Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination
Mark K December 27th, 2007
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a showing of the artwork of Joseph Cornell, which will be on display until January 6. The display and website at sfmoma.com have pulled me back time and again to study his work.
Cornell was self-taught and had a life-long fascination and correspondence with other creative people who intrigued him. He had a filing system where you collected ideas, along with photos, drawings and other found objects. He would then construct box-like cabinets in which he would display these items, arranged in such a way as to evoke a theme or an image of a dream.
Today, those boxes can be viewed at SFMOMA as well as on the interactive website for the museum (www.sfmoma.com). It wasn’t so much the boxes themselves that fascinated me as it was the idea of a person being curious and absorbing as much as possible from the simple details of everday life, at the same time surrounding himself with other creative people who inspire him.
There is a reason why I’m drawn to this work time and time again, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Like Cornell, I think that the key is to be curious and to collect ideas, then be open to what might come of them.
