setting for a fairy tale, part I

It’s as if the curtain has just come up. Voila! Cornell’s miniature stage. The play is about to begin.
His set is striking. A black frame, painted along the border of this box, reveals a grand chateau, which conjures up a feeling of the past. The chateau is set back from the border, giving the box an additional dimension, and making room for characters to act out their dramas before it. A forest, constructed from twigs, lies behind the chateau.
A Setting for a Fairy Tale.
Act 1, scene one.
Nothing happens. The tableau is frozen. No props or objects are moveable. Nothing will ever change. Yet there’s a magical atmosphere, as if much could happen, years could pass, or time could stand still. People could die and come back to life, or get lost in the forest behind the chateau. Who knows what happens in that forest? This box is all about the imagination.
Setting for a Fairy Tale asks me, the viewer, to create my own drama, becoming storyteller and listener for this stage.
The props: a mammoth Renaissance building, decorated with external galleries running between turrets. The building has a high-pitched roof and many windows. Yet this isn’t a three-dimensional miniature house that Cornell has drawn or built at a small scale. It’s a cutout engraving of a Paris municipal building, clipped from a book on French edifices entitled Les Plus excellents bastiments de France, published in 1576. The engraving by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau depicts the Chateau de Madrid, built for Francis I in 1549.
This clipped engraving, however, re-creates the feeling of an inhabited place. I experience a magical stumble back in time, and enter this symbol of the lost splendor of a Golden age, a world of princes and princesses, of chamber music, exotic banquets, trade, and romance. An enchanting world that no longer exists, except in its vestiges in the modern ballet and fairy tales. What might happen in this world, if I could imagine it?

Bébé Marie

Within her box behind glass Bébé Marie’s frail immortality could never be wrecked. Living further behind twigs, in a fictional forest, Bébé Marie is not only safe, away from air or elements or anyone who might touch her, but she is also a voyeur, always gazing at her viewer. A smiling evasiveness indicates that she has something to hide. What is it? The longer I stare at Bébé Marie, the more I want to know why she is in the forest, and why she is hidden. She entices me to come closer. Why is she so enmeshed in the woods? She stares and I imagine what she wants, and what she longs for, and suddenly, she knows! She knows all my longings and desires and fears, and inhabits them, and suddenly I am that doll in the forest, helpless and afraid—staring into myself. The exchange is an eerie one, fraught with complication. For I, the voyeur, have been caught by Bébé Marie. She has embodied all my desires, and knows that I am her, that object, lurking in the woods and I may never get out.

collage art interpretation

I do not know the title of this collage
it's by artist joseph cornell
it represents things hidden,
things hidden and tucked away
are impossible to hide

the sculpture of the little angel
gives light in this dark
yet colorful
context.
The room
is divided by a thick brown line,
which appears like a thin tree
trunk, though
it is a rendering of a tree
trunk, growing in a cell
with beautiful blue walls.
everything about this place should be dark,
dank--this appears to be a cell
this angel should be confined--
yet the cell is luminous.

moma catalogue 1980 cut up #5 (setting for a fairy tale)

even the most severely
Euclidean (Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system
attributed to the Greek mathematician
Euclid of Alexandria.)
box by Cornell
looks like an inhabited place
though its only resident
may be the shade
of a departed spirit.
They are not demystified things.
When dream does overflow into life, it may well demand the layering and linking that join
Cornell's emblems in extended, criscrossing
chains--a network of associations.
Setting for a Fairy Tale.

moma catalogue 1980 cut up #4

circe and her lovers
(mathematics in nature)
by joseph cornell

their mystery is of such a unique
quality that their emotional power possesses
the spectator without her wishing
to translate their secret
into less secret
language

moma catalogue 1980 cut up #3

the spiral
picked up
shifting sand allowed to form
different fleeting patterns
alluding to life spinning out
ever-narrowing route from the City
of Destruction to
the Celestial
City or Duchamp's
spiraling
or the circle
motif
a target
a moon
a glass disk
a ring confining a pet bird

moma catalogue 1980 cut up #2

The film finds no visual movement
the disjunctive "plot"
still images are merely quaint
"the gaze she knew as a child"
it is a cheaply made film
what the antipasto sun, the eternal bride
and a boxed doll see every day.
not very promising material
that hath no omen here -- but Awe--
an infinity of atmospheres

--The cinematic gaze of Joseph Cornell