artists today continue to explore similar creative methods demonstrates the power of this approach to materials. But for Cornell, along with this concept that disparate objects could take on new meanings when placed in proximity to one another came another kind of juxtaposition: the temporal comparison between past and present that constitutes nostalgia.

“Nostalgia anyone?” asked Cornell in a penciled scrawl on a scrap of paper now in the Cornell archives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nostalgia for the distant stars, whose light originated so very long ago, personified in Cornell’s beloved constellations Andromeda and Coma Berenices. Nostalgia for old science and its antiquated tools. Nostalgia for his own lost boyhood. Nostalgia for nineteenth-century ballerinas. Nostalgia for pastries consumed the previous day. For Cornell, nostalgia combined fascination, obsession, and longing for the unattainable— and it fueled his art.

In his hands, the memento could set off chain reactions of associations, often sweet, sometimes disturbing. His remembered glimpse of a child going through a subway turn-

stile, repeatedly evoked in notes about the experience, evolved into a celestial custodian to accompany the deceased Marilyn Monroe in several of his assemblage boxes. He kept records of sightings of preteen girls, who he sometimes followed in hopes of retrieving a lost button or barrette to add to his keepsakes. His painstakingly cut out Hedy Lamarr paper dolls carefully pasted onto black construction paper and naked dolls mounted in wooden boxes behind glass signal an artist whose gender identity may have been an ongoing source of confusion. Presents associated with the past—gifts of children’s books, sweets remembered from his youth, old photographs, bits of a ballerina’s costume—were especially valued as conduits for escape into the protected world of the dream.

Cornell was a complex individual who created complex works of art. He left a legacy of assemblage boxes and collages that continue to fascinate artists today. His innovative use of materials, the ways he plumbed them for multiple meanings, and the depth and breadth of his interests remain sources of inspiration for artists and writers today.

—Kirsten Hoving

Varujan Boghosian, Room with a View (detail), 2012, collage

Todd Bartel

Real Landscape No. 2

Abulic Terrain

Varujan Boghosian

St. George and the Dragon

The Pear

Joe Brainard

Untitled (Guest Check)

Untitled (Posy Power)

Untitled (Bicycle Ace)

Kirsten Hoving

Coma Berenices

A Peculiar Palpitating Effect

Upright Virtual Image

Michael Oatman

Achilles Standard

FROM A BOY’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN TWENTY-SIX VOLUMES

Westo Bully Comix

Die-Man

Dr. Nil

W. David Powell

Hey Joe

FROM GENERAL HOME DYNAMICS: HOW THE WORLD WORKS

General Home Dynamics, A

General Home Dynamics, C

Rosamond Purcell

Descent of Man Into the Woods

Dirigible

Marcus Ratliff

Hat Trick

Twins

Blue Moon

Robert Seydel

Untitled (Fine Hig)

Untitled (to Joseph C.)

Peter Thomashow

Balance

FROM PROFESSOR WOLFSON’S NOTEBOOKS

Respiration

Circulation

Lower Extremities

The Artists Todd Bartel (b.1962) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and studied in Rome at RISD’s European Honors Program between 1984-1985. In 1990, he was a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.). He achieved his MFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. Todd Bartel’s work assumes the forms of painting, drawing and sculpture in a collage and assemblage format. His work investigates the interconnected histories of collage and landscape and the role of nature and natural resources in Western culture. His work has been exhibited nationally in venues that include Palo Alto Art Center, Katonah Museum, Brockton Art Museum, The Rhode Island Foundation, Zieher Smith, Mills Gallery. He is the gallery director at the Cambridge School of Weston’s (CSW) Thompson Gallery, where he also teaches drawing, painting, conceptual art, collage, assemblage and installation art.

Varujan Boghosian (b.1926) is the son of Armenian immigrants. In 1953 he won a Fulbright Grant that allowed him several years of travel and work in Italy, until he returned to America and enrolled in the Yale School of Art and Architecture to study under Josef Albers. His work is represented in many private and public collections some of which include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.

A Professor Emeritus of Studio Art at Dartmouth College, he still lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Joe Brainard (b.1941–d.1994) at the age of 16, along with poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup produced The White Dove Review, an art and literary magazine that published works by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and other notables. Moving to New York, he quickly met a galaxy of literary and artistic stars who became his friends. Joe’s drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Museum, and the Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California, San Diego, as well as in many private and corporate collections. His work is now represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York..

Kirsten Hoving (b.1951) is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Art History at Middlebury College and author of Joseph Cornell and Astronomy: A Case for the Stars (Princeton: 2009). Her photographs have appeared in solo and group exhibitions around the country and was featured in the Fench publication, Square Magazine.

Michael Oatman (b.1964) fuses the roles of librarian, archaeologist, taxonomist and artist. His intricately detailed collages and exhaustively researched installations focus on what he calls the “poetic interpretation of documents.” Archives, photographs and records both inspire Oatman’s invented worlds and figure prominently within them. Recent projects include All Utopias Fell, a permanent installation of a crash landed spacecraft at MASS MoCA, and a feature-length ambient documentary about Easter Island entitled A Romance in Optics. Oatman’s work is included in hundreds of private and public collections around the world. He studied at RISD and the University at Albany. Oatman is an Associate Professor of Architecture at RPI, where has taught since 1999. He lives in Troy, NY. W. David Powell (b. 1947) is Associate Professor of Art at State University of New York College at Plattsburgh. His works in

both digital montage and traditional collage critique contemporary culture, particularly the notion of progress through science.

He has shown in both group and solo exhibitions in the US and abroad. The curator of this show, he also curated the show The British Are Coming, the British Are Coming: Graphics from Swinging London at Plattsburgh State Art Museum in 2006.

Rosamond Purcell, (b.1942) a photographer and writer lives in Medford, Massachusetts, seeks inspiration from venerable natural history collections and accidently venerable ruined objects. Her book Owls Head tackles the perplexing problem of assigning value to obsolete artifacts shaped, diminished or enhanced by the cycles of nature.

The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and Purcell worked as author and photographer on three books including Finders, Keepers: Oddities and Treasures from the collections of Peter the Great to Louis Agassiz. Other books by Purcell include Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck with sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay and Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare with scholar Michael Witmore.

Installations by Purcell include a full-scale recreation of the museum of the seventeenth century Danish professor of philosophy, Ole Worm. This installation, along with displays from Purcell’s studio, formed the exhibition Two Rooms, which was first shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Marcus Ratliff (b. 1935) received a scholarship to attend the MFA program at the Yale School of Fine Art after graduation from Cooper Union in 1959. From 1967–2007, Marcus designed and produced advertising, posters, announcements, catalogs and books for major art galleries, museums and art book publishers. After closing down his design studio in New York, Marcus relocated his home and studio to Norwich, Vermont. Since his transition from graphic design to collage-making Marcus has been invited to show at the Century Club in NYC and was invited to attend the American Academy in Rome as a Visiting Artist.

Robert Seydel, (b.1960–d.2011) was a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachussets for more than a decade.

He also served as curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University for a number of years where he organized exhibitions and programs. Seydel edited Several Gravities (Siglio, 2009), a volume of collages and poems by National Book Award-winning poet Keith Waldrop. His own Book of Ruth was published by Siglio in 2011, just after his untimely death.

Peter Thomashow (b.1953) is a physician, artist, collector and musician living in Vermont. He is on the clinical faculty at the Dartmouth College School of Medicine where he teaches Psychiatry. Dr. Thomashow has contributed to Cabinet Magazine and The Saranac Review. He was also the subject of the article The Doctor Who Paints Radios in the New York Times and featured in Metropolis and Industrial Design magazines. Most recently, he collaborated with a theremin player at The Main Street Museum of White River Junction, Vermont, to introduce his art installation entitled Special Rotating Optical Toy Experiment in April 2011, part of the continuing multi-media Wolfson Memorial Laboratory of Colour project.

The Works Todd Bartel

Joe Brainard

Abulic Terrain: Affecting Currents, (Salvage Series), 2000* Mixed media, 23.375 X 24.25 X 5.5”

Untitled (Guest Check), 1976* Mixed media collage, 9.5 X 7.75”

Garden Study (Surrender to Vastness), 2002 Mixed media, 67.25 x 14.5 x 1.75”, Garden Study (“A”merican Sublime: Pioneers of New Eden), 2004 Mixed media, 41.2 x 23.25 x 1.63”

Untitled (Bicycle Ace), 1975* Mixed media collage, 6 X 4” Untitled (Posy Power), 1978* Mixed media collage, 7 X 5”

Book II, 2011 4.5 x 5.7”, wet-plate collodion ambrotype on glass Michael Oatman From the series, A Boys History of the World in Twenty-six Volumes Dr. Nil, 1983* Cut paper collage, 6.75 X 10”, framed 14 X 17.75”

All images courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Die-man, 1983* Cut paper collage, 6.75 X 10”, framed 14 X 17.75”

Kirsten Hoving

Westo Bully Comix, 1983* Cut paper collage, 6.75 X 10”, framed 14 X 17.75”

Set Apart or Belonging to a People or an Individual 2011, Mixed media, 23.5 x 11.25”

A Peculiar Palpitating Effect, 2012* Archival digital print on fine art rag paper 15 X 15 “ image, framed 24 x 25 “

Achilles Standard, 2001/2007* assemblage, 14” X 14” X 14” (closed); dimensions variable (open)

Varujan Boghosian

Coma Berenices, Berenice’s Hair, 2011* Archival digital print on fine art rag paper 15 X 15 “ image, framed 24 x 25 “

Real Landscape No. 2, 2006* Mixed media, 10 x 7.5” framed, 7 x 5” unframed

Amsterdam, 2012 Collage, 6 x 6” Paradise, 2012 Collage, 17.25 x 19.25” Room With A View, 2012 Collage, 10 x 9.”

Upright Virtual Image, 2012* Archival digital print on fine art rag paper 15 X 15 “ image, framed 24 x 25 “ Virgo, 2011 Archival digital print on fine art rag paper 15 X 15 “ image, framed 24 x 25 “

W. David Powell From the series, General Home Dynamics: How the World Works General Home Dynamics, A, B, C and D, 2010* Cut paper collages on inkjet print formats, image area 8 x 10“, framed and matted to 11 X 14” All twenty-six works in this series have an image area of 8 x 10” framed and matted to 11 x 14”

St. George and the Dragon, 2012* Collage, 10.25” X 14”

Kirsten Hoving with Emma Powell

Hey Joe, 2011* Cut paper collage on inkjet print format, 8 X 10”

The Pear, 2012* Collage, 8.5 X 11”

Book I, 2011 4.5 x 5.7”, wet-plate collodion ambrotype on glass

Joe’s Expanding Universe, 2011 Cut paper collage on inkjet print format, 8 X 10”

Rosamond Purcell Descent of Man Enters the Woods* Photograph of collage, Epson print, 20 X 15.4” Dirigible* Photograph of collage, Iris print, 20 X 15.4” WWI Spade Photograph of collage Krystalnacht, 1988 Polaroid Land print, 20 x 22” Wanted Polaroid Land print, 8 x 10” Dust to Dust,1984 Collage, 23 x 16”

Victoria Palace Hotel, 2012 Collage of cut paper, 12 1/4 x 9” Sex Education, 2011 Collage of cut paper, 8.5 x 12.5” Evolution, 2011 Collage of cut paper, 8.5 x 12.5” Ghosts, 2011 Collage of cut paper, 8.5 x 12.5” Twins, 2012 Collage of cut paper, 12 x 9” Fratelli, 2011 Giclee print of collage of foil stamped, cut paper and ink drawing, 4.25 x 5.25”

Peter Thomashow The four works below are from Professor Wolfson’s Notebooks Balance, 2012* Cut paper collage, 17 X 11.25” Circulation, 2012* Cut paper collage ,17 X 11.25” Lower Extremities, 2012* Cut paper collage, 17 X 11.25” Respiration, 2012* Cut paper collage, 17 x 11.25” Simple Eye, 2010 Assemblage, 7.5 x 12”

Want Lies Wishing Collage, 8 x10”

Odysseus Redux, 2011 Collage of foil stamped, cut paper and canvas 15 x 10”

Marcus Ratliff

Robert Seydel

Smith Brothers, 2012 Collage, 4.25 x 14.25”

Blue Moon, 2011* Collage of cut paper, 9.75 x 7.25”

H are (from Book of Ruth), 2006* Collage 8.75 x 6.25 “

Smith Brothers Two, 2012 Collage, 8 x 11.5”

The Collector, 2011* Collage of cut paper, 13 x 9.75”

Untitled (Fine Hig), 2004* Collage, 6.5 X 4.25”

Exposed, 2011 Collage of cut paper, 13 x 9.75”

Untitled (to Joseph C.), 2003* Collage, 5.25 X 6.25”

Thinking About The Stars, 2012 Mixed media collage, 12.5 x 13.5”

Hat Trick, 2012 Collage of cut paper, 13.25 x 10” * Works shown in the catalog are indicated by an asterisk