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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School

2014

Performing Joseph Cornell's chronotopes of assemblage

Sarah Kathryn Jackson
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Jackson, Sarah Kathryn, "Performing Joseph Cornell's chronotopes of assemblage" (2014). LSU Doctoral
Dissertations. 3574.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3574

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PERFORMING JOSEPH CORNELL’S
CHRONOTOPES OF ASSEMBLAGE

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the

Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical Collage
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of Communication Studies

by
Sarah Kathryn Jackson
B.S., Southern Illinois University, 2006
M.A., Louisiana State University, 2009
May 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are so many people that have helped to make this project possible. I am so grateful

for all of the guidance and support. I am truly lucky to have you in my life.

First of all to my advisor, my friend, and my mentor, Patricia Suchy. I do not have the

words to thank you. I could not have completed this process without your encouragement and

wisdom. Thank you for teaching me the importance and magical potentials in embarking on a

creative dissertation, showing me that attention to detail and patience pays off. I have learned so

much from working with you and am so grateful to be in the same field with you. I owe you all

of the gratitude I have.

To Tracy Shaffer and Ruth Bowman for their commitment and guidance through this

process. Ruth, thank you for taking time from your retirement to be on my committee. Tracy,

thank you for taking time from your sabbatical to sit on my committee. I have learned a great

deal from both of you over the years both personally and professionally. I can’t thank you

enough for supporting me. And, thank you to Susan Ryan and Elsie Michie for sitting on my

committee.

Thank you to Craig Gingrich-Philbrook who opened my eyes to the power of

performance and who has been there for me over all of these years and seen me grow from a

young undergraduate into who I am today. I will forever be grateful for the day I decided to my

first class with you.

To my friends, my comrades, my partners in crime: Raquel Polanco, Rebecca Walker,

Benjamin Haas, Travis Brisini, Emily Graves, Ben Powell, Brianne Waychoff, Holley Vaughn,

John LeBret, Jade Huell, Ariel Gratch, Lindsay Michalik, Mollye Deloach, Vince Celluci, Pierre

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Cazaubon, Danielle McGeough, Derek Mudd, Brian Leslie, Lisa Flanagan, and Brandon

Nicholas. And to all of my SIU friend’s past and present. You all are the best people I know.

Thank you to my Métaphysique cast for helping me create our beautiful and bizarre

show. To all of my SIU friends who helped create Craig’s magical staging of Métaphysique.

To my family for their unbelievable support. Thank you Mom and Dad for your

unconditional love and encouragement. I continue to realize how lucky I am to have you as my

parents. Thank you for being in my corner no matter what. To my brothers: Ben and Kristian.

You are the best big brothers a girl could ask for. Thank you for being my role models and

letting me call you at all hours to ask you for advice, listening to me whine, making me laugh,

and always encouraging me. To my sister-in-law, Alecia, and my almost sister-in-law Alexis for

being amazing, strong, and kind women. And, to my grandfathers, Papa Dewey and Grandpa

Jackson. Their value of education, kindness, and perseverance motivated me as a young girl and

still motivates me today. I have felt your warm, encouraging presence over these years.

To Chris Shipman: my love, my Man Friday. You gave me love and tenderness when I

needed it. You helped me to keep my chin up, my eyes to the future, and always reminded me of

the magic I felt the first time I saw a Cornell box in person throughout the whole process. I could

have never done this without you. As Stevie Nicks would say, “You are the poet of my heart.”

To Jack, Adele, and George for their quiet encouragement and talent for making me laugh. And

finally, to the soon to be newest member of our little family, Finnegan. She doesn’t know it yet,

but she gave me the final push of motivation I needed to get this project done and make it

something I’m proud of.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii

ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... vi

CHAPTER ONE: AN INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................1

Joseph Cornell’s Creative Biography ......................................................................4
General Artistic Influences and Approaches ...........................................................5
Bakhtin’s Chronotope ............................................................................................13
The Chronotope of Product versus the Chronotopes of Performance ...................14
Cornell’s Assemblage Chronotopes .......................................................................16
Map of Chapters.....................................................................................................22
Significance............................................................................................................26
Limitations .............................................................................................................28

CHAPTER TWO: THE WANDERING CHRONOTOPE ................................................30

Wandering as Aesthetic Practice ...........................................................................31
From Creative Inspiration to Aesthetic Practice ....................................................35
Poetically Engaging the City .................................................................................36
Wandering: Place and Memory .............................................................................39
Immortalization of Place and Memory through Film ............................................43
Cornell and Creative Cartography .........................................................................46

CHAPTER THREE: GRAMMAR OF THE LEGS ..........................................................49

Wandering New Orleans .........................................................................................50
Collaging Memory ..................................................................................................63

CHAPTER FOUR: THE ARCHIVING CHRONOTOPE ................................................72

The Archiving Chronotope ....................................................................................73
Theorizing the Archive ..........................................................................................74
Cornell’s Archives .................................................................................................76
Dynamic Archiving or the Archive at Play............................................................84

CHAPTER FIVE: THE FILMIC AND DIGITAL ARCHIVE .........................................88

Film as Ephemeral Archive ...................................................................................88
The Digital Archive ...............................................................................................93
Nebula: The Powdered Sugar Princess ..................................................................94

CHAPTER SIX: THE COLLAGING CHRONOTOPE ..................................................102

Time and Space in Film .......................................................................................103
Cornell as Film Enthusiast ...................................................................................108
Cornell as Film Collector .....................................................................................109
Cornell as Filmmaker...........................................................................................114
Film Scenarios .....................................................................................................114
The Collage Films ................................................................................................115

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Cornell’s Collage Process ....................................................................................123
The Heterochronotopicity of Cornell’s Collage Films ........................................124

CHAPTER SEVEN: SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE .................................................126

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ASSEMBLAGE CHRONOTOPE .........................................136

Theorizing Assemblage .......................................................................................136
Assemblage Performance.....................................................................................138
Métaphysique d’Éphemera: A Performance Inspired by Joseph Cornell ............141
Assembling the Performance ...............................................................................141
The Chronotopes of Performing Métaphysique d’Éphemera ..............................151
Restaging Métaphysique: A Re-Reassemblage ...................................................161
The Métaphysiques of Performance ....................................................................166

CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION .................................................................................167

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................174

VITA ................................................................................................................................179

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ABSTRACT

In this project I study Joseph Cornell’s practices of art-making through a performative

lens. Rather than focusing on his finished products, I am interested in his embodied processes of

assemblage. I call on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to articulate how time and

space operate within Cornell’s finished works and his processes of assemblage art. In so doing, I

conceptualize Cornell’s textual chronotope, métaphysique d’éphemera or “everyday magic,” as

well as his chronotopes of assemblage: wandering, archiving, collaging, and assembling. I move

from the finished work to the contingencies and strategies of the performance of assemblage.

This project is unique because I extend my research into the creative realm, developing multi-

media artworks through my embodiment of Cornell’s chronotopes of assemblage. My

performance of Cornell’s chronotopes engenders projects that provide discoveries and expand

my understanding of each chronotope, Cornell’s practices, and my own creative and scholarly

work. The projects include: wandering New Orleans collecting memories that I then use to create

an interactive website, creating a video of one of Cornell’s film scripts that was never realized by

combining digital and analog technologies, creating a collage film composed of found footage,

and directing a theatrical performance, Métaphysique d’Éphemera, that was restaged three years

later. I conclude by arguing that Cornell’s textual chronotope, métaphysique d’éphemera, offers

an aesthetic to work within, while his chronotopes of assemblage provide a model for both

creative and scholarly work. I conclude by questioning whether the textual and process

chronotopes are inextricably connected or if they can be practiced independently by

artists/scholars.

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CHAPTER ONE: AN INTRODUCTION

The crowded halls of the Art Institute of Chicago had been a warm retreat from the wind

and snow outside. I wandered room to room anticipating the Cornell collection, peeling off

layers of clothing and talking myself into becoming more comfortable with the swarms of

tourists at every turn around every corner. I prepared to encounter Cornell’s boxes like preparing

to begin to write a new story that begins with wandering. When I finally found them I took my

time with each piece. I didn’t realize that there were more boxes behind me when I turned around

and saw something dimly glowing across the room. I walked toward it.

Its interior was dark. The interior of every box is dark when its contents are closed from

view, but thankfully Joseph Cornell’s boxes are open on one side for all to see inside the

memories they hide. Lighted Dancer stands nearly 14 inches tall, 11 ½ inches wide, and is

almost 7 inches deep. The exterior wood is stained a somber brown and the front glass of the box

protects the contents inside, which are saturated by a deep blue light that prompts me to step

closer. I lowered my body so I was at face level and peered into the box to discover that the dark

interior is composed of tree bark. The back wall of the box presents a backdrop lined with

intricately detailed and distinctly textured tree bark that looks like what the inside of a dream of

being lost in a forest might look like if you cut it open and explored its nighttime trees. Like stars

shining the way to waking, the bark twinkles from what appears to be glitter layered atop broken

glass, adding a magical element to the natural quality of the bark. I looked closer and saw that

the bark acts as a frame within the frame of the box to showcase a tiny paper cutout of a dancer

in mid-leap. Her legs are frozen in an aerial split, her white tutu perfectly placed despite her

apparent recent movement, and one arm is frozen as she reaches toward the sky. I realized that

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behind the dancer is a tiny built-in light bulb illuminating the dancer. When the light bulb is

switched off the dancer disappears.

Though the box is only seven inches deep the ballerina appears very distant. She reminds

me of insects stuck in sap or honey, but the feeling I am left with after standing awestruck for

five minutes is myself, simultaneously squirming to get free and longing to stay still. The

memory of this image is frozen in my mind like the imagined insect in sap, like the dancer in

mid-leap, like myself in the memory of this moment.

Lighted Dancer sent me dancing out of the everyday motions of life and allowed me to

wander into the dance of everyday magic always simultaneously performed in the dark boxes

inside us all. I had not seen a digital or print reproduction of this box before I came upon it at the

Art Institute of Chicago, and I was pricked by its presence in a way that made time stutter to a

slow stop. With this moment of presence, this moment of stillness, came an unsettling haunting

from a distant past. The dancer was stuck there in the dim light that illuminated her frame

seemingly in mid-decay. I knew that the moment the light went off she would temporarily

disappear, only to reappear again to repeat her dance of stillness.

The combination of preservation and decay in this box is hauntingly palpable. The deep

blue, dimly lit box, with its ballerina trapped safely inside, haunted me there, in that moment,

followed me out into the wintertime Chicago streets, onto the plane back to New Orleans, and

still to this day wanders with me through the everyday magic of my life. I am left with the

beautiful despair of knowing that it is always the nearly opaque light that illuminates her, that

hides her from full view, and that traps her in her performance for all time--a romantic

meditative ode to both her dance and mine.

In this project I study Joseph Cornell’s practices of art-making through a performative

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lens. As a performance studies scholar, rather than analyzing his products from a distance I am

interested in his processes of production as models for creative and scholarly work. In order to

study his processes I use a combination of theory and practice. I first research how time and

space operate and influence human agency and vice versa within each of Cornell’s creative

practices. In order to articulate my understanding of the role of time, space, and human agency in

Cornell’s processes of assemblage I call upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope.

Through this research I develop Cornell’s chronotopes of assemblage, which include wandering,

archiving, collaging, and assembling.

In order to operate betwixt and between theory and practice I extend my research into the

creative by re-performing or “trying on” his chronotopic practices as my mode of inquiry. By

doing so I produce artworks informed by the roles of time, space, and human agency in his

practices and my historical, critical, and theoretical research corresponding to each of his

practices. As a result, this project draws equally on scholarly research of Cornell’s practices and

embodiment as a way of knowing. My performance of Cornell’s practices of assemblage is just

as significant to my research as the traditional scholarly underpinnings of this study. I embrace

performance studies scholar Dwight Congquergood’s claim that “knowing comes from doing”

(152). Conquergood argues, “Performance studies struggles to open the space between analysis

and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice. This

embrace of different ways of knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how knowledge is

organized in the academy” (145). Through operating within Cornell’s assemblage chronotopes I

am able to map out a method for assemblage as a mode of creative and scholarly work.

Embracing performance as a mode of inquiry privileges alternative ways of knowing that are

unsettling to institutional disciplines. Dedication to combining theory and practice is specific to

3
performance studies. Conquergood notes, “This constitutive liminality of performance studies

lies in its capacity to bridge the segregated and differently valued knowledges, drawing together

legimated as well as subjugated modes of inquiry” (152). Following Conquergood, I shift

between theoretical, historical, and critical research and descriptions of my own creative work

throughout this project.

In the rest of this chapter I discuss Cornell in terms of what is most important to my

study, which includes his creative biography and his roles as wanderer, archivist, collage artist,

and assemblage artist. I then outline Bakhtin’s theorization of the chronotope and develop my

conceptualization of Cornell’s textual chronotope of métaphysique d’éphemera and his

assemblage chronotopes. I then map out in more detail the contents of each subsequent chapter. I

conclude the chapter by discussing the significance and limitations of my project.

Joseph Cornell’s Creative Biography

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York on Christmas Eve, 1903. He was the oldest

son of Dutch descendants, Joseph and Helen Storms Cornell, and had two younger sisters, Helen

and Betty, and a younger brother, Robert. His father was a textile salesman and designer who

carved wooden toys and furniture in his spare time. His mother was a Kindergarten teacher

before she married. She also wrote film scripts, played piano, and was an avid reader. Cornell

was close with all of his siblings, particularly his brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral

palsy. The Cornells were an affluent family and enjoyed a relatively privileged lifestyle during

Joseph’s childhood. Cornell’s parents were artistically inclined and interested in the turn of the

century’s entertainment; they took their children into Manhattan to see music, theatre, and

vaudeville shows, and to the emerging cinema. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan explains, “As a boy,

[Cornell] had taken special delight in early motion-picture theatres and penny arcades on Coney

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Island and along Sixth Avenue, the Eden Musée waxworks, the Hippodrome’s water ballets and

theatrical spectacles, and the Palace Theatre vaudeville extravaganzas” (Navigating 19). His

childhood hero was stage magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, whom he would have been

able to see on a family trip to the Hippodrome.

Hartigan describes Cornell as a bibliophile. His desire for solitude led to him become an

avid reader of books, magazines, and newspapers, all of which funded a “bank of knowledge that

embraced both nostalgia and information, the addictive pursuit of collecting, and budding

insights into his perception of beauty” (Navigating 20). He was extremely knowledgeable about

authors such as Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, and Ada Isaacs Mencken.

In 1917, his father died from leukemia and Cornell was sent to study at Phillips Academy

in Andover, Massachusetts, where he began to suffer from anxiety and depression. The Cornell

family had been well off since Cornell was young; however, after his father’s death the family

was unable to keep up their lifestyle and moved to a series of rented houses in Bayside, Queens,

and in 1929 settled at 37-08 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, where Cornell would live for the rest of

his life. In 1921 Cornell left Phillips Academy without graduating and returned home to help his

family’s financial situation. His sisters married and moved away, leaving Cornell and his mother

and brother together in the family home. Cornell’s affluent and happy childhood was replaced

with financial, physical, and emotional responsibility for his family, particularly his brother and

mother.

General Artistic Influences and Approaches

In 1921 Cornell went to work as a salesman for the textile wholesaler William Whitman

Company on lower Madison Avenue. During his time as a textile salesman Cornell wandered the

city and took in its culture. He visited antique shops, flea markets, second-hand shops,

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bookstores, theatre ephemera stores, and record stores. He also frequented museums, the opera,

ballet, and the public library. In the 1920s, Cornell was interested in modern art such as French

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. However, he was also following the developing avant-

garde community in New York, which was influenced by the European avant-garde movements

of the time such as Dada, Cubism, and German Expressionism. As Cornell researched different

art movements he also become interested in artists’ lives, which became a “lifelong pattern of

seeking out kindred spirits through his reading and collecting” (Hartigan, Navigating 25). He

also spent time reading art criticism and journals on music, theatre, and visual art. He attended

exhibitions and began meeting artists, curators, and others in the art world.

Hartigan explains that between 1926 and 1930, Cornell kept a scrapbook in which he

kept clippings dealing with his wide array of creative interests. The scrapbook was an

intertwining of his developing interests. Subjects were diverse, ranging from the nature of art and

poetry, music, Japanese and Chinese art and literature, spirituality, and modern art criticism. The

book consists of a softcover, two-ring binder with clippings neatly pasted in no obvious

sequence. Hartigan explains, “The content, like his experiences between 1921 and 1929, are so

cumulatively diverse that his perception of artistic emergence as natural, gradual, and

spontaneous is understandable. Evidence of a single, defining moment that moved him from

walking ‘with eyes and ears’ and seeking ‘the scientific sense of being’ to making art is simply

absent” (Navigating 39). Instead he moved from his role as an observer/collector to that of a

visual artist. During this period Cornell began cutting and pasting in his scrapbook, and there is

indication that he began making three-dimensional objects during this period as well.

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Cornell’s Practices

Cornell was a collector. He created his works from pre-existing materials. Along with his

collections of found objects he collected mass-produced Victorian paper ephemera such as trade-

cards, books, magazines, and photographs. Consumption of material goods grew in the Victorian

era with expanding international trade, mass production, and technological advancement;

advertising “generated a sense of a universe readily filled with necessities, inventions, and

fancies” (Hartigan, Navigating 55). Hartigan explains that there was a contradictory idea of

usefulness in the Victorian era. On the one hand there was a “waste not, want not” mindset that

encouraged reusing or finding new uses for household objects. On the other hand, because of the

rapid production of ephemera, tastes and styles changed quickly, causing consumers to discard

out-of-style objects. The first flea market opened in Paris in 1885 and the idea of “grandma’s

attic” became common in the Victorian era (Hartigan, Navigating 56). The waste not, want not

mindset re-emerged in the 1930s during the Depression when many people saved objects to be

used in new ways out of necessity. In his early work, Cornell’s collages were mostly arranged

with clippings and images from other sources. Cornell made use of what Joe Moran describes as

“rubbish,” “that which is discarded, ignored or left behind” (62). Objects turn to rubbish when

they become outdated, forgotten or when, as Moran suggests, “they outlast their status as

commodities and become part of our everyday clutter” (62). Moran goes on to explain that the

French term “bric-a-brac” carries the idea of objects that are casually abandoned and fortuitously

survive. Michael Thompson describes rubbish as ephemeral objects from everyday life that have

physically survived, but are no longer fashionable or usable (Moran 64). Rubbish or bric-a-brac

held special meaning for Cornell, and he roamed the city collecting and saving each piece until

he had the perfect use for it in his work. He kept thematic file folders filled with clippings and

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images accumulated over the years. Cornell never used the original image he tore from a book or

magazine for a piece of his work. Instead he used Photostats, copies of copies, keeping the

original in his collection.

Historians argue that for Cornell, objects were associated with the people, time, and

places over which he obsessed. In his artworks often ballerinas, actresses, hotels, birds, or film

stars are represented through objects metonymically associated with them or even belonging to

them, such as ballerina’s necklace or a bird’s perch. Throughout his career certain objects such

as pipes, bubbles, broken goblets, and sand repeated themselves, becoming motifs. These objects

appear so often that they take on special meaning.

In addition to his collages, boxes, and films, Cornell also kept a journal of observations,

dreams, and creative inspirations. He also developed extensive archives containing dossiers and

explorations of various themes over the course of his career. The contents included ephemera,

objects, clippings, postcards, notes, quotes, dried leaves and flowers, and illustrations that were

stored in folders, boxes, slip folders, and suitcases. Cornell kept, added to, and edited his

explorations and dossiers over the course of his entire career. He often referred to the collected

material for his collage, three-dimensional, and film projects.

Cornell’s Two and Three-Dimensional Works

Cornell’s early collages were inspired by and reminiscent of Max Ernst’s collages or

photomontages in which he “combined late-nineteenth century engravings into compositions

whose elements differ radically in scale…he created a unified image from the collage fragments

and assembled them so that they appeared to be a single entity” (Waldman 20). However, the

tone of Cornell’s work set him apart from Ernst and the Surrealists. While the Surrealists used

found objects and juxtaposition to create startling and often unsettling contexts, Cornell used the

8
same techniques to create dreamlike environments that asked the viewer to transcend time and

space imaginatively.

Though Cornell continued to make two-dimensional collages, his work transformed into

object or memory boxes composed of found materials. Cornell’s three-dimensional constructions

often referenced architectural spaces such as hotels, pharmacies, palaces, aviaries, observatories,

and theatres. A 1942 box entitled A Pantry Ballet (For Jacques Offenbach) took the form of a

theatre with its curtains made from doilies and lobster ballerinas wearing mesh tutus. His famous

Toward the “Blue Peninsula” (For Emily Dickinson)(1951-52), took the form of a stark white

deserted aviary with a window looking out to the blue sky. The bird of the habitat seems to have

just flown away.

Wooden boxes were not the only structures Cornell used in his work. He also

transformed storage containers, chests, suitcases and cabinets into object boxes. Untitled

(Pharmacy) (1942) was constructed from a wooden medicine cabinet with glass shelves. The

shelves were lined with glass vials holding natural materials like marbles, colored sand, and

seashells. Often within Cornell’s boxes were more storage compartments such as drawers,

bottles, and grids that held different found objects. The ordinary objects within container upon

container were both displayed and protected. His museum boxes, for example, are constructed

from chests holding vials holding found objects. Each vial has a slot to keep it secure within the

chest or museum. Cornell intended the viewer to be able to pick up and explore each vial. This

arrangement suggests “that the boxes are not just abstractions of specific types of environments

but also compartments stocked for discovery” (Hartigan, Shadowplay 28). Cornell’s boxes

encouraged the viewer to interact through other senses than just the visual. Viewers are invited to

open drawers, handle vials, or roll a ball. Often his interactive boxes would evoke arcade games,

9
reflecting his interest in turn-of-the-century mechanized entertainment. Boxes Untitled (Penny

Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1945-46), and the series of Medici boxes incorporate games

found in penny arcades like pinball and slot machines.

Cornell’s Filmic Works

Although not as well known for his films as he was for his three-dimensional boxes,

Cornell was an influential experimental filmmaker. Beginning in the 1930s, he made collage

films from discarded film footage of Hollywood B movies and ephemeral films. His collage

films include Rose Hobart (1936), Cotillion (1940s-1969), Children’s Party (1940s-1969),

Midnight Party (1940s-1969), Bookstalls (1940s), By Night with Torch and Spear (1940s),

Vaudeville De-Lux (1940s), Carousel- An Animal Opera (1940s), Thimble Theatre (1940s),

Jack’s Dream (1940s), New York-Rome-Barcelona-Brussels (1940s), and Cinderella’s Dream

(no date). In the 1950s he begin making original films in collaboration with experimental

filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and Jordan Lawrence. His original films document

special locations and monuments in and around Manhattan and include Centuries of June (1955),

GniR RednoW (1955-60), A Legend for Fountains (1957), The Aviary (1955), Joanne: Union

Square (1955), Joanne: Xmas (1955), Nymphlight (1957), Boy’s Games (1957), Cloches A

Travers Les Feuilles (1957), Angel (1957), Cappicino (1957), Mulberry Street (1957-65),

Flushing Meadows (1965), and Children (1957). Cornell also wrote several film scenarios that

were never realized including Monsieur Phot (1933), Nebula the Powdered Sugar Princess

(1941), and The Theatre of Hans Christian Anderson (1945). Although I was initially drawn to

Cornell’s boxes, I moved on to study his films. His films are especially important to this study

because I am interested in how Cornell’s filmic techniques can be used in conversation with

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digital technologies. Several of the creative projects I contribute as part of this study incorporate

the combination of analogue film and digital video technologies.

Cornell and Surrealism

Prior to World War II many of the surrealists fled to New York City, giving Cornell

direct access to surrealists such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp and their work. It made sense

that Cornell, frequenting museums and galleries, made his way to the new Julien Levy Gallery.

Levy’s gallery focused on contemporary photography, film, and painting. Levy worked to bring

Surrealism to the United States, and Cornell first encountered surrealist art in his gallery. On

November, 11 1931, Cornell visited the Julien Levy Gallery where he saw Dada and Surrealist

collages, sculptures, paintings, and photographs preoccupied with objets trouvés or “found

objects” which appealed to his value of the serendipitous and natural transforming moments.

Hartigan explains found objects as the epitome of finding as a creative act:

Using the found object (or image) means giving it fresh purpose or context, but the found
object can also give or deliver something new. This duality of the gift--from the artist to
an object, from an object to the artist or the viewer--contributed to his variant idea of the
‘objet donné’ or ‘given object,’ which informed [Cornell’s] perception of art as a spiritual
gift to humanity even in the early 1930s. (Navigating 46)

Cornell had been collecting found objects before his introduction to the Surrealists at the Levy

Gallery. Around this time Cornell worked on collages inspired by Max Ernst’s La Femme 100

têtes (1929). He then began making three-dimensional assemblages from found objects. Cornell

visited Levy to show him his own constructions including objects within a bell jar and pill boxes

as well as his collages. Levy included his work in the “Surrealisme” exhibition at the gallery in

January 1932, and then sponsored his first solo exhibit, “The Objects of Joseph Cornell” on

November 26, 1932. Levy advertised the objects as “toys for adults” that would make good

presents for Christmas.

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Joseph Cornell, edited by Kynaston McShine, includes essays that analyze Cornell’s

work through twentieth-century art movements, mostly Surrealism. Cornell shared the surrealist

idea that found and everyday objects can hold special, poetic meaning. With his use of found

objects, collage, and flânerie, Cornell surely has much in common with the Surrealists; he was

greatly influenced by Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst. In “The Transcendental

Surrealism of Joseph Cornell,” Dawn Ades explains, “The chance encounters and disorienting

juxtapositions of Cornell’s early collages conform to the earliest definition of montage in the

context of Dada and Surrealism” (16). However, Cornell maintained over the years that his work,

although inspired by Surrealism, was not surrealist. Cornell sought not so much the incongruity

that the Surrealists preferred as much as a “mysterious congruity, a thread of affinities, however

intangible, rather than an illuminating spark struck from disparateness” (Ades 16). The

Surrealists were dedicated to their dreams and subconscious desires. Their work was often

overtly sexual, and objects within surrealist art often represent unconscious desires and fears.

Cornell insisted that while the Surrealists were interested in making “Black Magic” with their

art, his was “White Magic” (Hartigan, Shadowplay 47). Nevertheless, Ades concludes “that he

belonged to the first generation of American artists to be profoundly influenced by the theory

and practice of Surrealism, which he found stimulating and liberating, but that he quickly

transcended this influence, although retaining to a considerable degree a Surrealist syntax in his

works” (23). Diane Waldman explains, “The Surrealists gave Cornell a poetic license, as it were,

to indulge in a fondness for the esoteric and the commonplace, a taste that should not be

confused with the indiscriminate” (213).

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Bakhtin’s Chronotope

In this section I conceptualize Bakhtin’s chronotope, which I have chosen to use to help

me explore Cornell’s use of time and space in his works and processes. Because the chronotope

focuses on time and space in embodied experiences, Bakhtin’s language provides a critical

approach to thinking about Cornell’s processes of assemblage.

Mikhail Bakhtin refers to the specific embodied orientation to time and space within an

artistic work as chronotopic: “We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the

intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in

literature . . . Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise,

space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Dialogic

84). In other words, space informs what events are possible in time; time imprints itself on space.

Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson add, “All contexts are shaped fundamentally by the kind

of time and space that operate within them” and “Different social activities and representations

of those activities presume different kind of time and space” (367). Bakhtin used the chronotope

to understand how different times and spaces enable the potential for particular kinds of actions,

valuing the chronotopes that were most responsive to human agency.

Bakhtin uses what he terms adventure time in the chivalric romance as an example of a

distinct literary chronotope. In adventure time, the chivalric hero lives in a miraculous world.

Everything in this literary world is extra-ordinary, causing the extra-ordinary to be the norm, or

ordinary. Bakhtin notes, “The unexpected, and only the unexpected, is what is expected”

(Dialogic 152) in adventure-time. The miraculous is the normal condition of the hero’s world

and so he behaves as if adventure were his “native element” (Dialogic 152). The hero travels to

faraway lands in adventure-time, but while the lands are all “other” lands, they are all similar to

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one another and have the same concept of glory and the heroic deed. Time is manipulated in

chivalric adventure-time. Hours can drag out; years can be condensed to minutes. The hero’s

identity and his actions are only possible because of the kind of world that the adventure-time

chronotope creates.

Bakhtin focused on chronotopes within literature. However, he explained that chronotopes

exist in everyday life as well. For Bakhtin, aesthetics and everyday life were inextricably tied

together. He tells us, “We might even speak of a special creative chronotope inside which this

exchange between work and life occurs, and which constitutes the unique life of the work”

(Dialogic 254, emphasis in original). Morson and Emerson explain, “Chronotopes are not so

much visibly present in activity as they are the ground for activity . . . They are not contained in

plots, but make typical plots possible” (369). Although each has a distinct orientation to time,

space, and human agency, they may overlap in practice and even, as Bakhtin argues, “compete

for ascendancy.” He explains, “Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist. They may be

interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in

ever more complex interrelationships” (Dialogic 252). Chronotopes can enter into dialogue with

one another. Further, chronotopes inform one’s perceptions and interpretation of action. By

doing so they also offer values.

The Chronotope of the Product versus the Chronotopes of Performance

At the beginning of this project I was drawn to Cornell’s aesthetic; the mysterious play of

preservation and decay drew me in. There is a specific chronotope at work within Cornell’s

aesthetic, métaphysique d’éphemera or “everyday magic.” This concept comes from nineteenth-

century French Romantic poet and novelist Gerard de Nerval, who emphasized the importance of

insignificant things once the imagination has transformed them (Caws 394). Cornell attempted to

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make the ordinary or fleeting subtly magical or metaphysical. Caws explains that métaphysique

d’éphemera “betokens the passion he devoted to the wandering portion of his days, tracking

down the trivial elements in his boxes which he saw as linked to a greater philosophical system”

(136). Métaphysique d’éphemera expresses Cornell’s investment in creating the perfect

combination of the everyday and the eternal in his work. Additionally, Cornell referred to this

tension in making his three-dimensional boxes and collages as the attempt to hold on to

something that inevitably disappears, like people, things, places, times, memories, and dreams. I

understand métaphysique d’éphemera as the textual chronotope operating in Cornell’s finished

products.

Art historians such as Hartigan describe Cornell’s ways of orienting to time differently

than most artists. He saw the past and present not as distinct, but as fluid and in conversation

with one another. Hartigan explains, “His perception of the past as a form of history that informs

the present and shapes the future considers time as a continuum and creative force. As a result,

rather than dwelling on details and memories as a source of sentiment, he transformed them to

project time’s multiple dimensions and effects” (Shdowplay 23). Additionally, space in Cornell’s

works combines the miniature and the infinite. Hartigan suggests that the miniature size of his

pieces allowed imaginative expansion for the viewer. A tiny vial holding a ribbon takes the

viewer on a journey of a memory far beyond the dimensions of the box itself. Hartigan claims,

“Cornell had to negotiate issues of scale within a space that he deliberately confined to the small

and intimate” (Shadowplay 27). The boxes open an infinite imaginative space within the

dimension of a frame, which often included mirrors, doors, or prosceniums that alluded to space

beyond the box itself.

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Cornell’s boxes mix past and present and eras. They also incorporate multiple uses of

space, ranging from multiple scales within a box to suggestions of the infinite within the

dimensions of the box. Space in another sense also becomes important for Cornell to preserve,

document, and intimately engage and interact with, particularly as New York’s cityscape

evolved.

But in addition to the senses of time and space (métaphysique d’éphemera) Cornell

conveys inside his works, each of Cornell’s practices of assemblage take on different orientations

to time and space that may or may not be necessarily tied to métaphysique d’éphemera

(Cornell’s textual chronotope). These chronotopes of process include wandering, archiving,

collaging, and assembling. Although critics like Lynda Roscoe Hartigan and Jodi Hauptman

discuss time and space in Cornell’s works, my study is interested more in spatial and temporal

dynamics in his processes.

Cornell’s Assemblage Chronotopes

An assemblage artist collects found or ready-made objects and places the objects into

relation with each other. William Seitz defines assemblage broadly as “A generic concept that

would include all forms of composite art and modes of juxtaposition” (9). I use the term to refer

to the general practice of taking pre-existing objects and/or images from one environment and

placing them into a new context in relation to other objects and images in order to create a new

artwork. Assemblage art includes three-dimensional compositions from found objects, two-

dimensional collage, filmic montage, photomontage, and dossiers. Each art form requires

embodied practices that combine drawing from the past while working toward a future creative

potential.

In this study, I describe Joseph Cornell’s works as assemblage art and then situate his

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working methods as performances. In doing so I adapt Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to

describe Cornell’s artistic practices of wandering, collecting and archiving, collaging, and

assembling as embodied performances.

Each of Cornell’s assemblage chronotopes takes on specific qualities in relation to time

and space. It is important to note that although I am separating and dividing the chronotopes to

define and characterize them, artists move back and forth between chronotopes. The creative

process is not a step-by-step process culminating with assemblage; the chronotopes of

assemblage are fluid. They offer a means to understand the assemblage artist’s creative work,

but they also offer a researcher/practitioner methods for creating new assemblages. The

assemblage chronotope is therefore heterochronotopic, meaning that multiple chronotopes are

always operating within the larger chronotope of assemblage. So, the assemblage chronotope

contains the wandering, archiving, collaging, and assembling chronotopes. The specificity of

time and space of each chronotope is still at work within the larger chronotopes that contain the

others.

The Wandering Chronotope

In Chapters Two and Three, I explore the wandering chronotope. The wandering

chronotope necessarily challenges daily routine. It upsets and disrupts it and thereby enables

chance and spontaneity. Schedules and appointments are disregarded, and instead of traversing

the city in order to accomplish a task or job, wandering offers one the chance to lose oneself in

one’s surroundings. The wanderer improvises and is satisfied with not knowing where she is

going exactly. Time slows and becomes leisurely. The wanderer meanders through the day,

going where she pleases, when she pleases, directed by her desires, whether conscious or not.

The wandering chronotope opens the possibility to be inspired by one’s surroundings. It allows

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the opportunity to observe, discover, and imbue surroundings with new and special meaning. The

wanderer is more connected to her surroundings. She does not simply rush by as she would in a

car or train. She takes more time, sees more details. Space plays a particularly important role in

the wandering chronotope as it becomes a vessel for memories. As we wander and encounter

familiar places, memories flood back to us. In this way, time, in the wandering chronotope, is

also layered. The wanderer simultaneously lives in the present and accesses the past as she

encounters particular places. Space holds memories of the past, but time progresses and the

landscape evolves.

The Archiving Chronotope

The second chronotope, discussed in Chapters Four and Five, deals with archiving. The

performance of archiving is solitary and intimate. As the archivist engages with the archive, time

can pass unexpectedly; hours can pass in what seem to the archivist like minutes. Detail is

magnified in this chronotope as the archivist can spend extended periods of time focusing on one

object, document, or image within the archive. While physical seclusion or isolation

characterizes this chronotope, an intimate connection occurs between the archivist and the

archival material. So, while time can seem to pass quickly because the archivist is caught up in

her work, time also slows in order for the archivist to interact with the objects with precision and

care.

Susan Davidson and Ann Tempkin explain that the collector and archivist isn’t only

compulsive or obsessive but also has, “A sense of purpose, an attachment to the objects of desire,

an appreciation of arranging, and a strong urge to share, whether to egotistical or unselfish ends”

(222). The archivist has a close relationship to that which she archives; she experiences a thrill in

the hunt for an object and has an intense desire to possess the objects. The act of archiving is

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highly idiosyncratic. Each archivist has a particular way to organize and catalogue her archives.

The archivist begins to make her own constellations of connections and associations between the

objects within the archive and uses those connections to create her archival system. Though the

organization of items in archives is subjective and often nebulous, it is not random. Archives are

selective and often rearranged, reevaluated, and revised according to the archivist’s intentions

over time. A tension occurs between private and public when archiving because the interaction

between archive and archivist is so intimate and idiosyncratic yet usually the archive is intended

for a public audience. But, because relationships between archival materials can be so associative

subjective to the archivist, they are often not completely accessible to a public audience.

The relationship between archivist and archive is a performative encounter between

living, dynamic, corporeal bodies constituted by memory, history, and experience. These bodies

are wholly interdependent while simultaneously existing in a state of what Bakhtin terms

unfinalizability. Importantly, the avant-garde archive exploits that which the nineteenth- century

archivists and historians fought to eliminate: contingency. Cornell’s boxes, for example,

although assembled in a form for presentation, open the possibility for alternatives or extensions

of pieces of art. Cornell’s archives use reused, found materials to be found and reused again.

Cornell’s archives and archival methods act as predecessors of contemporary archival practices

of creative remixing.

The Collaging Chronotope

The third chronotope, explored in Chapters Six and Seven, is collaging. Collage enables

the artist to experiment with placing materials together from various sources. The performer in

the collage chronotope is a joiner of things who pieces together multiple materials, often creating

odd and juxtaposed images, stories, and interpretations. Breton describes collage as “The

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marvelous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of

our experience, of bringing them together, and drawing a spark from their contact . . . and of

disorienting us in our memory by depriving us a frame of reference” (177). The collage is made

entirely of pre-existing objects and images that have been lifted from their original or previous

context and put into a new context. The arrangement of the objects in relation to each other

elicits subjective responses for each viewer. Norman Lilaberte and Alex Mogelon describe the

interpretation of collage:

The symbols within the collage, montage, assemblage, and construction must be
interpreted and related to human feelings, experiences, and values in order to evoke
individual reaction and understanding on the part of the viewer. Thus the power of
collage composition rests in the use of novel and many times unexpected materials,
juxtaposition so as to elicit psychological response from the viewer. (11)

The technique of collage can be translated to techniques in film editing. Like collage, montage

spatially and temporally creates the possibility for odd juxtapositions and the rough inverse of

that, continuity and contiguity created where there is none in reality. The collaging chronotope

is malleable and characterized by mutability of time and space. The performer has the ability to

create new continuities and ruptures where continuity previously existed, sometimes

simultaneously.

Working within the collage chronotope is often ad hoc. There are many mistakes and

false starts. However, through the experimentation of arranging and rearranging diverse

materials many surprises occur in collage. Some of the surprises are accidents that are unwanted,

but many times collage is full of happy accidents.

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The Assemblage Chronotope

In the assemblage chronotope, explored in Chapter Eight, the artist plays with collage and

montage in a three-dimensional space such as a box or theatrical stage. Notions of an original are

blurred and called into question:

These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of
the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy,
readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no
longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of raw material but working with
objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects
already informed by other objects. (Bourriauld 13)

Importantly, although the chronotope fixes and presents objects in a specific assemblage, it is not

meant to be stable. Whereas the archiving chronotope suggested potential for what Bakhtin refers

to as unfinalizability, the assemblage chronotope is more radically unfinalizable. Many of

Cornell’s boxes, for example, although assembled in a form for presentation, invite audience

participation by dropping a ball through a secret slot or opening a drawer to discover the contents

inside. Assemblage leaves open the possibility for alternatives or extensions of pieces of art.

Finally, the assemblage chronotope is the one chronotope that contains the others (wandering,

collecting, archiving, and collaging). Thus, it assembles not just materials but also these

chronotopic practices.

Assemblage has long been a mysterious and somewhat threatening form to the more

established art forms such as painting and sculpture. Assemblage can be considered a variation

on adaptation, with the idea that, as Paul Edwards argues, “Adaptation has become an everyday

art and a ubiquitous communication practice of digital consciousness, playing in improvisatory

ways beyond the boundaries of the identified, sustained art work” (376). Assemblage is not just a

description of the works of the twenty or so major artists who practiced it plus the lesser known

ones; it is a dominant form of cultural expression. But like adaptation, assemblage is not well

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understood; it is often thought of as lesser than or secondary to the “original” practices that made

the works that are adapted (which, upon closer examination, are often themselves adaptations,

too). William Seitz explains that assemblage “Has always been a threat to the approved media of

oil painting, carving, and casting” (87). He explains that assemblage “is an established mode of

communication employing words, symbols, and signs, as freely as it does pigments, materials,

and objects” (87). Assemblage art reveals rather than conceals its process, thus demonstrating

that process in a way that can be repeated by other artists.

Map of Chapters

The organization of the chapters in this study reflects my process as a researcher and

practitioner. The chapters alternate between my investigations of Cornell’s chronotopes and my

own artistic projects motivated by that study. In Chapter Two I discuss the theoretical

groundings that inform my development of the wandering chronotope along with Cornell’s own

practices specific to that chronotope. In Chapter Three I discuss my performance of wandering to

create my own Cornell inspired artwork, a website inspired by wandering in the city in which I

live, New Orleans. In Chapter Four I deal with the archiving chronotope. I discuss Cornell’s

subject-driven explorations as well his boxes in terms of the dynamic archive. Extending my

study of the archive to Chapter Five, I discuss Cornell’s films as ephemeral archives and link

them to contemporary practices of digital archiving. For the project portion of this chapter I

combine analog and digital archives to realize a film scenario that Cornell wrote, but never

filmed. In Chapter Six I outline the theoretical and historical groundings of collage as well as

Cornell’s practices of collage. In Chapter Seven I cover a collage film that I made inspired by

Cornell’s own collage processes. Finally, in Chapter Eight I incorporate all of the chronotopes to

discuss assemblage art as heterochronotopic through my theatrical production and a later

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restaging of Métaphysique d’Éphemera, a performance inspired by Joseph Cornell. Below, I

provide more detailed descriptions of the terrain covered in each of the chapters.

In Chapter Two I track Cornell’s wanderings in Manhattan and the surrounding

boroughs. Wandering provided Cornell with the opportunity to collect found objects for his work

as well as to be inspired by his surroundings. Drawing on Rebecca Solnit’s History of Walking, I

tie Cornell’s wandering to historic practices of walking for creative inspiration such as Romantic

and Surrealist wandering, the Parisian flâneur, Michel de Certeau’s poetic walking, and the

Situationist International’s dérive. I then discuss wandering as a way to engage with the history

of one’s surroundings. Drawing on scholarship by Dylan Trigg, Rebecca Solnit, Gaston

Bachelard, and Francis Yates, I argue that individual’s memories are imprinted in the locations in

which they occurred. Walking and interacting with spaces allows us to remember memories

located in specific places. I argue that space was not only creative inspiration for Cornell but also

locations stocked with memories. The evolving landscape of early and mid-twentieth-century

Manhattan created a tension for Cornell that appeared in his work. I discuss Cornell’s original

films as documents that attempt to preserve a location that is disappearing. I then draw on Jodi

Hauptman’s work to argue that Cornell’s collecting, archivization, and creative use of found

materials from the city are a form of experimental map-making.

In Chapter Three, I describe a project in which I wandered my city, New Orleans, and

collected memories. In the project I explored the connection between place and memory, using

walking as a method of remembering. I asked several friends to take me on walks through their

neighborhoods in New Orleans and as we walked I collected various found materials, recorded

stories, took photographs, and even mapped GPS traces. Hurricane Katrina devastated New

Orleans’ geographical map by wiping out entire neighborhoods and leaving many buildings and

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locations destroyed or abandoned. Since 2005, New Orleans has been rebuilt, but while many

neighborhoods have gentrified, some are blighted, and others are still in the midst of

reconstruction. This traumatic change in the city map of New Orleans has affected the memories

individuals have attached to specific sites as they have been destroyed, are drastically different,

or still abandoned. For the final stage of the project I created an interactive website using the

collected materials from my wanderings.

In Chapter Four I discuss Cornell’s extensive personal archives and archival practices. I

introduce traditional roles of the archive as well as experimental archives that challenge the

notion of the archive as a stable environment for outmoded objects and documents. I describe

Cornell’s archival explorations, and boxes and museums as examples of the archive as art. Over

the course of his career Cornell added to his archives and used his archives as a source of

creative material. Drawing on the work of Susan Davidson and Ann Temki, I compare Cornell’s

archival practices to Marcel Duchamp’s. I focus on several of Cornell’s archival explorations and

dossiers to demonstrate how Cornell used archiving for educational as well as creative purposes.

In Chapter Five I turn to his original films to argue that Cornell used film to document

places and moments slipping into the past, to archive the moment with the intent of preservation.

Further, I argue that Cornell used film to document the contingent. Film decomposes over time,

which fights against the notion of a stable, fixed archive. I discuss Cornell’s archivization as a

precursor for digital archivization art practiced by many contemporary artists. Practices of digital

archivization and digital archive art pose new questions about originality, authorship, and

ownership of digital archives as well as questions about stability and permanence. To study these

questions I call on Nicholas Baurriauld and Wendy Chun. I explore the possibility of using

obsolete and digital technology together creatively to extend Cornell’s archives. This kind of

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archival art is increasingly popular in the widespread use of digital technologies and shared with

a mass audience.

I then describe my creative extension of a film scenario from Cornell’s archive: Nebula:

The Powdered Sugar Princess (1941). Although Cornell wrote multiple versions of the scenario,

he never realized the film project. I used old and new technologies to breathe new life into

Cornell’s archive. To create my project I combined the use of pre-cinema device, the zoetrope,

and found digital video. Cornell’s scenario deals with the astronomical phenomenon that the

destruction of nebulae allows individual stars to be born. The scenario embodies a tension of

métaphysique d’éphemera, and my use of a combination of obsolete and new technologies also

enacts this tension.

In Chapter Six I discuss Cornell’s roles as a film enthusiast, collector, and creator. In this

chapter I deal with Cornell’s experimental films, particularly his collage films. I argue that

Cornell’s use of artistic media to explore the relationship between presence and obsolescence

and his turn to film allowed him to do this not only through subject matter but also in form.

In Chapter Seven I follow Cornell’s techniques of collage by cutting and splicing

together footage from various found films to construct my own film, splicing them together to

create a surreal narrative, Song of the Nightingale. I conclude by discussing the conversion of

my 8mm film to digital video, focusing on retaining my “accidents of deteriorization” and the

discoveries about presence and obsolescence that resulted.

In Chapter Eight I discuss assemblage art as inherently tied to the past, present, and

future, or, in other words, as unfinalizable through a continuous process of de-and re-

contexualization. I discuss Métaphysique d’Éphemera: A Performance Inspired by Joseph

Cornell, a theatrical performance co-written by poet Christopher Shipman and myself and which

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I directed in 2011 in the HopKins Black Box laboratory theatre on the campus of Louisiana State

University. I discuss the construction of the production through the chronotopes of assemblage. I

then demonstrate how assemblage art is meant to springboard into future creative work through a

discussion of a new adaptation of Métaphysique d’Éphemera staged at Southern Illinois

University.

Significance

Studying assemblage as a method of creative and scholarly inquiry de-romanticizes both

the creative and scholarly process of production. It fights against the idea of the individual

pursuit of creative and scholarly work. Assemblage brings this expectation of creative and

scholarly genius into question by offering everyday practices that lead to creative and scholarly

production. Assemblage gives researchers and artists everyday tools to go out into the world and

observe, critique, and create. It necessitates that artists and scholars look to the obsolete, the

forgotten, the overlooked as sources of creative and academic merit. Assemblagists make the old

new through their use of recycling and remixing.

The significance of this study lies in that it takes a performative, heuristic approach to

studying Cornell through the analysis and deployment of what I term Cornell’s chronotopes of

assemblage. This is a dissertation devoted to discovery through practice. While scholars have

approached Cornell’s works from art historical (McShine, Hartigan, Vine, and Lehrman),

psychological (Brink), and biographical (Solomon) perspectives, this study re-imagines Cornell’s

artistic processes and enacts them. While much has been written about the assemblage of

everyday objects in Cornell’s works, my study uniquely explores the performances of his

chronotopic practices of wandering, collecting, archiving, collage, and assembling. The

embodiment of each chronotope demonstrates a model for scholars and practitioners.

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Additionally, my study provides a model for the research process generally by developing the

chronotopes of creative research.

This study takes an alternative approach to Cornell and his work. It heeds Ameila Jones’s

call that the viewing or embodied reception of visual artworks should be a process that can be

engaged as performative rather than the traditional ‘disinterested’ and objective interaction

between audience and artwork (2). In this study performance offers a way of knowing and

interacting with Cornell’s work. Thus, this study makes practical scholars’ perspectives and

arguments in an embodied way.

Additionally, this study has merit in that although Bakhtinian analysis has been used

extensively to study literature and culture (and literature in culture), it has seldom been used to

study the creative process of the visual or plastic artist. One significant work that does engage

Bakhtin's ideas to discuss painting and sculpture is Deborah J. Haynes’s Bakhtin and the Visual

Arts. This study expands the areas of research that benefit from applications of Bakhtinian theory

by applying it to visual/plastic art making. However, Haynes does not extend her analysis to

actual practice, which is what I do in this dissertation.

Studying Cornell’s works chronotopically and using these chronotopes as a basis for re-

performances of Cornell’s practices helps in the project of recovering what Bakhtin called

“eventness” in the artwork (“Author and Hero” 189). Whereas phenomenology is limited in that

it deals with one set of chronotopes--the time/space of the viewer--this study puts these in

conversation with the authoring chronotopes of assemblage art in order to study Cornell and to

use his methods as relays for my own assemblages, research, and ultimately, scholarly writing.

Further, I embrace Cornell’s idea of exploring that becomes creative as well as the belief

that assemblage art acts as educational and creative material for artists. Through the process of

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embodying Cornell’s chronotopes of assemblage I come to understand Cornell’s practices and

achieve new methods for creating my own art as well as for understanding the creative process.

For example, by taking on the role of the wanderer I develop an approach to my surroundings

that is both invested and critical, enabling me to make discoveries that I might not have

otherwise made. I am influenced both artistically and academically through the environments I

explore. I engage my own surroundings and environment as being full of potential artistic

expression. Through my re-enactment of the assemblage chronotopes I acquire an appreciation

for long periods of time spent on one project, the patience that is learned, and the connection one

feels with the piece of work. I also embrace the idea of unfinalizability. Each component of

assemblage is strategic although the final assembly might appear to be random; therefore my

approach aims to move behind the finished assemblage and into the contingencies and strategies

of the performance of assemblage. Thus through attending to the practice I understand and help

my readers to understand that assemblage art is just as much or more about the process of

making assemblage than it is the (un)finalized product.

Limitations

There are limitations to this study. I focus on Cornell’s processes more so than the boxes.

As such I acknowledge that this is not a comprehensive study of his works. Cornell was a

prolific artist; his works are collected in over forty public museums and collections, with

numerous works owned by private individuals. I limit my discussion to individual works that

inspire each of my analyses and creative projects. I study Cornell from the perspective of an

assemblage artist—a wanderer, archivist, collagist and assemblagist—and as such my selection

of which works to discuss is contingent upon the kinds of agency each of my chronotopes

affords. These might not be the works that Cornell scholars have heretofore considered most

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significant. As well, because I am interested in uncovering the repertoire within his archive and

deconstructing the difference, this study potentially will not stabilize Cornell so much as

destabilize prior perceptions of Cornell and his art.

Within each chapter no one theory prevails. Though I take a performative approach to

operating with each assemblage chronotope, I allow the individual chronotopes to influence the

particular conceptual-theoretical issues that arise in each chapter. By taking this approach I put

discourses from performance studies, art history, and cultural studies in dialogue with one

another in order to explore ways of understanding Cornell’s processes that may have been

overlooked or left out. I am interested not so much in the significance of Cornell’s boxes and

films in their final form as they have been studied by most art critics and historians as I am in the

embodied processes by which Cornell assembled his works. He never considered his boxes

complete, so to study his work as finished aesthetic products tends to bracket out what I believe

is most compelling in his works.

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CHAPTER TWO: THE WANDERING CHRONOTOPE

In this chapter I focus on the wandering chronotope as embodied and practiced by

Cornell. Cornell spent much of his time wandering the urban environment of Manhattan and his

neighborhood in Queens. For Cornell, wandering was often aimless, done for the pleasure of

becoming unfamiliar in familiar places. He had favorite locations that he visited frequently, but

most of the time he did not have a predetermined destination in mind. Instead he drifted, letting

his desires and emotions guide his path.

In the wandering chronotope schedules and appointments are disregarded and instead of

traversing the city in order to accomplish a task or job, the wanderer can lose herself in her

surroundings. The wanderer floats through the city, letting her whims and immediate desires

navigate her through her surroundings. As the wanderer meanders, her attractions lead her to new

and unfamiliar places to explore. This does not mean, however, that one cannot wander in

familiar surroundings. If the wanderer embodies the wandering chronotope in her own

neighborhood, for example, she takes on a new perspective. She slows down and becomes more

observant, which allows her to see what was previously unseen. The familiar becomes unfamiliar

as the wanderer approaches her surroundings with the openness of being influenced by her

surroundings in the moment. Whether in new and unfamiliar or familiar surroundings,

embodying the wandering chronotope opens the possibility to be inspired by and develop a

connection with natural and architectural surroundings. Wandering enables the wanderer to

imbue specific places with special meaning. As the wanderer passes places she has been before,

memories are unlocked and become present in that moment. In this way, time, in the wandering

chronotope, is heterochronotopic. The wanderer simultaneously lives in the present, while

experiencing memories that return as she engages with places she encounters. The cityscape,

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however, does not remain unchanged by time. Natural and architectural spaces evolve over the

years by being remodeled or torn down and replaced with new structures. With the evolution of

the cityscape memories attached to architectural and natural spaces can continue or be lost along

with the changing cityscape.

Below, I cover Cornell’s processes and related processes that inspired my project, the

subject of the next chapter. I begin with Cornell’s own wanderings of New York. Then I discuss

artistic and social movements that influenced his wandering such as Romantic wandering

(wandering for pleasure) and Surrealist wandering, which introduced chance and imbuing found

objects with special meaning. I then discuss Cornell’s boxes as experimental maps. Finally, I link

wandering to memory, arguing that walking the city is an act of memory that resonated with

Cornell emotionally and inspired him creatively.

Wandering as Aesthetic Practice

Cornell visited Manhattan often as a child with his family in the 1900s-1910s and as an

adult when he went to work as a salesman for William Whitman Company, a wholesale textile

company on lower Madison Avenue. Although his business was located in the heart of the

garment districts of Manhattan, Cornell left his building and deviated from his daily walking

route while working as a door-to-door salesman. He spent much of his time “walking the city,

walking anywhere, looking at whatever fell into his sight--people, the pigeons, the reflections

glimpsed in the windows of buildings, the new steel skyscrapers rising out of nowhere, the

crumbling brick houses where the city’s Dutch settlers had lived so many centuries earlier”

(Solomon 34). As Cornell wandered daily structures and schedules disintegrated, allowing him to

drift by chance and desire from place to place, discovering his own New York.

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Like the Romantics, Cornell wandered not only as a mode of transportation, but also for

the experience itself. The Romantics walked for the sake of walking and the way it made them

feel both physically and psychologically. Rousseau explains:

Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so
much myself--if I may use that expression--as in the journeys I have taken alone on foot.
There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts. When I
stay in one place I can hardly think at all; my body has to be on the move to set my mind
going. The sight of the country side, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, a
sound appetite, and the good health I gain by walking, the easy atmosphere of an inn, the
absence of everything that recalls me to my situation-all these serve to free my spirit, to
lend a greater boldness to my thinking, so that I can combine them, select them, and
make them mine as I will, without fear or restraint. (qtd. in Solnit 19)

Romantic William Wordsworth and his companions are credited for walking for the sake of

walking rather than as a means to an end as it was for many of their contemporaries. Rebecca

Solnit tells us, “It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things

happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both

means and end, travel and destination” (6). It was the journey itself, the act of walking and

interacting with their surroundings that interested the Romantics. Solnit argues that the

Romantics “founded the whole lineage of those who walk for its own sake and for pleasure of

being in the landscape, from which so much has sprung” (82). Further, walking became cultural

act as well as an aesthetic experience for the Romantics (Solnit 82). As Rousseau explains,

walking allows one to gain a new perspective. It provides the opportunity to be free of daily

responsibilities, to forget personal situations, and to free the spirit temporarily. Cornell’s

personal circumstances were difficult and he was plagued with periods of deep depression. He

was his ailing brother’s caregiver and the sole earner of the family. Being out of doors and

walking about gave him temporary relief from his daunting responsibilities. It lifted his spirits.

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In the nineteenth century Walter Benjamin, inspired by Charles Baudelaire, describes the

flâneur. The French word is understood as “stroller” or “idler.” Solnit argues that the flâneur

emerged as the late 19th century city became “so large and complex” that it became unfamiliar

even to its citizens (199). The flâneur is often described as a man, well dressed, and wealthy, as

he has free time to wander aimlessly. The flâneur made his debut in nineteenth-century Parisian

arcades through which he would walk and window-shop with no intention of buying. The flâneur

wanders city streets with no route or destination. “He flows like thought through his physical

surroundings, walking in a meditative trance” (Lopate 88). There is a myth that the flâneur was

to stroll with a turtle, which was to set the pace, allowing the flâneur to observe his surrounding

in the minutest detail. In his Arcades Project Benjamin describes the flâneur as a dreaming idler:

“That anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the

sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--

indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through” (417). The flâneur is an

emotionally distanced yet active observer of the places where he wanders.

The Surrealists embraced Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur and extended it into an

aesthetic technique. The Surrealists wandered the streets, letting chance take them from one

place to the next. The everyday, including objects and places, took on special, extraordinary,

even magical meaning. Solnit explains, “Surrealism prized dreams, the free associations of an

unconscious or unself-conscious mind, startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence, and the

poetic possibilities of everyday life. Wandering around a city was an ideal way to engage with all

these qualities” (206). The Surrealists were interested in investing the obsolete, forgotten, and

debris of the everyday world with elevated meaning.

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At times Cornell felt the detachment from his surroundings characteristic of the flâneur.

He says in his journal, “Detachment . . . buoyant feeling . . . an abstract feeling of geography and

voyaging . . .” (Caws 98). Although Cornell wandered the streets of Queens and Manhattan, he

did not exactly embody Benjamin’s flâneur, who was often of the leisure class and thus had extra

time to wander the city because his economic status meant that he did not have to work.

Additionally, the flâneur might be considered a voyeur, visually consuming his surroundings and

moving on. Though Cornell wandered his surroundings, observing his environment, he did not

just visually absorb the city with an air of entitlement. He interacted.

His wandering was often aimless and exploratory in nature. He wandered the city to

discover hidden nooks and crannies and to be amid the bustle of the city rather than removed.

Having nowhere in particular in mind, he allowed himself to float along and let whatever caught

his attention guide him. In this way, he came across many of the materials as well as ephemeral

encounters he incorporated into his work. He spent his days wandering “Book Row” on Fourth

Avenue, the shopping districts from Third Avenue to Broadway, and down into Washington

Square and Greenwich Village (Hartigan, Navigating 19). Hartigan explains that many of the

surrounding buildings predated 1900 and still had an air of nineteenth-century leisure with horse-

drawn trolleys and antique and “Oriental shops,” ice cream parlors, eateries, bookshops, the

famous FAO Schwarz toy store, piano showrooms, Grand Central Station, and the Flatiron

building. Cornell often stopped at The Sign of the Sparrow book and ephemera shop, which

specialized in theatrical memorabilia. His office was in Madison Square, and there was a park

nearby on 23rd Street surrounded by the Flatiron building, American Parthenon, and the

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Building. As he wandered his favorite haunts he observed

other pedestrians, stopped in ephemera shops, took in films, had coffee and pastries at coffee

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shops, and lunched at automats. He would gaze out windows and track his daily path in his

detailed journals. Like the Romantics, Cornell also enjoyed walking in nature, for example along

the shore of West Hampton where one of his sisters lived. He collected objects and observations

as he wandered.

From Creative Inspiration to Aesthetic Practice

Cornell’s wandering, which began as a mode of exploring the city, its structures, open

spaces, and inhabitants, gradually turned into a highly personalized artistic method. He explains

that wandering was “exploring that became creative” (Caws 155). Breton’s idea of “complete

happiness,” Cornell later noted in his journals, was of “quickly being plunged into a world in

which every triviality becomes imbued with significance” (qtd. in Solomon 92). As he leaves

the city, Cornell recounts, “Elements of the commonplace (easily forgotten) recalled vividly”

(Caws 136). Wandering challenged the Surrealists to live, move about, and observe their

surroundings with a new perspective that opened possibilities of the everyday. Through

wandering Cornell chanced upon locations, people, and objects that he invested with importance,

which were often obscure, forgotten aspects of the world. Everydayness took on an almost

magical meaning as he wandered through New York and the boroughs.

In 1957 Cornell collaborated with Rudy Burckhardt on a film to bring the essence of one

of Cornell’s favorite places, Manhattan’s Bryant Park, to life. Nymphlight (1957) stars the young

Gwen Thomas and is Cornell’s most narrative film as it follows the young girl running through

the park carrying a broken parasol. We watch her watch her surroundings: pigeons in flight and

in trees, the spraying fountain, men sitting on benches. Our perspective shifts back and forth

from watching her watch to seeing what she sees (her point of view or POV shot). The setting

becomes a tranquil sanctuary in the middle of the bustling city. Time slows down as we take on

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the girl’s perspective and meditate on the surroundings. As the film continues the girl gradually

disappears or withdraws from the park, leaving the viewer alone. Suddenly, another young girl

wanders into the park. The camera follows her as she aimlessly wanders through the park, taking

in the surrounding nature. She appears to be enchanted by the park and is completely unaware of

the camera as pigeons swoop around her. The film ends with two shots: the first girl’s

abandoned parasol in a trashcan and an extreme close-up of the pool of the fountain as water

drips from the stone. In his essay “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” Sitney argues that

Nymphlight is a film about metamorphosis: “the cinematic occasion is an act of invocation to the

spirits of places consecrated in Cornell’s experience” (85). The film brings the park or the spirit

of the park to life through the girl with the parasol. The inanimate becomes animate to express

the magic that Cornell experienced in Bryant Park.

Poetically Engaging the City

Michel de Certeau notes that walking offers a poetics of the city through an embodied

encounter with the city rather than a detached view from above. He argues that a detached, all-

encompassing view forces a “way of being in the world (to be) forgotten” (151). Instead, de

Certeau suggests that the city walker makes the city his/her own. Walking gives citizens a tactic

that subverts institutional power or strategies. Further, a walker applies his or her individual

imagination to the city, which opens up possibilities for new meanings and directions of places in

the city. Rather than passively walking along the intended paths, the walker creatively moves

about the city in ways that undermine the original intention of the layout of streets and buildings.

Solnit says, “Architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go”

(213). Walkers make their walking a poetic experience through the way they move about and the

paths that they create as they walk through the city.

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Dérive, a term made popular by Guy Debord and practiced by the Situationist

International (SI), was inspired by de Certeau. Debord explains dérive as “A technique of

transient passage through varied ambiances . . . . In a dérive one or more persons during a certain

period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure

activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they

find there” (62). The Situationist International (SI) formed in 1957 based on theoretical and

avant-garde critiques of capitalism. They embraced Marx’s critique of capitalism and argued that

the spectacle (à la Debord) leads to alienation. The SI embraced the everyday as a way to

undermine capitalism’s control over society. SI sought ways to undermine or subvert political

and economic control of urban space and “open one’s consciousness to the unconscious of urban

space” (Hauptman 149). One of their methods was dérive or drifting through the city streets,

surrendering to one’s desires to go where one pleases.

Cornell left his office building and explored neighborhoods in the city, poetically

interacting with his surroundings and giving personal attachments and value to places as he

moved through them. Though Cornell’s dérive was not intentionally subversive of the powers

that be, his wandering inherently upset traditional understandings of moving through the city.

From the perspectives of the Romantics, Surrealists, and Situationists, Cornell’s walking may be

considered aesthetic practice in and of itself, but it also led to other aesthetic projects for him.

The fleeting moments of city life that Cornell observed as he walked inspired him. For

example he rode the elevated trains, built in the 1800s, that ran through Manhattan, Brooklyn,

and the Bronx. As he rode he observed that the passengers had both a bird’s eye view of

pedestrians below and an eye level perspective of people in passing buildings. These fleeting

moments while traveling through the city inspired the Third Avenue El film.

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Stan Brakhage worked with Cornell on a film project to capture the Third Avenue El

before it was demolished. The Third Avenue Elevated railroad line was built between 1875 and

1878 and was in service until 1955. It was the last elevated line to operate in Manhattan.

Brakhage finished a version of the film and titled it Wonder Ring (1955); however, Cornell was

unsatisfied with the result and took several years to re-edit the film. Cornell rearranged shots,

added shots, turned the film upside down, printed it tail-to-head, added an end title that reads,

“The End is the Beginning,” and re-named the film Gnir RednoW (1960). There is no

protagonist. We take the perspective of the wandering camera. We walk up the stairway to the

platform where the camera tracks the architecture of the platform including doorways, stained

glass windows, and reflections from the city beyond. A train arrives and zooms past the camera,

allowing us to look inside the windows at passengers on board and through to the other side of

the platform to passengers waiting to board. The quickness of the passing train is juxtaposed

with the slow and methodical panning movement of the camera capturing the architecture.

Suddenly, the camera is on the train as it pulls out of the stop. We pass buildings, and their

windows are at eye level with the train, letting us peer into the lives of the inhabitants. We can

see the streets below and the smallness of the people and cars going about their days. The

window of the train becomes a frame through which we observe the passing world, New York.

Passengers’ reflections appear in the window, creating a double view, the static inside and

passing outside of the train. The speed of the film changes; suddenly everything is in fast

motion. Passengers board and the train moves at an accelerated speed. Suddenly we are

traveling in the opposite direction. Then our direction switches back. The images become more

and more distorted as the film comes to an end. Gnir RednoW defamiliarizes the everyday,

making it appear rhythmic, surreal, and otherworldly. We ride the train with Cornell or even as

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Cornell. We view the film from his unique perspective. The film captures only what the

wanderer observes.

Wandering: Place and Memory

Cornell felt a strong connection with his surroundings whether it was the urban

architecture of Manhattan or the quiet solitude of the coast. Personal history is bound to the

places the we inhabit, places we have been, places we travel past on our daily jaunts, places we

only see once, and even places in our imagination. As we encounter places to which we have

attachments, memories of our histories come to us, making the past present for a moment.

Perhaps the memories are never really gone, but stored in places, waiting for us to access them.

And, at times memory is involuntarily triggered, as in the case of Proust’s madeleine. In Á la

recherche du temps perdu Proust’s narrator bites into a madeleine, causing a flood of memories

to come instantly rushing back to him. Hornstein notes, “Proust was clear that any recuperation

of memories could not be willed; rather, the only possible means of accessing them was

involuntarily through a material object that could serve as a trigger to the past” (6).

According to Solnit, “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the

more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and

associations that will be waiting for you when you come back” (13). Solnit proposes a

connection between place and the body that occurs when one walks through one’s city’s streets

or the rural landscape. It is a relationship that cannot happen if one drives or takes public

transportation. Dylan Trigg explains in his book The Memory of Place:

Being attached to a place means allowing memories to be held by that place. In turn,
being held by a place means being able to return to that place through its role as a reserve
of memories. Not only do places hold memories in a material sense-- as the archive of
our experiences--but those same places crystallize the experiences that occurred there.
Being in place is not temporally static. Rather, our memories pursue us as we pursue
place, both forming an ambiguous zone somewhere in between. (9)

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Trigg tells us that we locate memories in places to which we are attached. When we return to

these particular places we can access memories that have been stored there. So, place and self

becomes intersubjective for Cornell. Trigg explains, “Places are defined in their relationship with

the particular subject who experiences them” (5). Places are the texture of memory and provide

the defining character of memory. This relationship between person and place is an event for

Trigg.

In The Art of Memory Francis Yates tracks the ancient practice of attaching ideas, words,

and memories to physical locations. The practice stretches back to the Greeks and was formally

practiced through the Renaissance. For example, orators would mentally spatialize their

speeches. To memorize the speech they would imagine walking through the space where they

mentally stored the speech. And, as they mentally encountered different areas of storage they

would recall the words of that bit of the speech. Solnit explains, “There is a very practical sense

in which to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there

before. At its most casual, this retracing allows unsought memories of events to return as one

encounters the sites of those events. At its most formal it is a means of memorizing” (76). For

practitioners of the Art of Memory, memories were stored in physical objects in a landscape. For

Solnit, “To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though

thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel

through” (77).

Because places hold memories that are accessed as we move through space, the cityscape

is experienced in a temporal durée for the wanderer. Rosalind Krauss explains durée as a

meditation on perception: “Perception is announced thereby as something that takes places as a

durée, an unfolding, a diachrony” (123). For Krauss, durée is an extended temporality that is

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“involved in experiences like memory, reflection, narration, proposition” (153). This type of time

allows the wanderer to see and interact with the evolving cityscape. As Becky Cooper suggests,

“Each building has layers of history” (11): what used to be there but no longer is, what has

changed to function differently, new structures in the place of old structures, etc. Cornell writes,

“Different sights (pre dawn etc.) sometimes of the particular vs. abstract--the past become the

present” (Caws 109).

As the twentieth century progressed the New York landscape rapidly evolved. Old

buildings were piling up on top of each other or being demolished to make way for new

structures. Old shops that Cornell frequented were sold and repurposed to meet the needs of the

growing city. Suburbs spread to the rural coastline. The old and the new were blended. “The

present city is built on the ruins of the past . . .the new and old are inextricably entwined”

(Hauptman 154). The evolving cityscape was particularly emotional for Cornell because

memory and place were intertwined for him. As the cityscape evolved memories were

threatened.

Walking became a way for him to keep the Manhattan of his past alive. Solnit argues,

“Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the

landscape, and the city, and every walking is on guard to protect the ineffable” (11). Cornell

revisited the theatre district he went to so often as a child. He writes:

Into town late--bank--down to Lexington and 24th. Goldsmith’s-assortment,

Mexican midget, dancing bear, Hungarian cards, Bay of Naples litho. Colored. Over to
Madison Square for bus. A brief swirl of snow suddenly came covering everything with a
fine coat and then letting up before the short bus ride to Twelfth Street. Unexpected
illumination and evocation of the past in these circumstances with feeling about
Madison Square, etc. (Caws 99)

Jodi Hauptman tells us, “Although the city’s layering offers the history and memory to which

Cornell was so attracted, the metropolis’s incessant covering of the old by the new provoked

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anxiety” (153). In his journal Cornell notes that he was filled with the “terror of the

encroachment of piled-up concrete in the city vs. remembered sites” (Caws 409). In this anxiety

he evokes Benjamin’s angel of history:

His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it
before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to
Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that
the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to
which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which
we call progress, is this storm. (Illuminations 257)

Cornell was Benjamin’s angel of history caught in the storm of New York’s rise to the world’s

most powerful city. His Victorian city was being replaced with steel skyscrapers. The city threw

out the obsolete, which piled up in second hand stores around the city. What Cornell could not

see is that in reclaiming fragments of that obsolete, his practices would inform generations of

assemblage and archive artists.

Although we feel intimately connected with a place, this does not prevent the place from

evolving over time. This loss may be painful and can cause one to lose a sense of one’s identity

with the disappearance of an intimate place. Trigg contends:

What emerges in this breakdown is the rise of anonymous materiality. Whereas we take it
for granted that the places we value somehow mirror our identities, what we tend to
overlook in this mimetic act is the cosmic indifference lurking beneath that materiality.
All along, however, there exists the anonymous space that fails to look back at us, despite
our attempts to imbue that world with value and memory. (218)

According to Trigg and Gaston Bachelard, imagination, tied to aesthetic creation, functions as a

preserver of memory. “In sight of this alteration, a renewed value is conferred upon a given

object. Only now, the tone is less of lamentation and more of preserving what remains of the

past, with such an effect to conceal the erosion of time and space” (Trigg 175). And, as a result,

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“Entwined with the past, the same past is re-experienced in the present as one of presence and

absence simultaneously” (Trigg 175).

Immortalization of Place and Memory through Film

Many of Cornell’s original films focused on the documenting and memorializing of

locations such as private homes, public transit systems, and public parks on the verge of

destruction in his community. Cornell was emotionally connected to these sites and thought of

them as repositories or archives for specific memories. Many of his films are attempts to

immortalize locations that would soon disappear; they document an evolving cityscape.

In these films the camera wanders or records the wanderings of the filmmaker.

Additionally, the camera functions as a tool to preserve a location or moment slipping into the

past. Sitney explains, “The camera movements tend to be slow and very deliberate, panning

from one dominant point of interest to another of equal weight. They are edited in a leisurely

rhythm, except when the cutting jumps to catch the flight of a bird or butterfly” (82). Cornell’s

films are predecessors of the lyrical film, which Brakhage made famous, and which through

“orchestration of imagery, camera movement, and editing brought to maturity the film-without-

a-protagonist--or one whose protagonist is the fiction of the filmmaker behind the camera”

(Sitney 84). In Cornell’s films, the protagonist is ambiguous or mediated through a young

woman or girl. Often a protagonist is not present at all; instead the film is a first-person

“encounter of the camera with special places” (Sitney 84). Perhaps filming was not only an

attempt to save or immortalize the specific places, but also the memories that came to him when

he visited the places. Time and space are preserved as the filmmaker observes and records them.

Cornell often used repetition of shots and angles on the subject to attempt to capture its essence.

In “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory,” Wendy Chun describes repetition not

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as wasted thought, but thought disseminated (192). The camera repeats the same movement over

the same subject over and over. Through this repetition, I see Cornell attempting to capture the

inner essence or his emotional connection and memories of a monument, park, or home. In

Cornell’s films the mundane becomes magical and safe from the destruction of time. However,

as I discuss in the next chapter, film is not a stable, permanent document, but a medium that is as

ephemeral as the fleeting moments it records.

Cornell’s original films embody characteristics of the wandering chronotope through

their lack of protagonist in favor of lyrical, improvisational movement of the camera. The camera

focuses intently on whatever the filmmaker is interested in, which can be interrupted at any

moment. The films themselves are creative products directly inspired by Cornell’s wandering.

Finally, the films are documents of the intersubjective relationship between people and their

surroundings. They capture and preserve memories attached to particular places.

Centuries of June (1955), photographed by Brakhage, is a meditation on an old mansion

in Flushing, Cornell’s hometown, that was on the brink of demolition. In my mind this is a house

he has known, been familiar with for years. Perhaps he passed it on his walk to the train or on his

daily jaunts and bicycle rides. The film opens on a large tower house. The house is abandoned.

The paint of the exterior is chipping and the yard is overgrown. Large trees full of birds and

bushes fill the yard. The house looms over the yard; it is the kind of house kids tell scary stories

about as they pass. The camera tracks the house, following the tower up to the rooftop, and then

cuts to the trees in the yard that surround the house. The camera repetitively pans from the tree

leaves down to the tower, repeating the shots as if making sure to capture the minute details of

the exterior of the house. The camera gradually gets closer to the house. The shots are shaky and

appear to be handheld as Brakhage’s camera surveys the house and the yard. For a split second

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we can see someone around a corner in the yard. It looks to be Cornell, but he disappears so

quickly that it is impossible to tell one way or the other. The camera follows angles of the house:

the angle of the staircase railing from the porch down to the sidewalk; close-up of the tower and

then cut to the grass; slow pan from the grass, up a pine tree, and to the tower. Suddenly, a

butterfly catches the attention of the camera. The camera is distracted from its slow, methodical

survey of the house to follow its flight. Then a young boy kneels in the dirt yard with a stick.

Schoolchildren walk home from school on the sidewalk next to the house; they are aware of the

camera as they walk toward it. A shot focuses on a boy and girl picking up and throwing rocks

across the street. As they walk away they turn and look at the camera. Cut back to the house shot

from an extreme low angle. We wander the yard. We meander through the plants and trees and

look at the architecture of the house. We walk and look where we please.

Suddenly, the perspective changes. We are viewing the world from inside the house. We

are looking out the window. It is as if the viewer takes on the role of the house. We look out and

see the world continuing as we fall further and further into disrepair. The leaves blow in the

wind; birds and butterflies flutter about; schoolchildren play in the yard. Life continues outside.

The window frames are used as the frame of the film. We are inside a Cornell box peering out as

the camera approaches a window hinged open, and sunlight spills in and onto the wood paneling

and tile floor.

The perspective changes again and we are back outside looking at the house. The camera

follows the lines of the house side to side and up and down. Children play in the yard. The

camera is distracted again and wanders to capture a butterfly and then a little blond girl in the

grass. Children sit on the steps, get up, and slowly walk away.

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Sitney explains that the film is a lesson in “organizing a film of silent images to evoke the

poignancy of the loss of those very images which the film preserves” (84). As the camera travels

over the surface of the house and around the surrounding yard, the film becomes a meditation on

the entire space. As the empty house decays life continues in the yard as butterflies and children

roam about. Sitney tells us, “The rhythm of the film reverses the relationship inscribed in the

images: the house appears as the static center of a world in which everything else is in flux; but

the structure of the film insists upon the uniqueness of the house and its coming destruction,

while the insects and children will be repeatedly replaced” (86). Cornell never directly expresses

his personal memories attached to this tower house. Like most of his work, the meaning is never

fully knowable or recoverable. But it invites our own personal memories and associations.

Cornell and Creative Cartography

In Stargazing at the Cinema Jodi Hauptman describes Cornell as a creative cartographer.

She suggests that his creative cartography is derived from urban wandering and that collecting

and collaging are Cornell’s version of cartography (147). For Hauptman, Cornell’s wandering is

done out of a desire to find or capture an essence of a fleeting image. The objects he collects are

referents for places and memories encountered during his wanderings. She explains, “A collage-

map, a cartography of fragments, however, does offer more than a simple line, providing the

viewer-walker-wanderer something physical to grasp, a starting point, at least, for a chain of

reminiscences” (157). The collage becomes a map of the city as well as the time in which the

wandering unfolded as well as the time(s) recalled. She explains:

Refusing pen and paper as tools to chart a particular route or mark an important site,
Cornell arranged objects from his collection to “draft” a map based on emotion and
memory. As both a flâneur and a cartographer, Cornell collected “mementos” or “traces”
of the places and people he passed. Spurning souvenirs from renowned New York
landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, the artist instead selected (or
in his view, rescued) objects that could serve as memorials to an intimate experience of

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the urban environment. . . By replacing inscription with collection, Cornell
composes a picture of a city as it is lived, not an abstraction charted from a safe and
sterile distance. Cornell’s city is loud, bustling, and dirty, soiled with history. (Hauptman
151)

Understanding Cornell’s collages and three-dimensional assemblages as maps fits into a larger

practice of experimental mapping. Experimental mapping has its roots in Debord’s dérive and

psychogeography. If we understand his work in this vein then Cornell was a predecessor of the

Situationist International’s maps of desire, which were constructed based on the wanderer’s

emotional connections and impulses. Experimental mapping provides a subjective view of an

environment rather than an objective, removed view. Additionally, this type of mapping is open

to interpretation for each viewer. We create our own meanings and understandings and in this

way, experimental maps are ambiguous and indeterminate. Experimental mapping allows

individuals to map what is important to them.

Contemporary artists extend the concept of the experimental map. For example, Becky

Cooper created Mapping Manhattan by distributing a map of Manhattan to people all over the

city and asking them to map their Manhattan by mapping their memories. Each map is a

subjective understanding of the urban landscape each participant inhabits. Further, new

technologies allow digital experimental mapping projects such as the website MapStory, in

which individuals use personal GPS trackers to track their paths. Participants can make maps of

whatever they choose by uploading their coordinates from the GPS to a website and creating

aesthetic maps. Other projects focus more on personal stories and histories within the city.

Yellow Arrow is a project that began in Manhattan in 2004 and offers a new way to explore the

city by allowing every structure to become an attraction. The project’s website explains, “The

project is built around the general philosophy that every place is distinct and engaging if seen

from a unique perspective”(Yellow Arrow). In Theatre/Archaeology, Mike Pearson and Michael

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Shanks call the project an example of “Deep Mapping,” which is “a cartography of the intimate,

the everyday, the monumental, the ephemeral, the epochal."(64). Participants travel through their

city and place yellow arrows on special locations and objects. Then they send a text message

with a story, a poetic fragment, or a prompt for action to Yellow Arrow with a code. Yellow

Arrow attaches the code of the location to the specific story. When another person sees a Yellow

Arrow logo he or she texts the code to Yellow Arrow and receives the story, memory, poem, or

prompt that is attached to the specific place. Like Cornell, Yellow Arrow artists take advantage of

multiple media available to them to create highly personalized maps of their environments.

In this chapter I discussed the characteristics of the wandering chronotope, the theoretical

groundings that informed my development of the chronotope, Cornell’s own wandering

practices, and how his wandering informed his artwork. I then discussed wandering as a way to

access memories attached to specific locations, which is troubled when locations change over

time. Then, I explained how Cornell’s original films are examples of documentation of

wandering and immortalizations of disappearing places. Finally, I discussed Cornell’s collage

and box works as examples of creative cartography and tied contemporary digital projects to

Cornell’s three-dimensional works. In the next chapter, I discuss a creative project that took

place in summer 2013 in New Orleans in which I asked friends to wander with me through their

neighborhoods. The project is informed by the wandering chronotope mapped out above.

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CHAPTER THREE: GRAMMAR OF THE LEGS

The characteristics of the wandering chronotope inspired a three-part project. As the

creator of the project I began by aimlessly wandering my surroundings, attempting to gain a new

perspective. Out of all of the characteristics of the wandering chronotope, I was most intrigued

by the connection of space and memory and how wandering is a way to access memories

consciously or unconsciously. So, I took a variation on aimless wandering. I asked friends who

live in New Orleans to take me on a walk through their current, old, or favorite neighborhoods,

to places that evoked particular memories, and to recall memories as we walked. I collected as

we walked. Inspired by digital experimental mapping, I used a GPS tracker to create digital

traces of our paths, marking each place we stopped. I also recorded their stories, took subjective

photographs, and collected found objects along the path.

The final portion of the project consisted of creating a Cornell box of my wanderings.

Like Cornell, I found my exploring becoming creative. On my walks, New Orleans became my

cabinet of curiosity, and I wanted to create a contemporary Cornell box to display the traces of

my wandering. To do this, I designed a website to present the various materials I gathered. This

part of the project was chronotopically different than urban wandering; creating the website was

a process of collaging memory.

The different reasons Cornell wandered the urban and rural environment--walking for the

enjoyment of walking, walking as creative inspiration, and walking as a method of accessing

memory--all added different characteristics to how time and space functioned as he wandered.

Conceptually, I followed Cooper’s comparison of Manhattan to a cabinet of curiosity within

which were “portals to hundreds of worlds” (11). Informed by these characteristics, I set out to

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create a curiosity cabinet of New Orleans by wandering, observing, interacting, and recalling

memories within the buildings, landscape, and objects throughout the city.

Wandering New Orleans

I begin in my own home. I follow Oulipo writer George Perec’s advice about how to

engage with urban and domestic space by paying attention to the “infra-ordinary.” He suggests,

“You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no

interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless” (50). I walk from one end of my

home to the other trying really to see my surroundings. I live with my husband in a loft

apartment above a nail salon on Magazine Street in New Orleans. The stairway that leads to the

entrance in the back of our apartment is made of black iron and is extremely steep. At the top is

the platform where our door is located, but then an old stairway continues down and is blocked

off by a large piece of plywood. We assume that this was the original stairway before the street

level floor was converted into a storefront. I follow Perec’s suggestion: “In apartment buildings

in general: look closely at them; look upwards; look for the name of the architect, the name of

the contractor, the date when it was built; ask yourself why it often says ‘gas on every floor’; in

the case of a new building, try to remember what was there before; etc.” (45).

We have asked our neighbor if he knows how old our apartment is. All he knows is that

his was built sometime in the late 1800s and functioned as a temporary home for sailors. He

knows that ours was built later but he doesn’t know when exactly. The entrance opens into the

kitchen with wooden floors, a brick fireplace, and industrial looking appliances. Did this used to

be a restaurant? Everything is stainless steel, including the piping on the ceiling and walls to

protect the wiring. I walk down a long hallway. To the right is a large bathroom with another old

fireplace, a claw foot bathtub, and a strange walk-in shower behind a wall. Continuing down the

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hallway I enter the main living space. The ceilings are much taller, probably fifteen or twenty

feet. The wooden floors are older in this room and there are two floor-to-ceiling windows at the

end of the room looking out over Magazine Street. Since we have lived here there has been a

large number of picture hooks on the wall. They are so high, however, that we can’t hang

anything from them or even take them down. Was this an art gallery? A studio space? I examine

the objects that I have accumulated over the years and realize that much of what I own comes

from my family: a music box chess table, a picture of a Victorian lady, a sun catcher hanging in

the window, a Lee Ward sequined camel from the “Twelve Days of Christmas” collection, an

angel bookend, a wooden birdhouse, a fringed lampshade, Mardi Gras beads hanging from the

bookshelf, an old globe that includes the no longer extant USSR, a memory box my husband

made for me to propose, a paper model of a building in the French Quarter that I found at a junk

store in Illinois. Do I hold on to these objects because I find them aesthetically appealing? Yes.

But I also hold onto them because they are referents for my past. As I drift through my

apartment I stop at each object that catches my attention and in that moment memories come

flooding back to my present: the radiator in the dinning room of my grandparent’s home and the

curtains that hung behind it decorated with handmade decorations at Christmas. The den full of

special toys for the children during the holidays; the smell of my grandfather’s garage where he

built birdhouses with my brothers; the wheat field in France. I realize that the objects not only

bring back memories of specific experiences, they also bring back the feelings of particular

places. As I walk away, the memories slowly retreat back into the object, awaiting my next pass

by.

I open the door to my apartment and walk down the steep metal stairs, round the alley

corner and walk out to Magazine Street. It is around nine AM, early June in New Orleans, and I

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want to beat the heat. I stand for a moment, deciding which direction to walk, choose the right

and set off. I cross the street and peer in the silver shop, macaroon shop, and huge antique mall

as I pass. I notice an eclectic collection of bizarre objects from different decades assembled in

the window display together. A 1920s flapper hat and 3D glasses from the 80s. First things first:

I stop in a Community Coffee shop and order an iced coffee. Leaving the coffee shop with cold

coffee in hand I head into the Garden District. I walk slowly, admiring the large old homes with

private balconies, porches, and gardens. The yards are detailed yet aged, a perfect combination.

Well maintained, but not too pretty or perfect. I pass a house kitty-corner to Lafayette Cemetery

No 1. I stop at the iron door and peer through to a set of antique wicker furniture arranged

haphazardly throughout the yard. At that moment I feel like I am in another era, the century most

likely when this old house was built, when all at once opera music blares from an open window

on the second floor of the home. I am awestruck. Of course there would be crazy opera music

coming from a mysterious second floor window. The music continues and I cross the street and

head toward the cemetery as a man and woman’s voice sing of love and loss in Italian. The

music echoes into the cemetery.

I enter the cemetery and head to the left. There are lizards everywhere. Big lizards. They

run this place. Thinking of the butterfly in Centuries of June, I decide to let them guide my tour

of the cemetery, stopping when I see one, investigating the above-ground graves where the

lizards lead me. Some of the graves are extremely old and some of them are cracked, falling

apart, with vines growing up around them. I can’t help but think of vampires. Faded, fake

flowers sit on tiny edges of some of the graves while others are adorned with Mardi Gras beads,

rocks, and other special objects. I weave through the catacombs, reading the epitaphs that are still

legible. The one that strikes me most reads, “Not dead, just resting.” I half-heartedly try to find

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the oldest catacomb in the cemetery, but give up. I leave the cemetery and continue through the

Garden District, heading up to Prytania to attempt to stop in a bookshop, but it isn’t open yet this

morning. So, I head toward the Lower Garden District, decide that I want to get back to

Magazine Street, and cut down 4th Street to get there. The houses here are different, newer. There

are fewer trees. I suddenly feel very out of place, like I just found a very upscale suburb with

new, gaudy versions of the quietly grand, overgrown yards and homes of the streets I had

explored earlier. Men leave their under-construction houses in suits with bowties and expensive

straw hats. Women in exercise outfits wave goodbye to their spouses and go on with their

business. I just want to get back to Magazine. When I do, I turn to my left and decide to take a

break at the next coffee shop I pass. I reach another commercial stretch of Magazine and pass a

men’s hat shop, antique shops, and clothing boutiques and come to Reservoir Café. I sit at the

front window, eat a slice of banana walnut bread, and take notes in my journal. I leave the café

and decide that I want to go downtown. I walk up to St. Charles to catch the streetcar. It is early

enough that the streetcar isn’t too packed. The windows are open and the air flows through,

creating a warm yet refreshing breeze for the passengers.

The streetcar stops at the intersection of Carondelet and Canal Streets. I walk up Canal

toward Rampart. I want to see the State Palace Theatre up close. I have seen it many times

passing it in my car, but I want to explore. The State Palace is one of the famous historic theatres

on Canal. It is huge, occupying a square city block. The theatre itself is closed, abandoned since

2007, although several businesses remain open within the building. The box office is still there

with movie posters pasted on the inside. I walk toward it and instantly smell urine. I keep

walking to peer though the main entrance doors. I can see a lobby that has been unused for years.

This once immaculate building is beyond repair. No one will buy it because it would be so

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expensive to renovate. So, it slowly or maybe not-so-slowly deteriorates in the middle of the city.

My heart breaks a little.

I cross Canal and enter the uppermost part of the French Quarter. The streets are quiet

and spotted only with hotel employees on their smoke breaks or valet workers waiting to pull

around someone’s car. Smoke and exhaust fill the garages and back entrances to hotels. I

become acutely aware that I am the only female on the street. The cop in my head tells me not to

look uncomfortable, not to make eye contact, to walk a little faster, and to get to a more heavily

trafficked street. It’s the middle of the day, I tell myself, and I am being paranoid. But still, I turn

the next corner and head to one of the busier streets of the Quarter. I cross Bourbon. I will not

walk down Bourbon Street, especially in the middle of the day on a weekday; it’s too depressing

with its neon lights, doormen trying to get you to enter the sleazy strip clubs, and the stench of

stale booze. I pass Royal with its antique shops and boutiques and turn on Chartres. I stop in a

vintage clothing store and peruse the clothes and accessories from the 1970s through the 1990s. I

like the store, but I don’t buy anything. I keep walking. I decide that if the opportunity arises I

will have my palm or Tarot cards or tealeaves read. I reach Jackson Square. The artists and

performers are just arriving. Many are waiting until later in the afternoon, once the hottest part of

the day has passed, to set up. But, some are here, willing to tough out the midday heat. I walk

through the square and see two booths offering palm reading, but no one is there. So, I keep

walking. As Perec advises, wander “until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments,

that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is

happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even

know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements . . .” (53). I reach the edge

of the square and see a man with a table and chair. I look interested, and he asks if I want my

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palm read. The last time I had my palm read I was six or seven years old at a church Halloween

party, and the palm reader was most likely someone’s mother dressed up like a gypsy. The man

takes my hand and begins telling me things that are vague yet specific such as I’m

argumentative, critical and sarcastic, and that I usually turn these qualities inward and am harder

on myself than other people. He tells me that I have always had a hard time with timing and that

I have difficulty communicating my thoughts and feelings clearly to others. He tells me that I

would be a good teacher or lawyer. He asks me if I’m writing something currently. I smile and

nod. He tells me that I will have two or three children, live a long life with struggles at some

points, and that I have two marriage lines. I look concerned and he asks if I’m Catholic. I say I

was raised Catholic and he laughs and says, “Yeah, they usually don’t like it when I tell them

that.” I give him ten dollars and say goodbye.

I continue down Chartres, reach the far end of the Quarter, cross Esplanade Avenue, and

enter the Marigny. I walk down Frenchmen where the bars and restaurants aren’t open yet. I’m

disappointed because I wanted to stop at one of my favorite tapas restaurants and have a nice

lunch. I keep walking. I’m getting tired, hot, and ready to head back. I turn around and head back

to the Quarter. I cross Esplanade again and walk the opposite direction down Royal. I come to a

Community Coffee house and stop to get an iced tea and take a little rest. I write in my journal

and sip my cold tea. Rejuvenated, I walk back toward Canal on Royal, passing tourists taking

pictures and basking in the glory of walking through the city legally drinking beer. Locals on

bikes carrying artwork pass by me, and I wonder how they keep balance. Horse-drawn carriages

clack down the streets. People on Segways roll by as a tour guide tells stories of historic

buildings. Street musicians are setting up in the middle of the street on Royal. I reach Canal and

see the uptown bound streetcar turning the corner of Carondelet and run to catch it.

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As I ride the streetcar, I get so absorbed in enjoying the breeze and the view along St.

Charles that I completely forget to pull the cord for the streetcar to stop where I need to get off to

go home. I don’t even realize it until three blocks past. I pull the cord and get off at Louisiana

Avenue. Walking under the shady trees, I spot a cabinet near the sidewalk in front of an old

house. It turns out to be a tiny community library. The cabinet with a glass door has two shelves,

one shelf for adults and one for children. A sign says that anyone is welcome to take a book and

is invited to leave a book as well. I stop and look at the books for a few minutes, then continue

on my way home. I turn left on Magazine and pass familiar stores and stop in one to see if I can

find a pair of shorts that I like. I don’t. I leave and walk past restaurants with smells that make

me realize how hungry I am. I reach my block and also realize that I’m drenched in sweat and

very tired. I have been walking for five hours now. I walk down my alley and back up my steep

stairs. I think about my husband slipping on the stairs while taking our dog for a walk after a

rainstorm. I open the door and am so happy to be home.

After reflecting on my wandering, I decide to extend my project. I want to get both

outside of my house and outside of my memories. I want to see New Orleans through other

perspectives. I decided to extend the idea to my friends and to make the wandering targeted. I

ask friends and neighbors who live in New Orleans to take me on walks. Their choices and

desires determine the next phase of the project.

Wandering with Pierre

We drive over the St. Claude Bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward, an area of New Orleans

that sustained particularly heavy damage from the storms and flooding in 2005. I had forgotten

that my friend, Pierre, grew up in the Holy Cross neighborhood there because since I have

known him his parents have lived in Houma, Louisiana. We drive through the neighborhood

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lined with homes ranging from upper middle class to low income. We park at a dead end, facing

the levee, houses to the left and an open field to the right. We walk along the shell-covered dirt

on the side of the road. “So, there’s where I grew up.” The home is a nice elevated double

shotgun surrounded by a new fence. Pierre tells me his father was a mason and had a pile of

bricks in the backyard that Pierre used to build castles. His father remodeled the house to make it

more functional for a family. There used to be a tree house in the backyard that Pierre built with

his father. Pierre points to two empty lots and tells me about the families that used to have homes

there. A brother and sister lived directly next door. The neighborhood kids thought the sister was

a witch, with her wiry grey hair and crooked teeth. The brother died and wasn’t found for four

days after the neighbors realized they hadn’t seen him for a while. When the paramedics took

away his bloated body they also took the sister, who had been in the house the whole time, to a

mental institution.

We continue walking from the house through the neighborhood as Pierre recalls where

his childhood friends lived and where their families relocated after the storm. We keep walking

to a school surrounded by a fence with a no trespassing sign attached. A hole has been cut in the

fence and we slip through. The original building of Holy Cross School is still there, boarded up

and overgrown. Pierre’s father went to school here. The building was built and the school

established in 1849. Supposedly the ghosts of the Catholic brothers roam the attic. The rest of the

structures have been demolished, the pool filled in and replaced with FEMA trailers, also now

abandoned. A marble sculpture garden remains in the middle of the property surrounded by huge

old live oak trees. “Strange what stays,” Pierre says as he notes the sculptures and a metal

flagpole still standing waiting for a flag to rise.

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We walk around back and up the levee to the river. We walk the levee with the river to

the left and fields and houses to the right. There is where the woman with the pet horse lived.

Pierre’s dog once stole the horse and led him, rope in mouth, to the St. Claude Bridge. We pass

old buildings--churches his family attended, community centers they were members of--and

Pierre’s memories rush back to him, surprising him with things he hasn’t thought of since he

moved. We end our walk in the field across from his childhood home. The wind is blowing and

the wildflowers in the field are the same as they were when he was young, but he can’t

remember their names. There is a mound in the middle of the field and Pierre says that it seems

smaller. Was it lowered or is it different in his memory? This was the center of everything, he

tells me. Such an open space in the middle of a metropolitan area. There used to be maple trees

shading his house. They are gone now. One is still in his neighbor’s yard. Pierre walks up to it

and recalls how he used to get into trouble for hiding in the fallen leaves from the maple trees

once in his yard.

Wandering with Lisa

Lisa picks me up at nine in the morning. It is early June in New Orleans, which means

you want to do anything outside either early in the morning or in the evening; it is hot even at

nine. We drive from my apartment on Magazine to Race Street in the Lower Garden District. We

park and stop in a coffee shop where I order an iced coffee and Lisa orders a regular coffee. We

step outside with our drinks and begin our walk.

Lisa is trying to solve a mystery. She is trying to remember which apartment is the one

she lived in when the roof collapsed. Her landlord was a judge who was a recovering alcoholic.

He was trying to help others by employing them as workers for the property he owned, but,

according to Lisa, he was taken advantage of by many of the addicts he tried to help. We come

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upon a tall, three-story brick building with huge windows that open out toward the yard. This is

the apartment. Before she lived in this apartment she lived in a really nice place a little further

uptown, off of Prytania. But, the landlord accused her and her roommates of having secret babies

in the apartment, which wasn’t true. After this incident things got a little weird and Lisa and her

roommates moved out to the place we are looking at now.

The apartment building is beautiful, but it is in the process of falling into disrepair. Lisa

lived here before or after the flea-infested apartment that was also owned by the judge. There

was a series of terrible living situations in the Lower Garden District that occurred within a span

of a couple of months in the 1990s, and Lisa now has trouble keeping the series of events in

order. We continue walking and pass the bookstore/café that the judge opened. The space hosted

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and was run by recovering addicts. There are strange

combinations of murals on the outside: devils, fields, and characters from Where the Wild Things

Are cover the exterior of the building, which is boarded up and appears to have been for quite

some time. There are remnants of Christmas decorations around the door. Lisa tells me that the

latest review of the café she read online was terrible, warning potential clientele that females

shouldn’t set foot in the place.

We cross over to the park between the lanes of Camp Street heading downtown toward

the interstate. Lisa tells me that this is the path she would walk to her ice cream scooping job at

Häagen-Dazs in the French Quarter, where she met her husband, Jim. We walk to a statue of

Margaret, who opened the first orphanage in New Orleans. Surrounding Margaret is a gorgeous,

overgrown rose garden with butterflies flying amongst the roses, set in a major road in the

middle of the city. Lisa says that back when she used to live in this neighborhood it was

sketchier than it is today: “You would have to look out for hypodermic needles as you walked.”

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We turn around and make our way back into the narrow streets of the Lower Garden District. We

find the first house she lived in, where the landlord accused her and her roommates of having

babies. The current tenants have turned the driveway into a little garden. Around the corner is a

massive house that looks like it is right out of Great Expectations, with its old paneled windows

and overgrown trees and plants. The windows are streaked and Lisa tells me that gravity causes

glass to sink after time. When you look at old windows you can see the evidence because the

glass is streaked.

Wandering with Jordan

Jordan picks me up on my street and we drive over to the edge of the Marigny and the

Bywater, neighborhoods below the French Quarter. Both neighborhoods are now in the midst of

a sort of renaissance. Young artist types are moving in; art galleries, coffee shops, and

restaurants are opening all over the place. According to Pierre, the Bywater is the fourth hippest

neighborhood in the US. Anyway, that’s now, 2013. Back when Jordan lived in the

neighborhood the gentrification process was still in its early stages. We park in front of his

former apartment, a bright green double shotgun. When he lived in this neighborhood he walked

everywhere. He worked at the Court of Two Sisters restaurant in the French Quarter and would

walk to work in his uniform, a checkered vest and bowtie, every day. Jordan associates the

neighborhood with a specific time in his life: he had just finished his MFA in creative writing

and had no idea what he was going to do with himself. Within a week of moving to New Orleans

he was mugged in front of his house. Most of the time that he lived in this neighborhood he was

depressed and spent much of his time walking around. The neighborhood represents a tension for

Jordan: the excitement he felt living in New Orleans for the first time along with post-MFA

depression.

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He also associates the neighborhood with walking. We head down the block and around

the corner to Hank’s, a seedy convenience store where Jordan would buy beer and food and often

encounter a shoeless prostitute and crack dealers. On the walk we pass a house that Jordan tells

me used to be a crystal meth lab. Across the street from that run-down house is a newly

renovated home that just sold for $400,000. The rent has shot up in the past years as the Healing

Center, a center that is dedicated to the rejuvenation of the community by offering physical,

nutritional, and environmental programs to those in the surrounding neighborhoods, has been

built and the neighborhood has slowly begun gentrifying. Jordan describes walking around the

neighborhood looking closely at the ground and finding money, drugs, and interesting objects.

We keep walking and pass the coffee shop where he would sit working on his laptop and Mimi’s,

a hip dance bar turned tapas bar. We pass a gorgeous Mimosa tree. Jordan tells me that when it

rains it folds its leaves up. He doesn’t know why.

One of the business owners in the neighborhood posts photographs of the neighborhood

in the 1940s. Jordan tells me how interesting it is to see how the neighborhood still looks the

same. We end with Jordan telling me about the graffiti in the neighborhood and how it has

changed since he lived here. “Red Beans” was the main tagger when he lived in the

neighborhood. Now throughout the blocks tags have been covered over and many of the new

ones read, “Gay for Pay.”

Wandering with Chin

I have dinner with friends in the Marigny and after dinner we walk to R Bar, which is

right across from the restaurant and then to Lafitte’s, the oldest bar in New Orleans. As we walk

we pass Frenchmen Street, scene of live music every night and the annual Halloween block

party, Chin tells me a story of one of the most memorable Halloweens that played out on the

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streets we are walking. A specific image has stuck with him over the years. Halloween in the

Marigny is a subversive affair, according to Chin. People walk laps around the neighborhood,

stopping and popping in and out of different places. The R Bar was Chin’s favorite stop. His

friend, who was seven feet tall, dressed that Halloween as Big Bird. His head was in the neck of

the costume so all in all he was about nine feet tall. Frenchmen used to be known for nitrous

tanks on the street during Halloween. Big Bird collapsed from taking a nitrous hit and decided to

stay on the street while his friends continued to party. There he was, a nine-foot Big Bird passed

out on the side of the street.

Hours later when the sun was coming up and Chin was leaving R Bar, in the distance he

saw Big Bird pick himself up, scratch his now unmasked head, put the two-foot head back on,

and wander off into the sunrise. It was the opposite of a cowboy western, Chin says.

Wandering with Chris

In my own neighborhood the Irish Channel, I walk with my friend and neighbor, Chris,

who wants to show me the house where he and his partner lived before we met. As we walk

Chris tells me the story of how he and Josh wound up in New Orleans. Chris was a successful

business owner in Portland, but during the economic recession his business failed. He was in his

forties and had no idea what to do with his life. So, they decided to pick up and move cross-

country to New Orleans. As we walk, Chris doesn’t really tell me about specific places we pass

such as the bagel shop where we met, the coffee shop turned restaurant across the street, the dog

groomer, etc. Instead he explains that this house and this neighborhood and the decision to move

to New Orleans represented a pivotal point in his life. His values changed from being business

driven to searching for a more emotionally fulfilling career. This walk and the places we pass

represent this life choice for Chris.

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Collaging Memory

After wandering the city, I moved on to the third stage of the project, creating my own

experimental map of my wanderings. Like Cornell, I collected different media on my

wanderings. I collected a mixture of objects including material and digital traces: physical

objects that stood out to me on my walks along with digital GPS traces, photographs, and audio

recordings. I decided to assemble my traces in an interactive website. I wanted to create a digital

memory box that allowed viewers to explore and interact with each object within and to discover

multiple worlds and histories within New Orleans. Gathering materials for the website became

another version of wandering, this time in cyberspace. However, for the assembly of the website,

I no longer operated within the wandering chronotope. Instead, I was operating within the

archiving and collaging chronotopes in order to collage the memories gathered on my physical

wanderings.

I began by choosing Adobe Muse, a web design software that didn’t require the

knowledge of code. I talked with friends with web design experience for advice and guidance.

Inspired by Cornell’s Aviary Parrot Box with Wire Drawers (1949), I wanted to create the

website conceptually as a kind of cabinet with drawers that the viewer opens and virtually enters.

Each walk would be its own drawer. Once I embarked on the creation of the website everything

slowed down to accommodate my interaction with technologies that were new to me. First, I had

to learn how to navigate the software and how to create the aesthetic I desired. I spent much time

watching Abode tutorials to learn the basics and the not-so-basics.

I scoured the Internet diligently searching for antique maps of New Orleans. The maps

would be the wallpaper for each box. I also wanted the website to be full of vintage frames. So, I

hunted for images of appropriate sized frames. I created hyperlinks on the homepage that would

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open a drawer to a specific walk. I spent hours searching Google Images for jpeg files that would

work as the knobs and serve as hyperlinks to the drawers. I found an antique illustration of a

seashell for the walk through Holy Cross, a bowtie for the Marigny, a Victorian Halloween

cartoon for Frenchmen, a dollhouse for the lower Garden District, and a vintage photograph of

pugs in a basket for the Irish Channel. I downloaded each image, uploaded it to Photoshop,

meticulously cut out each image, saved it as a new file, and prepared to paste it to the homepage

(see Figure 1). The cutting and pasting work in Photoshop was tedious and time consuming.

Figure 1: Home page

I sent my GPS tracks from my walks to my Dropbox and from there uploaded each trace

to a Google map, creating a map for each walk. Within each map I created pinpoints to mark

specific places along each walk. Each pinpoint was given a name and a description of the

memory, thought, etc. that occurred at the location.

The process of the creating the website was also an embodiment of the wandering

chronotope. Although not physically walking through different neighborhoods, I wandered the

Internet searching for digital images that could represent my physical wanderings. Like the urban

wanderer, I let my whims and curiosities determine where I linked next. I knew that I wanted to

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collect digital images to create my website, but I did not set out with pre-determined ideas of

what or where to find them. Instead I let chance, contingency, and desire guide my search. I was

inspired as I wandered and like Cornell, collected bits and pieces as I went, dragging and

dropping images to my desktop. I embraced the wandering chronotope as my method of digital

exploration.

Once I collected and archived all of the materials I needed I began assembling the digital

cabinet of curiosity. I began with the Home page by first importing an antique New Orleans map

as the background layer or wallpaper of the entire page, then pasting all of the images I had

Photoshopped to be the knobs and drawers leading to individual pages, arranging them over the

neighborhoods on the map. I was digitally collaging, collecting pre-existing images, cutting them

from their original contexts, and pasting them into my own work (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Map of New Orleans’ Neighborhoods

Once each image was placed on top of its corresponding neighborhood I moved on to

pages for individual walks. I began with Holy Cross. Creating this page was very much an

experiment and involved a great deal of arranging and rearranging. It took many imports and

deletes to get the effect I wanted. I imported photos as a slideshow and a frame to place on top of

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them, realizing that I needed to reverse the order of importing the layers. Also, I realized that

horizontal and vertical photographs needed individual frames just as they would on our walls

(see Figure 3). This process was slow going through much trial and error.

Figure 3: Images of the Lower Garden District

Once I figured out how to achieve the effects I wanted I realized that I didn’t like what I

had done before and deleted the entire page and started over. It was a steep learning curve. I

figured out what worked and what didn’t and let these experiments inform how I approached the

following pages. As I completed the maps with locations pinpointed and my description of what

happened at each pinpoint, I uploaded each to its particular page on the website. Once they were

embedded I placed an antique frame around them, just as I had done with the photographs.

Viewers would be able to click on each pinpoint and read about each location. They could follow

our GPS paths, read the fragments of memories attached to particular places on the walk, and

look at photographs taken on the walks (see Figure 4).

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Once all of the elements were collected and added to the website I focused on the

minute details of arrangement. I moved objects around and tried different types of fonts, until I

was certain that every element was exactly how I wanted it.

Figure 4: GPS Tracks of Lower Garden District Wandering

Analysis of Project

As I wandered my neighborhood I drifted from interest to interest. I let my whims and

desires motivate my movement through the city. I took my time, slowed down, and paid attention

to my surroundings. And because of my attention to things that I typically pass without notice I

interacted with my surroundings. The familiar became unfamiliar; I saw the city up close rather

than quickly passing by on my way somewhere. The minute and overlooked became significant;

lizards in the cemetery, music drifting out of a window, and chalk markings on sidewalks all

took on special meanings. My wandering also became highly personalized. My thoughts

wandered as I travelled from place to place. I experienced emotional reactions to places and

things I encountered. I attached feelings, memories, and associations to places with which I

interacted.

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Asking my friends to take me on walks to places that evoked memories forced them to

interact with their physical surroundings. Their movements and narration were influenced by

their physical environment, evoking Jean Christophe Bailly’s idea of the grammaire generative

des jambes or generative grammar of the legs. In his essay “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic

Space,” Michael Sheringham notes that for Bailly, the city was “under threat from the tyranny of

bad architecture, soulless planning and indifference to the basic unit of urban language, the

street, and the ‘ruissellement de paroles’ (stream of words), the endless stories, which animate it.

Keeping the street and the city alive depends on understanding their grammar and generating the

new utterances on which they thrive” (111).

The walks became a performance of remembering. If we understand memory to be

spatial, then by walking familiar paths my friends accessed memories with each step. However,

places evolve over time. Therefore, memories evolve as well, changing over time as the structure

and environment changes. Memories become fuzzy, incorrect or just disappear as places change

and disappear. But some memories remain even if the structures were completely gone. This

lingering can disrupt our sense of self. Trigg explains that this “disturbance is grounded in the

residual sediment of my (regular) place no longer being there, despite its occupancy in my body”

(11). We attempt to document and hold onto the materiality of the disappearing or changing

places in order to maintain our relationship with them. The embodiment of the wandering

chronotope creates a multi-temporal experience for the wanderer, in which the past or perhaps

the pain of a slipping memory becomes present.

The narration of the wanderers in my project transitioned between observations to

recollections. The past and present merged as we walked. The wanderers provided a grammar of

the legs, telling stories, bringing the past into the present, unfixing or bringing the past to life and

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extending it into the future. My friends recalled and created their stories to share with me, and

the sharing became an event in itself. Storytelling, in this project, created multiple histories

within the city. Stories undermine or challenge the history of traditional mapping and narrating

history. Their stories, as Della Pollock argues, “make history go” (1).

Private and public intertwined as my friends told me personal stories about their

surroundings. They became creators, participants, and authors of the city. Their wanderings and

recollections became my method of exploring the city. It was all new to me. However, for my

friends, these walks were familiar, though I could see them recalling memories that they hadn’t

thought of in years; their former homes, their neighbor’s house, a balcony, a tree, a piece of

graffiti on the side of a building, a fountain, all brought back memories that had been stored

away. As I walked the city, I learned the unknown histories of the people in my life, the ordinary

or mundane that has become special to them over time. I also learned their subjective history of

New Orleans, how they interact differently with the city now than they did in their former lives,

the influence particular parts of the city have had on them. Their life histories are interwoven

with their surroundings. Both change over time and as the materiality evolves or falls into

disrepair so too do the memories--sometimes. Sometimes it is the opposite: the memory remains

while the material has disappeared or been destroyed. This tension is particular to New Orleans

because of the city’s social and environmental history and the sudden and violent change that

reshaped the city in 2005.

The wandering portion of this project enabled a very different bodily and psychological

experience than the website design half of the project because I was primarily operating in

different chronotopes. As I walked through neighborhoods with my friends we were performing

memory. I could see how time operates in layers. With my various tools I collected memories

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and my personal observations of each experience. I felt like an explorer, like a person new to a

totally unfamiliar place, even if I had been to these places before. I was seeing how other people

experienced and connected to their surroundings. I was seeing New Orleans through different,

unique perspectives. Creating the website, however, was a very individual endeavor. I had to

figure out a way to archive all of the material I collected. As it is with all designing, the website

creation was all about details, making sure that every aspect met my goals. I felt like Cornell in

his basement, meticulously arranging and rearranging objects he collected in his surroundings. In

this project I was a wanderer, collector, archivist, and collagist, each role providing

characteristics and practices that enabled different aspects of the project.

In terms of my experimental map the digital layers don’t work the same way as Cornell’s

material layers of his collage maps. Layers don’t present temporal duration. Rather, digital layers

can be approached in any order. Unlike material layers in two-dimensional collage, digital layers

don’t necessarily present a chronological order with the base layer the furthest past and the

closest layer the most present. They are not ordered to represent the order or time in which I

found each trace. Instead, the website is more like his memory boxes in that it is up to the

viewer how to interact with the objects within. They still track particular journeys, histories, and

memories, but the viewer isn’t forced to view from most current to the furthest memory. The

website deals with collaging memories accessed and collected via wandering. So, it focuses on

the paths and traces (stories, memories, photographs, objects) collected while walking with each

person. As in Cornell’s boxes, the findings from the walks are personal associations, which are

therefore not fully recoverable to an audience, but they are invitations for the audience’s own

associations. The website stores memories. It deals with the relationship between place and

memory and the role wandering plays in accessing or performing memory. So, the website

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encourages re-wandering in digital space. However, the memories and stories are not fully

recoverable. They are past, but not absent. Or like the epitaph reads, “Not dead, just resting,”

until someone wanders by and brings them to the present, momentarily, to discover the

strangeness in what stays.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE ARCHIVING CHRONOTOPE

Although Cornell was classified as an assemblage artist, he could also be considered an

archival artist. Cornell visited archives, archived his collections, created artistic works from

archival material, and made archiving a key method of his artistic practice. For Cornell, archives

were also educational. Cornell had a generative relationship with archival materials, treating

them not as sacred materials to be stored away but as objects to be altered, manipulated, and

extended into the future.

Archives serve as sources for research and artistic inspiration for future generations to

use, adapt, and appropriate the material(s) within. Archives can be participatory and

collaborative, connecting multiple authors across multiple decades. The distinction between art

and archives and archives and museums can be blurry.

In this chapter I explore the archiving chronotope at work in Cornell’s practices. As I

research Cornell’s archives and archiving techniques, I am informed by theorists and

practitioners interested in the archive as it functions in art and memory. First, I discuss the

traditional understanding of the archive; then I discuss how twentieth-century avant-garde artists

challenged and critiqued traditional notions of the institutional archive. I then link their

experimental archival practices to Cornell’s and discuss several of his archival projects in detail

including what he called his “explorations” and boxes as examples of the archive as art.

Importantly, I discuss the value of Cornell’s archives/art as generative and education material for

future generations of artists and researchers. In the chapter immediately following I expand my

notion of what constitutes an archive by discussing filmic and digital archives. Finally, I describe

my own project that springs from this understanding.

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The Archiving Chronotope

The archiving chronotope is characterized by an intimate interactive relationship between

archivist and materials. The archivist forms a personal connection with the materials she is

archiving. She dedicates herself to spending an extended period of time working with archival

materials, which causes her to form her own feelings and associations with the materials with

which she interacts. She develops an “attachment to the objects,” and “an appreciation of

arranging” objects in the archive (Davidson and Temkin 222). She is invested in the organization

and preservation of the contents of the archive. As the archivist interacts with her archive time

slows down, allowing for precision and attention to detail. At the same time, time can pass

quickly because the archivist can become so wrapped up in her actions that hours pass like

minutes. Archiving may be an idiosyncratic experience; the organization of the archive is often

subjective and associative, causing the motivation of the organization or the contents of the

archive to be not fully available to an outside audience.

Another characteristic of the archiving chronotope is its unfinalizability. Contrary to the

traditional understanding of archives as locations for documents to be preserved once they are

obsolete and remain untouched for all time, the archiving chronotope creates archives that evolve

over time through addition and deletion. Further, archives are meant to be used by future

generations. They are a source of education, an opportunity for interaction. They also may

provide raw material or inspiration for future artists through recycling and re-mixing archival

materials. Thus, the archiving chronotope embodies and documents contingency. However, it is

contingency that traditional archiving practices sought to limit.

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Theorizing the Archive

Traditionally, archives have been thought of as locations in which to store objects and

texts that are no longer in use. In this sense, archives are used to keep the past accessible to the

present. They possess authority because the objects in the archives are evidence for the history

that gets told. Archiving has its beginnings in the bureaucratic world as technological

advancements produced an excess of documents that had to be organized and stored. Jacques

Derrida traces the etymology of the word “archive” and explains that it has always been linked to

authority: “Arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior

magistrates, the archons, those in command” (2).

A key component of the traditional archive is the belief that archival materials

transmitted and represented “sediments of time itself” (Spieker 6). Nineteenth-century historians

approached the archive as existing in two orders. First, they saw the archive as they encountered

it in the present. Second, they approached the archive in terms of the past or original

interdependence of the objects. They believed that the past could be accessed through the archive

in the present. Archives were thought to be topographic or relating to a concrete and linear past.

In other words, archival materials could be traced back to an authentic origin. Nineteenth-

century archivists and historians sought to create archives that were stable, fixed, with no

possibility for contingency to enter the impermeable archive. With the introduction of

technologies of reproduction such as photography and film, archivists relied on their ability to

capture an unmanipulated reality and in turn authentically represent the past to the present. What

nineteenth-century historians did not account for was the contingent in the archive.

In the twentieth century, avant-garde movements challenged and critiqued the traditional

institutional approach to archives as stable, fixed, and tied to a linear past. Their techniques of

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collage, photomontage, and assemblage challenged chronology. The insistence of a neatly

separated past and present as well as single origins was challenged by these avant-garde

practices. The archive was no longer thought to limit contingency, but to document change, the

very thing it previously sought to limit. The same technologies that were used as institutional

tools of mimetic representation were now used to challenge or subvert linear and objective

archival representation. The avant-garde archive was non-hierarchical and non-linear. Rather,

like montage, it was understood as a constellation or web of materials surrounding a theme, idea,

or even a person. Duration, contingency, and process were introduced into the archive and the

processes and methods of archivization.

Archives became multi-mediated or not media-specific. The composition of an archive

expanded to include materials from everyday life. As in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,

Cornell collected found materials and, in turn, archived them so as to be recycled over and over

throughout his career. Benjamin’s Arcades Project, composed of collected fragments and

quotations, was not meant to be unchanging throughout time. Instead, he noted, “I, however, had

something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old--in

such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own--was the task of the

collection that filled my drawer” (7). Benjamin’s use of found quotations meant that they could

be again edited and reused in the future. In this vein, Cornell, for example, used the same film

footage in different contexts in multiple films as well as copies of the same images in different

boxes. Cornell collected art books and periodicals, themselves archives, from which he cut out

images that attracted him. Later he used other types of mechanically reproduced images such as

Photostats, clippings of illustrations from magazines, and type. Cornell’s work was centered on

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found objects, in this case mechanically reproduced images and texts. Cornell never included

original illustrations, paintings, or sculptures in his collages. Everything had been used before.

Michel Foucault’s genealogy provides a way to problematize the governing power of the

archive. For Foucault the job of the genealogist is to unearth disparate histories. He explains

that the goal of the genealogist is to “study the beginning--numberless beginnings whose faint

traces and hints of color are readily seen by an historical eye” (81). For Foucault, genealogy is a

form of carnival, which, as described by Bakhtin, inverts social norms and levels hierarchies of

social class by challenging hegemonic history. As Bakhtin writes, the principle function of

carnival is “degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract . . . to the

material level, to the sphere of the earth and body" (Rabelais 19-20). By giving voice to

overlooked, forgotten, and devalued histories genealogy disrupts capital “H” history.

In The Archive and the Repertoire, performance studies theorist Diana Taylor argues for

uncovering or exposing the repertoire within archives. I am interested in Taylor’s argument that,

“Embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge” (21). She explains:

“Part of what performance and performance studies allows us to do . . . is take seriously the

repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting

knowledge” (26). For Taylor, embodied memory or performance is as valuable as what we think

of as traditional archival material. So, the ephemerality of performance does not inhibit long-

term transmission of personal and cultural memory.

Cornell’s Archives

Before Cornell officially began making his artwork (1926-1930), he kept a three-ring

binder of clippings of images and texts that interested him including art, literature, philosophy,

and music. As his method of collecting found objects grew and transformed into a creative

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method, Cornell needed a way to store and organize the materials. For many years Cornell

worked in his family’s dining room after everyone else went to bed. Eventually, he converted the

small basement of the family home into his studio. He described his studio as a “laboratory” and

“experimental workshop” (Davidson and Temkin 225). The basement overflowed with Cornell’s

collected objects. After his death, his family and museum archivists discovered that there were

“Easily three thousand books and magazines, a comparable number of record albums and vintage

films, enough diaries and letters to now fill more than thirty reels of microfilm, and tens of

thousands of examples of ephemera--from postage stamps to clay pipes, from theatrical handbills

to birds’ nests” (Hartigan, Shadowplay 15). Because of the quantity, the continuous collection,

and the range of materials Cornell collected, he came up with his own archival system.

Originally three-dimensional and two-dimensional materials were archived separately.

His taxonomy was determined by relationships. Three-dimensional objects such as shells, pipes,

corks, and glass were stored close together in individual recycled containers such as old cookie

boxes, jars, and cigar and stationary boxes, which he whitewashed and labeled, indicating their

new contents with blue paint. He shelved cartons with similar contents close together and labeled

the general type of material. Two-dimensional materials usually were stored in envelopes,

folders or bags on which he made notes. In Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp… In Resonance,

Susan Davidson and Ann Temkin state:

Maintaining an internal sequence was simply not a concern, especially when items tended
to come and go--into artworks, magazine layouts, other files, other hands, even trash. In
Cornell’s files, the vintage and the contemporary mingled freely in the form of
photographs, Photostats, lithographs, engravings, postcards, excerpts from books,
newspapers, and magazines, and notes--often lots of notes--on everything from envelope
flaps to typing paper. (224)

These files were subject driven and included ballerinas, actresses, singers, artists, writers,

astronomy, romantic and modern ballet, birds, films, literature, music, plants, and science. Often

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written notes were included in the files, notes that included the date, time of day, the weather, as

well as possibilities for projects, reminders, and drawings of works in progress. The relationship

between the images in each file was complex and associative. “This was an artist for whom

browsing, collecting, and sifting were, at heart, experiences to be savored and lingered over for

equal measures of stimulation and reverie” (Davidson and Temkin 222).

Explorations

Cornell began mixing media by assembling archives he called “explorations,” which

included both two- and three-dimensional ephemera centered on a topic, idea, or person.

Assembling his explorations entailed researching, collecting materials, and putting together files

on his subject. Explorations were stored in folders, slipcases, and old suitcases. Davidson and

Temkin explain, “He credited most of the ‘explorations’ to a specific momentous event, which

he wrote about over time--in his diaries, in correspondence, and usually in notes incorporated

into each ‘exploration’” (228). Cornell’s explorations often spanned decades as he continuously

added to them whenever moments of inspiration struck. These explorations created dynamic

archives, formed from moments of personal inspiration leading to collecting and researching

materials relating to the subject. Although the explorations offered materials for Cornell’s formal

artwork throughout his career, they were also art in themselves. Davidson and Temkin note that

Cornell believed in the communicative and educational power of his archives. He thought of his

explorations not only as materials for future projects, but also as a way for future artists to enter

into communication with his work and, “pursue beauty and knowledge in the ‘warp and woof of

daily life,’ just as he had” (233).

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GC 44 Exploration

His first exploration began in spring 1944 when Cornell began working at a nursery

called the Garden Center (GC) in Queens. His job amidst the flowers and plants at the GC was a

source of personal and spiritual joy as well as creativity for Cornell. He wrote, “There flowed

such a never ending series of surprises connected with flowers, forgotten paths, experiences on

bicycle through fields heavy with summer and mellow with autumn” (qtd. in Hauptman 22).

Cornell wanted to capture, communicate, and represent his experiences at the Garden Center

with the same intensity of the original moment. He explains, “I devised a method in the attempt

to hold fast that overflowing ‘bouquet’ before the ‘full flavor faded’” (qtd. in Hauptman 22). His

method was collecting. He collected “magazine and newspaper clippings, reproductions of

artworks, postcards, quotations from books read, descriptions of scenes in movies viewed, leaves

and flowers, illustrations cut from children’s fairy tales, scraps spied in flea markets or along city

streets” (Hauptman 22); all centered around the Garden Center, as one object alone could not

represent his experience. He writes:

Standing upon the threshold of the world of authentic visions and being allowed to linger
. . . all this can never be satisfactorily recaptured and communicated. But as much as can
is herewith presented as it unfolded in the aftermath of the above experiences adding
whatever pictorial or literary image, souvenir, or anything that served my purpose to this
end. (qtd. in Hauptman 23)

Cornell accumulated material for the exploration he called GC 44 for ten years. At first he

simply gathered material, but slowly his accumulating turned into a creative method. Hauptman

explains, “Expanding beyond the recapitulation of a recent event, GC 44 began to offer more

than a demonstration of a technique to capture particularly visceral experiences; it became,

ultimately more important for Cornell’s oeuvre, a way to document and preserve history,

memory, and the past” (24). Cornell planned for GC 44 to be composed of seven chapters

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revolving around specific themes. Each chapter would include an image with corresponding

writings. The exploration never took the form Cornell originally conceived. Instead it remained

more casual and consisted of newspaper clippings, art periodicals, photographs, medieval

manuscripts, a photo essay on English dairy farms and other images in portfolios. Cornell

mounted some key images on album size white paper accompanied by writings underneath the

images. This was as organized as GC 44 ever was. Instead, through his work on GC 44, Cornell

discovered a method for accumulation and assemblage that he would use throughout the rest of

his career.

Cornell turned to the ballet as the subject of his next exploration, Portrait of Ondine.

Cornell was particularly drawn to the nineteenth-century Romantic Ballet. He attended the New

York Ballet, befriended famous ballerinas, and researched famous, historical ballerinas in the

Museum of Modern Art’s dance archives. Inspired by his research, Cornell began to bring

nineteenth-century ballerinas to life in his twentieth-century work. The historically obscure

Fanny Cerrito became one of Cornell’s favorite Romantic ballerinas. Perhaps it was her

obscurity that attracted Cornell to explore her life and career. She was known for her role as

Ondine, an immortal creature of the sea in the ballet Ondine, ou La Naiade (1843). Starr tells us,

“The retrieval of Cerrito from old prints, dusty books, and a long-forgotten ballet became his

personal crusade for over twenty-five years. In his journals, Cornell writes of a series of

epiphanies, in which she rematerialized to him in everyday life” (19). Once, as he wandered

through the bookstalls of 4th Avenue, she appeared to him. He also describes catching sight of

her through a window while riding a train to Long Island. These moments of epiphany or

imaginary encounters were of great significance to him and inspired the production of his

Portrait of Ondine exploration. Cornell described his Ondine exploration as an “unauthorized

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biography” or “imaginary portrait.” Starr explains, “Portrait of Ondine highlights Cerrito’s life

and career as it subtly slips in and out of time and place from nineteenth century Europe to

twentieth century New York and the settings and images that brought her to life again for

Cornell” (25).

When Cornell began the Ondine series, he encountered Ondine-type characters in

different genres including the aquatic ballet at the Hippodrome, “The Little Mermaid” by Hans

Christian Andersen. His film scenario Monsieur Phot (1933) included a mermaid submerged in

a tank of water while reading from a book. Monsieur Phot was likely inspired by a Georges

Méliès film, La Sirene (1904). These multiple encounters of an Ondine type of character

contributed to Cornell’s fascination and conceptualization of his Portrait of Ondine.

The Ondine exploration is an example of how Cornell’s archives did not refer to a single

origin but instead offered fictional and multiple inspirations as origins. It is also an example how

Cornell used and reused materials in new and multiple contexts throughout his career. He

demonstrated creative freedom as he gathered, mixed, and remixed found materials and

inspirations to create his own biography of Cerrito. The exploration included "Images mounted

on white paperboard sheets, in the tradition of album pages as well as bookplates . . . excerpts

from nineteenth-century books, nineteenth-century watercolors of Naples, Kodachrome

postcards of New York, European maps, a Cerrito autograph, and drafts of explanatory notes”

(Davidson and Temkin 226). The exploration was archived in different ways over the years.

First, the materials were stored in an album and then, “moved into a suitcase, made a public

appearance in a shadow box, and wound up (but did not end) in the lidded paperboard slipcase

that we encounter today” (Starr 19). In 1945 Portrait of Ondine was put on display at the

Auditorium Gallery at the Museum of Modern Art. The exploration was put on exhibition again

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a year later in the exhibition, “Romantic Museums at the Hugo Gallery/Portraits of Women:

Constructions and Arrangements by Joseph Cornell.”

In Joseph Cornell and the Ballet, Sandra Starr notes that Ondine took on many different

forms in Cornell’s work over the years. From the Ondine archive, Cornell created boxes,

collages, and scenarios, constantly remixing his collected materials. In the souvenir case

Untitled (Fanny Cerrito in Ondine) (1940-42), Cornell incorporates a cutout illustration of

Cerrito from an album titled, Les Beautés de L’Opéra (1845). The same cutout appears in a later

box titled Untitled (Cerrito in Ondine) (1947). Some of the boxes created from the exploration

are overtly Ondine, while others are more abstract and associative. For example, An Owl for

Ondine (1954) contains an owl in a dimly lit forest but does not overtly make a visual homage to

Ondine. However, if one knows the inspirations for the box, Ondine references are overflowing.

In the box Cornell combined the poem “Ondine” by Aloysius Bertrand, in which Ondine is

described as raindrops falling on a building, with another Bertrand poem “La Pluie,” in which

the poet describes a storm in a black forest and birds within the forest. Cornell enjoyed the way

Bertrand evoked the mood of Ondine. The initial inspiration for An Owl for Ondine (1954), was

Jean Girardoux’s play Ondine (1954), which incorporated a barred owl that Starr argues

represents Cornell, and who is ready to announce Ondine’s appearance at a moment’s notice

(Starr 25-30).

In Window Façade (1953-56), Cornell brought Cerrito to Manhattan by creating a box

inspired by a moment of imaginative inspiration as he peered at the Manhattan Storage and

Warehouse building across from his office. He wrote in his journal that each night guards would

appear in the windows to close the blinds simultaneously. One night, many Cerritos appeared in

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the guards’ places. Ondine is nowhere to be seen in the box. The box is a whitewashed grid

suggesting the windows through which Ondine appeared to Cornell.

Starr argues, “As an artist Cornell became Cerrito’s custodian, and his work on her marks

an effort to convey her spirit fully in a manner less and less dependent on the specifics of her life

and work” (34). Over the course of his career, Ondine began to be a word that evoked a specific

feeling and mood for Cornell. She haunts his work as she comes and goes in and out of it for

twenty-five years.

The Duchamp Dossier

By 1913, Marcel Duchamp had established his ready-mades, which were artworks made

from commercially produced objects that Duchamp selected and displayed. Perhaps the most

famous example is his Fountain (1917), a urinal reframed as artwork. His adjusted ready-mades

were made from commercially produced objects as well; however, Duchamp extended simply

selecting the objects to selecting and combining multiple commercial objects in relationship to

one another. For example, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) was assembled from a metal wheel mounted

on top of a wooden stool. Cornell met Duchamp in Manhattan in 1933 at a show that Duchamp

organized at Brummer Gallery. A few years later, they met again and established a close

friendship and working relationship from about 1942 to 1946. Cornell and Duchamp shared

interests such as collecting and archiving flotsam and jetsam, obsolete or forgotten and

overlooked everyday materials. Davidson and Temkin tell us, “The essentially solitary nature of

their archival pursuits made them kindred spirits” (15). Duchamp hired Cornell to assist him in

the assembling of his Boite-en-valise (1935-41), which is a small leather valise containing

miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s works. Cornell’s turn to explorations, the multi-media

subject-driven archives, might very well have been inspired by working with Duchamp.

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Davidson and Temkin argue that this turn in his work was critical for several reasons: “First, it

tied the dossiers generically to Cornell’s other, better known box constructions. Second, the

volumetric format provided greater flexibility, expanding to include mismatched contents and

even three-dimensional objects, while, third and conversely, it enforced at least marginal

limitations on the scope of his rapidly bloating files and folders” (246).

During the span of their relationship, Cornell composed a Duchamp exploration called

Duchamp Dossier. In this exploration, he collected correspondences between himself and

Duchamp, clippings, ephemera associated with Duchamp from that time period, even trash that

Duchamp disposed of and Cornell retrieved from the garbage: Cornell kept receipts, laundry

tickets, and sugar wrappers (Davidson and Temkin 248). Cornell’s Duchamp Dossier was put on

exhibition in 1998 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Dynamic Archiving or The Archive at Play

Cornell’s museum and pharmacy boxes are linked to the twentieth-century avant-garde’s

critique of traditional archives and museums. Beginning with the avant-garde and continuing

into contemporary art, artists questioned the traditional art museum in terms of what was

considered art as well as the layout, viewing practices, and other visitor decorum. Cornell’s work

addressed these critiques through the contents of his work as well as the formats and media he

used. The boxes and cases were not simply objects used to display the content. They were not

frames or pedestals holding a painting or sculpture. Rather, they were central to the

conceptualization of his work.

Cornell’s value in and reliance on alternative media and viewing formats have been tied

to a wide variety of practices that preceded him. As noted above, Cornell was greatly inspired by

Duchamp’s Boite-en-valise (1935-41), a small leather valise that contained miniature copies of

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pieces of Duchamp’s work; Cornell’s own museum boxes were lidded wooden cases that stored

glass jars containing ephemera such as colored sand, coins, fragments of maps and pages of

books, beads, and mechanical springs. Like Duchamp, Cornell incorporated photographic

reproductions in his museum boxes. André Malraux introduced the idea of “The Museum

without Walls” in which art would be an assembly of meaning informed by different voices

across time and place. Although Malraux had not yet read Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction, we can understand Malraux’s expansion of the idea of the museum in

light of Benjamin’s understanding of the democratization of art through mechanical

reproduction. Cornell certainly benefited from reproduced art as he spent his early years

searching, learning, and exploring art books of works he had never seen in person. Davidson and

Temkin explain that both Cornell and Duchamp used images that fall in line with Malraux’s idea

of the museum (240). And importantly, Cornell often considered his works incomplete. Works

would span years, even decades, as would his archives. Mechanical reproduction was a key

element in this ongoing transformation.

Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak compare Cornell’s boxes to cabinets of

wonder: “Cornell’s boxes have affinities with the Wunderkammern and Wunderkabinette of the

seventeenth century, in which the wonders of the physical realm were gathered-natural and

artificial curiosities, paintings, small works of art, coins and medals, automata, and scientific

instruments-with the naïve intent of creating an encyclopedic in miniature” (282). Wonder was a

key descriptor of these collections because it referred to “both the objects displayed and the

subjective state those objects inevitably induced in their respective viewers” (Weschler 77). El

Lissitzky began designing galleries that focused on the observer, “By turning the visitor into the

dynamic agent of a continuously shifting viewpoint whose movements create the space in which

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they unfold” (Spieker 109). Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms focused on creating an active

viewer in the art gallery. To achieve this Lissitzky created spaces that allowed the viewer’s

perspective of the artwork to constantly shift. There was no one correct position from which to

view works, but rather multiple angles and perspectives were created as the viewer moved

through the gallery. Spieker argues that Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms directly challenge the

nineteenth-century’s archives and museums. The rooms function more like filmic montage. He

explains, “Just as montage subjects traditional representation to time and movement, so the

Demonstration Rooms also suggest that time is the museum’s most essential element” (109). One

key characteristic of the Demonstration Rooms was that they were “optical[ly] dynamic”

meaning that the backgrounds of the rooms were not just support for pieces of art, but also active

parts of the experience. For example, the background would be a different color depending on

where the observer stood. The observer engages with the rooms, creating an aesthetic experience

in itself. Spieker argues that Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms embody the idea that vision is a

construct created from division, interval, change, motion, and difference. Spieker notes, “The

experience the Demonstration Rooms made available to their visitors is analogous to the one

Benjamin claimed for film; instead of an illusion of continuity and flux, they permit a glimpse at

the archive of differential moments--their oscillation and differentiation--that represent that

illusion’s phenomenological horizon” (Spieker 124). Cornell referenced this connection of

perspective in his boxes in which he includes film stills. Further, his boxes were built for

interaction. Many of his boxes such as the optical toys, Sand Trays (1930s-1950s), and Medici

Slot Machines (1940s-1960s) were to be held and played with by the viewer. Interaction and

participation was key in creating the experience of Cornell’s boxes.

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The practices of these artists described above incorporate the idea of the archive as

artwork, which “challenges the notion of history as a discourse based primarily upon chronology

and documentation” (Osthoff 12). The archive is no longer a stable, impenetrable place full of

dead material. Instead, archives become a source for creative extension. In Performing the

Archive, Simone Osthoff explains that because the boundary between art and archive is blurring,

the archive has become a source for creative output. Therefore, history and theory are more

frequently included in artwork (12). Hal Foster uses Liam Gilliam’s idea of “promissory notes”

to claim that archives function as “Promissory notes for future elaboration or enigmatic prompts

for future scenarios” (5).

In the following chapter I discuss Cornell’s films as ephemeral archives and then extend

my argument of the ephemeral archive to contemporary digital archives. Then I combine

analogue and digital technologies along with Cornell’s archives and use them as promissory

notes to produce my own multi-media work.

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CHAPTER FIVE: THE FILMIC AND DIGITAL ARCHIVE

In this chapter I discuss Cornell’s original films as archives. I then argue that like the

objects the films were meant to preserve, filmic archives are ephemeral. I then extend my

discussion to the digital archive. Finally, I describe how I combined the analogue and the digital

in a film project that realized one of Cornell’s unrealized film scenarios from his archives.

Film as Ephemeral Archive

Throughout his career, Cornell often felt an inconsistency between the embodiment of an

experience and its documentation. With film, Cornell was able to collapse the moment of

inspiration and execution. Film became a way for Cornell to archive contingency, duration, and

the ephemeral. The butterfly in Centuries of June (1955) and the birds in Nymphlight (1957)

discussed in Chapter Two are examples of the collapsing of inspiration and execution through

contingency.

Mary Ann Doanne explains that film could record “a fleeting moment, the duration of an

ephemeral smile or glance” (3). It follows that film can also capture accidents and surprises, or

what Doanne refers to as contingencies that shock us. Doanne explains, “Film was perceived as

the imprint of time itself, a time unharnessed from rationalization, a nonteleological time in

which each moment can produce the unexpected, the unpredictable, and temporality ratifies

indeterminacy” (23). However, once contingency has been recorded or archived it becomes part

of the past. Doanne argues that film functions first as a record of what happens in front of the

camera. Thus, time itself becomes archived. However, we think of film as occurring in our

present because it “exists” when it is screened for a present audience. So, the past is archived

and the viewer’s experience is an experience of presence. But, as Doanne argues, it is a presence

that is haunted by historicity (23).

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The medium of film itself captures and freezes a person or moment in time and space yet

continually moves forward. Though it is captured on film, the moment is past. Spieker notes:

As media technology whose goal is the archivization of time in flux, film produces a
living present from a mechanically accelerated series of stills. Thought of as a series of
discreet recorded moments that aim to register the contingent, film partakes of the Real;
as a continuous motion projected on a screen, however, it is part of the Imaginary,
translating the discrete series of still images into more or less coherent visual flux. (52)

This theorization of the archivization of the contingent in film is challenged by French

Philosopher, Henri Bergson. Spieker continues to explain that for Bergson, “the contingent

present cannot be archivized; first, because we cannot speak it without slippage and, second,

because there is no point in time that could be said to be independent from what preceded it or

from what follows it” (66). For Bergson, there is no disembodied past, and the present only

exists as duration from one’s past to one’s future. His understanding of the contingent presents

the idea that film, “as a chronology of legible moments neatly separated from each other by

regular intervals, may turn out to be less clearly structured and defined than we would like it to

be” (Spieker 66). Although presenting a repeatable present, the archival process of filmmaking

incorporates multiple temporalities.

Hauptman describes this desire for the past as a similarity between historiography and

surrealism though the desire itself differs: “The historian collects fragments in an attempt to

reach the past while the surrealist scans the walls of the city searching for signs of love and

wishes that it never be fulfilled” (41). Cornell embodied a combination of historiographer and

surrealist. This mixture creates a tension for Cornell’s desire to preserve the past or

métaphysique d’éphemera.

As a filmmaker, rather than adhering to a strict, straightforward, linear script, Cornell

followed his fancies and whims, allowing contingency to play a large role in his films. His films

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had an inherent tension of archiving the ephemeral. As I have discussed, Cornell used film to

document and memorialize structures that were on the verge of destruction, such as a house in

his Flushing neighborhood or the 3rd Avenue El. Documenting contingency was a way for

Cornell to preserve the disappearing around him. The film or rather, each still frame, was a

physical document of the place and time in which the film was taken. With each viewing of the

film the place and memories attached to that place came to life. Understood in this way, each of

Cornell’s original films were archives of memory that were preserved and repeated even after the

locations changed and disappeared. However, once these vanishing places were captured on

film, they were not forever preserved from decay.

In June 2012 I visited the Anthology Film Archive in Manhattan for an exhibition of their

Cornell film archive. As I sat in the theatre and watched his films that are not the originals, but

copies, I became mindful of the deterioration of the films themselves. Though captured on film,

that which he has immortalized was disappearing. With each repetition of the film the subject of

the shot slipped further into the past, making the fixing of it that much more impossible. We can

watch these moments of preservation, but time keeps moving frame by frame. And, with each

repetition the materiality of the film decomposes little by little. The attempt of preservation is

futile, but it is meaningful.

In “Making History Go,” Della Pollock introduces the idea of “preserving the vanishing,”

which she describes as the space between performative presence of a place or event and its

impending absence (11). For Pollock preserving the vanishing does not mimetically represent the

past, but finds ways to engage creatively with the past that lets the past speak for itself. She

explains, “It is in the moments of the most intense performative play—the moments when the

gaps between signifiers and their avowed signifieds are widest—that history creeps back into (or

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perhaps more accurately, out of) representation” (27). Cornell’s original films achieve Pollock’s

idea of preserving the vanishing both in their production as well as in their editing. Cornell’s

direction for filming required that the filmmaker not try to capture a whole or truthful

representation of the subject (often a location) of the film, but rather an essence or a feeling

evoked from the place. The filmmaker creatively engaged with the disappearing location and let

it speak for itself. Further, in the editing of his original films, Cornell left in slips and mistakes.

This choice to leave in ruptures embraces the embodied performance of the filming and editing

experience and refuses the pressure of mimetic representation. Finally, in my viewing of

Cornell’s films at the Anthology Film Archives, the effects of time were evident in the films.

Rather than trying to reconstruct the films to their original quality for the screening reproductions

of the films, the archive left in the evidence of decomposition, allowing the films to speak for

themselves as cultural artifacts.

Cornell was an artist trying, desperately, to preserve a moment of beauty in its time and

space, but always facing the futility of his attempt. His turn to film as an artistic medium is

particularly interesting in that the technology of film inherently deals with ephemerality, a theme

that was central to Cornell’s work. Cornell used artistic media to explore the relationship

between presence and obsolescence, and his turn to film allowed him to explore it not only

through subject matter but also in form. Sitney explains, “All of Cornell’s work speaks of the

aesthetic mediation of experience. To encounter anything in its fullness was to come into nearly

tangible contact with its absolute absence, its unrecoverable pastness, its evanescence” (69). That

which is gone or disappearing is potently present in Cornell’s films. What I find particularly

interesting is that this quality also seems tied to the materiality of film itself. The science of

celluloid insists that the repetition of the image only makes it disappear faster. According to

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Spieker’s understanding of Johaan Droysen’s book Historik, “The past we come to inspect in an

archive is fully contingent on the conditions (and constraints) of the process of archivization

itself” (26). Celluloid inevitably deteriorates over time. Usually, films are carefully stored or

archived in order to preserve them. However, even in archival conditions films slowly

disappear. Eight-millimeter film, for instance, is made of tri-acetate cellulose, which over time

chemically breaks down and causes the film to decompose. It can warp, become brittle, or

acquire an oily or powdery coating as it decomposes.

Diana Taylor identifies the archive as, “supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts,

documents, buildings, bones)” and the repertoire as, “embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken

language, dance, sports, ritual)” (19). She explains that although archives are supposedly

resistant to change, the value, relevance, and even meaning of the archive does indeed change

over time. Cornell’s technique of wandering and creatively documenting locations on the verge

of destruction and evolution put the archive and the repertoire into play together. While Cornell

was concerned with preservation of special locations as he experienced and remembered them,

his films captured and embodied the ephemeral. Though captured on film, the content could not

be stabilized. Just as his films could be reproduced and repeated long after the landscape

changed, each viewing weaves together past, present, and future of the cityscape. Films

document memories of what it was, what it is, and the inevitability of it evolving or disappearing

in the future. Hauptman argues that Cornell chose his artistic medium based on his subject. I

argue that film was another, perhaps more potent way, for him to express the chronotope of

métaphysique d’éphemera.

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The Digital Archive

With artists turning to digital archives as well as archiving their art via digital technology,

the issue of the permanence of digital archives is becoming a heavily discussed topic. New

technologies are thought to make information more stable and accessible. It is often assumed that

digital memory is permanent, allowing for anything and everything to be archived with no threat

of decay. However, this notion is at odds with the material transience of information and the

Internet. Wendy Chun argues that information is only stable for the moment(s) our eyes take in

the information. Then it continues to move and change. It is because digital memory degenerates

(and has to be refreshed) that digital memory is possible. Computer memory fades just as other

material objects do. Chun suggests, “The always-thereness of digital media was to make things

more stable, more lasting. Digital media, through the memory at their core, were supposed to

solve, if not dissolve, archival problems such as degrading celluloid or scratched vinyl, not create

archival problems of their own” (188). Contrary to wide beliefs, digital media are not stable,

fixed, and always there. Chun continues, “Digital media are degenerative, forgetful, erasable”

(192). This condition creates an interesting tension in digital archival art and archiving digital art,

particularly when the digital artworks such as video collages and mash-ups are assemblages

made from various digital archives. Digital assemblages composed from found material from

multiple digital archives bring new meaning to Malraux’s Museum without Walls, expanding the

archive from collaboration across specific times and people to multiple people simultaneously

worldwide for a presumably infinite amount of time. Chun famously notes, “We must analyze, as

we try to grasp a present that is always degenerating, the ways in which ephemerality is made to

endure. What is surprising is not that digital media fade but rather that they stay at all and that we

stay transfixed by our screens as their ephemerality endures” (200).

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Although Cornell worked with analogue technology, his chronotopes resonate with

contemporary uses of digital technologies. Looking to old technologies to understand new

technologies in a new or better way is a central value of those invested in the field of media

archaeology, a field of study that asserts that new technology is informed by obsolete

technology. In the next section of this chapter I take the idea that old technology informs the new

and put it to the test in an experiment to realize a film scenario from Cornell’s archives through a

project that combines pre-cinematic techniques, analogue film, and digital video.

Nebula: The Powdered Sugar Princess

The characteristics of the archiving chronotope inspired a video project that combined

material from Cornell’s archives, “obsolete” analog technology, and digital technology. Using

Cornell’s unrealized film scenario, Nebula: The Powdered Sugar Princess (1941), as the subject

of my project, I adapted the film scenario into an experimental video using existing video, stop-

motion animation, and animation from a replica zoetrope. I used the process of the project to

experiment with the idea that archives are not fixed and permanent. Rather, archival materials are

sources for creative and educational extension made by scholars and artists, creating a dialogue

between their times and spaces. Though I worked individually and meticulously by adapting,

extending, and manipulating archival material, drawing from Cornell’s archives as raw material

for my own creative extension allowed me to enter into conversation with Cornell’s work.

In 1941 Cornell wrote the film scenario titled, Nebula, The Powdered Sugar Princess

(hereafter Nebula). The scenario blended astronomy and fantasy to create a script for a ballet

film. Like Monsieur Phot (1933), the scenario was never filmed; however, Cornell gave the film

“tangible form in collages made in conjunction with the project” (Hoving 73). Nebula consisted

of six pages of notes that described three acts of the performance.

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In the first act a young ballerina, Nebula, refuses to put on her costume and dance La

Sylphide (1832). In response, her ballet teacher conspires with a magician to turn her into a real

sylphide. She is turned into the winged spirit and floats through what Cornell described as “the

kind of world that one see thru the microscope/Floating cells magnified to gigantic” proportion

(qtd. in Hoving 74). Because of the strange creatures floating past her, the ballerina cannot

dance as she did on earth but moves as if she is swimming.

The second act of the scenario is more impressionistic and is comprised of three tableaux.

Cornell pairs Claude Debussy’s music with blue and green lighting. He describes:

Snow falls, and, as the princess floats and dances, she ecstatically spreads her arms open
to welcome the snowflakes. The light shifts to green, and the set resembles a glorified
fairy aquarium. When the lights move to dark green, they flash like shooting stars.
Perfectly at home with the heavenly bodies, Nebula now stands on a balcony slowly
fading away as she looks straight into the camera and blows a kiss at the audience. (qtd.
in Hoving 74)

As the view shifts from the close-up of Nebula to a more distant perspective, the outlines of

constellations appear and disappear. The stars in Nebula’s tutu, her hair, and her forehead

become a constellation. Nebula disappears, but becomes a part of the cosmos.

The third act was to be filmed in Technicolor and consisted of close-ups of snow falling

and melting on Nebula’s face and hair with shapes floating past her.

Cornell’s Nebula parallels the story of a nebula in astronomy, which has a very specific

operation of time and space. In Nebula, the disappearance or finiteness of the woman is

inextricably tied to her preservation, just as nebulae, enormous clumps of gas and dust,

disintegrate. The decay of the nebula creates individual stars.

My realization of Nebula (2013) consisted of a combination of the second and third

version of Cornell’s scenario. I downloaded a video archive of Anna Pavlova dancing her

famous “Dying Swan” dance from Swan Lake (see Figure 5). (Cornell has made homages to

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Pavlova dancing the dance of the Dying Swan.) I collected sequins, feathers, glitter, and sand.

With this material I created handmade strips to fit inside a replica zoetrope, a pre-cinema device

that consists of a rotating cylinder with vertical slits through which the viewer watches a

sequence of images rotate and appear become animated. The strips I made were not traditional in

the sense that in historical examples of the zoetrope they followed a sequence of a particular

motion such as a horse galloping. Instead I created multiple strips of various designs, not

worrying to make sure that the sequence would create the illusion of sequential movement. As

the zoetrope rotated I filmed at an extreme close-up angle through the slits in the device. As a

result the strips were animated and interrupted by the momentary darkness of the rotating

zoetrope. Incorporating the momentary darkness created by the zoetrope allowed me to make the

viewer aware of the technology itself rather than the illusion created by the technology.

From the video of Anna Pavlova I created still images and printed material photographs.

By deciding to create material photographs to incorporate into my digital video I called on

Cornell’s use of Photostats in his work. Rather than using original prints in Cornell’s case, he

used reproductions that he could manipulate. Similarly, I used Photostats from digital archives to

create a different material effect in my video. I cut out Pavlova’s body from the rest of the photo

and created a series of stop-motion movements. As I filmed, the ballerina would slowly move

across her stage via stop-motion with sand, glitter, and jewels creating a trail of stars around her.

At the end of the stop-motion Pavlova is consumed by the nebula, which then explodes into a

constellation. Once I was done with each of these pre-cinema techniques I uploaded each image

to non-linear video editing software and began digitally manipulating them (see Figure 6).

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Figure 5: Video Layered with Zoetrope

First, I layered the video of Pavlova’s dance underneath the zoetrope video of the strip with the

feathers circulating. I then added the stop-motion photographs and set the frames per second at a

speed that would animate the images. Layered on top of this sequence is a zoetrope strip with

white paper and sequins as well as the feathers.

Figure 6: Stop Motion Ballerina

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In the video, the dancing Nebula fades in, growing larger as she dances toward the

camera. Though I have used a video, it has been converted from a film from the early twentieth

century. The age is apparent. She flickers and fades as she dances the dance of the “Dying

Swan.” The zoetrope feathers fly past, and sequins spin behind her creating shadows into which

she disappears and reappears. The sequins become stars, and the feathers are a part of the swan

slowly disintegrating and becoming the stars. She dances her dance of destruction and creation.

The zoetrope becomes her stage. Digitally manipulated, she dances within the pre-cinematic

device. As she concludes her dance her image fades out as the last feather passes. Only the

sequins are left within the zoetrope. She has becomes the cosmos. Darkness. Feathers.

Suddenly Nebula reappears as a cutout photograph. She begins her stop motion dance

across the frame as sequins, sand, and jewels shower around her costume. As she dances her

costume disperses across the frame, creating constellations. Feathers begin to fall and consume

her. She breaks free and begins her exit. As she concludes her dance she is no longer whole, but

is entirely made of stars.

Analysis

Pavlova danced the “Dying Swan” for the first time in 1905 and repeated the

performance nearly 4000 times. She was one of Cornell’s favorite ballerinas; he had an archive

file dedicated to her. The video I appropriated from YouTube became the raw material I used to

create my extension of Cornell’s scenario. I was also inspired by his box A Swan Like for

Tamara Toumanova (1946), in which a single swan framed in white feathers sits in front of a

starlit background, and his collage of Toumanova dancing, frozen in space and made from

rhinestones that look like stars. Toumanova was Pavlova’s protégé. Michel Fokine created the

Dying Swan dance for Pavlova. When Toumanova was young she premiered onstage alongside

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Pavlova. When Pavlova died Fokine passed the legacy of the dance to Toumanova, but not

without paying tribute to Pavlova. It became a tradition on the anniversary of Pavlova’s death to

have a single spotlight accompanied by the Dying Swan music metaphorically dance across the

stage. In Cornell’s Toumanova collages and boxes there is likewise homage paid to Pavlova

(Starr 66).

My realization of the scenario is reminiscent of some of Cornell’s work relating to

cinema. First, the incorporation of the zoetrope resembles Cornell’s use of another pre-cinema

machine called the praxinoscope. The praxinoscope consisted of a spinning cylinder with

sequential images attached to the inside. In the center were mirrors constructed in a circle. As the

praxinoscope spun, the mirrors reflected the images in motion, creating animated images. In

Thimble Forests (1948) and Jardin de Marie Antoinette (1949) Cornell manipulated found

circular boxes and transformed them into praxinoscopes. This transformation created an intimate

interaction for viewers who, as they peered into the box, saw endless reflections of the contents

because of the mirrors surrounding the perimeter of the box.

In Jouet Surrealiste (1932), Cornell altered images to be used for a thaumotrope. The

thaumotrope was invented in 1825 and demonstrated the effect of persistence of vision. The

device rotates a disc with an image on each side; as it spins the two images seem to blend

together to create one coherent image. Cornell used commercial discs that were meant for the

thaumotrope, but he would add paint and collage other images on top.

The box Black Hunter (1939) shows multiple, nearly identical cutouts of a hunter

shooting his gun. The images are in line vertically and at a slight curve. Each gun smokes, but

the amount of smoke varies in each cutout. It seems as though a camera captured each moment

of the hunter shooting a target. On the far right of the box hangs a string with four round balls

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attached. It is as if the hunter is using them for target practice. The images evoke Eadweard

Muybridge’s series photography, which produced the first photographic sequenced frames of

moving images in the 1870s. The scene is layered with glass, which Cornell painted red.

Hartigan explains that this technique emulates painting glass-plate negatives and slides and

stereo-synthesis, which is an obscure technique developed by cinema pioneer Louis Lumière.

Hartigan explains, “Multiple, slightly varying positives of an image were printed as

photomontages on the glass plates, sandwiched together in a wood frame” (Navigating 176).

This technique was used in order to give static objects a sense of depth and movement.

My film also recalls Cornell’s souvenir boxes Lucile Grahn as La Sylphide (1945) and

Homage to the Romantic Ballet (for the sylphide Alicia Markova) (1947). Both boxes contain

glitter, spotted wings, a piece of a headdress and white beads. The ballerina has disappeared, but

remnants of her remain. The contents of each box shifts as the viewer picks up and interacts with

the box.

The rotation of the zoetrope in Nebula (2013) creates limited or selective viewing

through the spaces in the device, and thus functions like the windows in Cornell’s boxes.

Further, this selective viewing is representative of Cornell’s worldview, which was a narrow and

deep interest in very selective things. The windows or spaces in Cornell’s work are strategic and

methodical, giving the viewer a deep but narrow view of the subject.

Cornell believed that an artist’s archives should be accessible to future generations of

artists. For him the archive was not a fixed and sacred space, but a source for creative extension.

As such, Cornell’s film scenario acted as my artistic inspiration. As I read the scenario I wanted

to adapt his story using archival footage, found materials, and digital film and editing

technology. Because of the unfinalizable quality of the archive, I was able to take Cornell’s film

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scenario along with digital archives to create a piece that straddles the past, present, and future

through its content and form (digital and analog technologies). By taking on this project I came

into conversation through time and space with Cornell and his work. I formed an intimate

connection with the archival materials I used. I became familiar with Cornell’s film scenario and

took my time imagining how I wanted to bring his intricate and oneiric Nebula to life. I worked

for extended periods arranging, rearranging, and manipulating film footage and photographs.

Like Cornell’s incorporations of objects that held highly personal and associative meanings, I

included material objects in the project that I associated with the film scenario, making

interpretation of the film not entirely available to the audience. I looked to Cornell’s analog

processes to inform how I approached a project that combined both analog and digital

technology. And, rather than attempting to create a mimetic representation of Cornell’s film

scenario I gave myself freedom to create a piece that I felt embodied the mood of Cornell’s

original writing. As Pollock argues, it is through creative, non-mimetic performative play that the

past comes alive in the present.

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CHAPTER SIX: THE COLLAGING CHRONOTOPE

A major source of inspiration for Cornell’s work was the cinema. Over the course of his

life Cornell became a film enthusiast, collector, and avant-garde filmmaker. In many ways,

Cornell’s maturity both personally and artistically paralleled the coming of age of cinema as a

legitimate art form. As a boy he saw early experiments with the form and grew up witnessing its

advancement from optical toys to vaudeville acts to silent films to “talkies.” He preferred films

from the silent era, saying, “Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally

occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to

evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human

countenance in its prison of silver light” (qtd. in Sitney 73).

Cornell’s deep interest in film as an art form segued into experimentation with film.

Beginning in the 1930s he worked on collage films, which he made by cutting, rearranging, and

mixing together found films. The collage films include Rose Hobart (1936), Cotillion (1940s-

1969), Children’s Party (1940s-1969), Midnight Party (1940s-1969), Bookstalls (1940s), By

Night with Torch and Spear (1940s), Vaudeville De-Lux (1940s), Carousel- An Animal Opera

(1940s), Thimble Theatre (1940s), Jack’s Dream (1940s), New York-Rome-Barcelona-Brussels

(1940s), and Cinderella’s Dream (no date). Though the filmic term for footage that is cut and

spliced together to create unexpected association is montage, I use the term collage because I

study the practices he used to make these films, which are best expressed through his process of

collage. As I discussed earlier, in the 1950s and 60s, Cornell authored and directed his own

films, often working with a collaborator such as Stan Brakhage, Jordan Lawrence, and Larry

Jordan. Cornell also wrote film scenarios using filmic language that allowed for events to occur

that could only be accomplished via film. The scenarios were to be imagined rather than made

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into actual films. The scenarios include Monsieur Phot (1933), Nebula the Powdered Sugar

Princess (1941; discussed in the previous chapter), and a scenario inspired by the writings and

illustrations of Hans Christian Anderson titled Theatre of Hans Christian Anderson (1945).

In this chapter I survey the multiple ways that time and space perform in each of

Cornell’s relationships to film: the enthusiast, the collector, the original filmmaker, the scenario

writer, and the collage filmmaker, devoting more extensive study to the collage films. Time and

space function in specific yet different ways in each of these relationships, calling for different

kinds of filmic chronotopes. I argue that Cornell’s films operate within Roland Barthes’ third

meaning. Barthes argues that film can move past informational and symbolic meaning to the

third meaning, which fights against interpretation and the visual’s reliance on the verbal.

Cornell’s films exceed linear narratives by focusing on the manipulation of time. As I discuss

below in the section on a transition from still to moving images, film is used to capture or

document events that unfold in front of the camera. It captures contingency. However, through

collage, film can be edited and rearranged to challenge continuity of time and space as well as to

create multiple chronotopes within one collage film. The process of collage thus creates a

heterochrontopic film. Further, as I have addressed above, film is not a deterioration-proof

medium that provides infinite playbacks of performances captured on film. Film fades,

deteriorates, and is vulnerable to damage. Ultimately, I argue that Cornell’s interest in the

obsolete is made highly poignant through his use of collage films because of the material

ephemerality of film itself.

Time and Space in Film

Our experience of time and space transformed with the technological progression from

still to moving images. Cornell was born in 1903, the year that cinema began to move towards

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narrative storytelling with Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). In the same year,

the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company built the first artificially lighted film studio on

14th Street in Manhattan, and Luna Park opened on Coney Island. Cornell played with optical

toys such as zoetropes, kinetoscopes, and mutoscopes, which animated still images, and

stereopticons, which created the illusion of three-dimensional photographs (Hartigan, Navigating

35). Kinetoscopes and Mutoscopes were installed in arcades and vaudeville theatres in the late

1800s with huge popularity. Viewers would drop a coin, look through a single lens, and rotate a

handle that moved still images so they appeared to be in motion. Coming of age during the

transition from still image to the moving image clearly had an impact on Cornell’s understanding

of the functions and possibilities of time and space in film.

Back in 1877-1878, Eadweard Muybridge applied ideas of persistence of vision to

photography. He is famous for his use of multiple cameras to take sequential shots of a running

horse to prove that at some point all of the horse’s legs were off of the ground. He made the

Zoopraxiscope, which was a glass disk on which individual images were copied from his

photographs via paint. He projected the disk in rotation, creating the illusion of continuous

movement. He is quoted, “I am experimenting upon an instrument that does for the Eye what the

phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion” (qtd.

in Wood 170).

A few years later, Étienne-Jules Marey worked with sequential photography, which he

referred to as chronophotography. He recorded successive movements on a single glass plate.

Gaby Wood describes the effect: “A beautiful ghostly sequence, as if the person in the picture

were a spring, slowly being pulled apart across the frame” (171). Marey moved from glass plates

to celluloid film. He was interested in the movement of the human body and used a camera to

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break down human movements into what looked like mechanical segments in order to “see what

the naked eye couldn’t” (Wood 174). The films were viewed as stills though they are indeed

images of sequential movement.

Edison and the Lumière brothers made the earliest films that were for entertainment

purposes. By the early 1900s films were being projected at vaudeville theatres as novelties in

between live performance acts and later in storefront theatres or Nickelodeons, which were

dedicated to film projection. To see the cinema progress from optical toys, to moving image

machines such as the Kinetoscope, to projected moving images would have been a kind of magic

for Cornell. The process was a perfect blending of science and magic. When animation through

the movement of sequential photographs was introduced, it brought with it, “A whole new range

of monstrous or magical possibilities” (Wood 175). People flocked to movie houses to

experience the magic of the moving image.

In a dark theatre strangers crammed together to watch individual images move through a

projector that created the illusion of movement. The new motion pictures were a novelty to

experience. It was a place to take the kids to see, to take a date, to slip into after work or during a

lunch break. Everyday time was suspended as audiences entered the theatre and experienced a

new entertainment form that functioned on the basis of manipulating time. It allowed the

audience to live temporarily in an imaginary world whether it was the past, present, or future.

Film thus challenges an audience’s understandings of past and present. As Doanne

argues, film inherently exists in multiple temporalities. Film archives time; paradoxically, it

archives the contingent. Audiences understand that what they see on film has already happened,

but they are seeing it in their present. For Doanne, there is the “mechanical” temporality, which

is the linear running of the film through the apparatus. There is the “temporality of the diegesis,”

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which refers to the way in which time is organized in the image. Not only could audiences travel

via the screen to the past or future for the length of the film, but time could be condensed or

expanded, and films could move between past, present, and future. Finally, there is the

temporality of reception, which includes the temporality (and spatiality) spectators experienced

while viewing the film.

People had to learn how to read--or experience--time in films. Cinema and its

predecessor, photography, along with other new technologies such as phonography and typing,

were all emerging technologies that recorded reality, which linked them to science and

objectivity rather than subjective representations of art. This put cinema in a precarious position.

While film was thought to be a tool to record reality, it was also used by artists to make fictional

stories that manipulated reality. In other words, like the new archival practices I discussed in

Chapter Five, it was used precisely for what it was used to fight against: ambiguity and

subjectivity.

Robert B. Ray explores the cultural and perceptual training involved in reading moving

images. Writing during the silent film era, Boris Eikhenbaum suggested that we learn how to

read films, to make sense from one clip to another, with inner speech, which means that we

create a narrative in our heads that connects separate shots (Ray 33). Paul Willemen explains

that we translate visuals into our dominant meaning system, language, in an attempt to rid visuals

of ambiguity (Ray 33). Therefore, in early cinema, many silent filmmakers relied on structures

and formulas that triggered readymade inner speech. Readymade inner speech used stock

characters, actions, and storylines. For example, villains had moustaches and squinty eyes and

heroines had petticoats and blonde hair; there was a chase scene, a lover’s meeting, the stroll, the

rendezvous, the murder, the deathbed vigil, etc. These actions and characters provided what

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Roland Barthes describes as “a code of actions [that] principally determines the readability of the

text” (qtd. in Ray 35). Each of these generic formulas operated within a particular chronotope,

causing the audience to have particular expectations of actions, plots, and characters within each

film.

Ray explains that in the early 1900s most films were made using theatrical conventions:

the action was filmed twelve feet away, which showed the actors in a full shot, much like

watching them on a stage. Films were special features at vaudeville performances and were

often travel films and one-point gags. As the demand for new films grew, narrative plots

replaced vaudeville turns. Audiences wanted stories told through the images. Chase films, which

were easy to follow visually, achieved this early. Chase films came with various readymade plot

lines, action sequences, and shot set-ups that directors could include in their films to achieve that

particular genre efficiently. Other popular genres were melodramas and comedies. Sound also

contributed to the ways people read early films. Some films came with scores to be played along

with the film. Full orchestras and organs were installed in some theatres. Machines that could

produce sounds of applause, crying babies, gunshots, marching feet, and animal noises were

installed. When synchronized sound was introduced to cinema these techniques were not

abandoned. Instead, every component of the film was grounded in a particular genre chronotope.

Cornell’s collage films borrowed material from these genre films, but rearranged them into

strange chronotopicities, explored more fully below.

Cornell was attracted to the magical possibilities through the manipulation of time and

space the new medium of film offered. Later, he would become interested in the manipulation of

the materiality of film to further manipulate time and space. However, Cornell was also attracted

to the qualities of pre-cinematic devices with their illusions and wonder. Often, with these

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devices the viewer was also the operator and could manipulate how he or she viewed the images.

The viewer had an intimate relationship with the images viewed due to the size of the devices,

the space between viewer and device, and the interaction between the two. Combined, pre-

cinematic devices and film offer multiple and complex possibilities to manipulate time and

space, to mix, re-mix, and rearrange chronological sequences to create a sense of mystery and a

hint of magic for the viewer.

Cornell as Film Enthusiast

Hartigan provides important details about Cornell’s cinema going (Navigating 41-50). As

an adult, Cornell went to the cinema on nearly a daily basis for entertainment and escape from

his daily life. He read technical histories of the film industry as well as fan magazines. Cornell’s

taste in film was typical of his time. He liked movies such as D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms

(1919). Broken Blossoms stars the ingénue, Lillian Gish, who escapes an abusive father and finds

shelter with a Chinese man who falls in love with her. When the father discovers her

whereabouts he tracks her down and kills her. When her friend finds her dead he builds a shrine

and takes his own life.

The movie houses in New York occasionally screened foreign films that Cornell made a

point to see such as Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920), which tells the story of “the favorite slave

girl” of a tyrant who falls in love with a cloth merchant, which puts her life in danger. He also

saw Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Menilmontant (1926), which tells the tragic story of two sisters, and Carl

Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). These films were significant for Cornell

because the cinematography was so inventive.

Hartigan explains that these filmmakers placed more importance on image over narrative.

These directors were more interested in the experience of emotion and the poetic nature of film

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rather than narrative structure and generic readability. American D. W. Griffith transformed

cinema by telling stories and manipulating visual images. He split up scenes into fragments that

could be reassembled for emotional and dramatic potency. He emphasized images through

precise framing and juxtaposing images and the speed with which they were edited. The

“Lubitsch effect” was characterized by a compression of ideas and situations into single shots or

brief scenes allowing the audience to interpret meaning themselves. Dimitri Kirsanoff’s

Menilmontant (1926) used sophisticated techniques of montage, hand-held shots,

superimpositions, and dynamic shots and angles. Hartigan says, “Kirsanoff deleted explanatory

intertitles and used montage, superimposition, and hand-held camera shots to create a purely

image-based, poetic experience” (Navigating 24). Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is filmed

almost entirely in close-ups to get the emotional and psychological state of Joan; severe lighting

and angles are also used. Hartigan continues, “Dreyer’s approach to photography elevated

unconventional angles and close-ups of faces-a hallmark of silent films-to new expressive

heights” (Navigating 24).

In the early thirties Cornell attended film programs that Levy’s Film Society offered.

The programs were very eclectic and “encapsulate[s] his exposure to the period’s multivalent

testing of the medium” (Hartigan, Navigating 68). Many filmmakers experimented with

montage and superimposition. Their films challenged the popular film with its fixed meanings

and instead used filmic techniques that encourage the possibilities of complexities and

ambiguities that would prove to be so influential to Cornell’s work.

Cornell as Film Collector

By the mid 1930s, Cornell bought a projector and began collecting films. Owning a

projector meant that Cornell could screen films in the privacy of his own home and that he could

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watch them at his convenience and as often as he pleased. Cornell was his brother, Robert’s,

caretaker, a role that he played until Robert’s death in 1965. Robert was born with cerebral

palsy. After attending boarding school, Cornell moved home, where he would watch over his

brother at night, washing him, feeding him, and keeping him company.

Cornell was dedicated to entertaining his younger brother. The brothers shared a deep

interest in art and film. The brothers had nightly film screenings, watching everything from

George Méliès’s trick films to Hollywood classics. The brothers would rescreen their favorites

over and over. With the repetitiveness of viewing the same films, they noticed different things

and read new meanings into scenes they had seen many times before. From the anticipation and

excitement of picking the nightly films, the Cornell brothers’ film screenings were a deeply

personal experience for them. This experience was very intimate from the minute movements of

reeling the film through the projector to the two of them sitting together to watch the projected

films.

Collecting and preserving or “saving” films from obsolescence was also important to

Cornell. Hartigan explains that at some point after 1931 Cornell realized that the early silent

films he loved were in danger of obsolescence and so he began collecting them. By 1940 he was

involved in an international network of film buffs and scholars who were committed to the

preservation of films (Hartigan, Navigating 68). He acquired films from other collectors as well

as from junkshops and flea markets. He kept them archived in his personal collection, and every

once in a while screened the films. His collection was admired by international film collectors

and critics. However, he rarely shared public screenings of his collection. Cornell gave his

collection to the Anthology Film Archives in 1969. Sitney explains that the Archives made a

catalogue explaining which films were complete, which were able to be projected, and which

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were too damaged to be projected. After Cornell died and the Archives began going back

through his collection they realized that many of the films they had originally presumed to be

fragmentary were actually incomplete collage films (87).

His personal collection gradually became substantial and included science and nature

documentaries, goofy newsreels and exotic travelogues, early cartoons, slapsticks and

melodramas. He also owned several works by Méliès and Feuillade (Sitney 72). He was

particularly drawn to early French trick films. Cornell said that he admired, “their release, their

escape, their flight, their defiance of the limitations of the physical world: their amiability; the

subtler sense of light and air” (qtd. in Sitney 73).

Georges Méliès was an important figure for Cornell. Méliès was a magician before he

became a filmmaker. He began his conjuring shows with the famous “Vanishing Lady” and other

tricks including a body chasing after its head and an animated skeleton. Méliès often ended the

performance with a magic lantern show. The Lumière brothers rented a workshop on the second

floor of Méliès’s theatre and began constructing a device to project moving images. And on the

famous day of December 28, 1895, Méliès was in attendance when the Lumière brothers

projected the train pulling in to the station, which caused many audience members to run or duck

in shock and horror of the approaching train. The next year Méliès traveled to London to buy his

own projector and by the following year began making his own films. He made 500 films

between 1896 and 1912 (Wood 187).

What distinguished Méliès from other filmmakers was that he saw the possibilities that

film offered were connected to conjuring. Gaby Wood explains, “In his own movies at least, the

camera would never tell the truth” (176). Wood continues, “He immediately saw it as an

extension of what he did at the theatre: not just another trick in his bag, but a way of bringing

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illusions to life in a way that had previously been impossible” (184) with filmic techniques such

as fade-in and –out, overlapping dissolve, and stop-motion photography. He combined these

cinematic techniques with live stage magic. Méliès “made the human body do impossible things,

and proved how mechanical or puppet-like our celluloid selves could be” (Wood 176). He used

these techniques in his films to achieve disappearance, dismemberment of body parts,

transformation, and animating inanimate objects.

Méliès made a film adaptation of Pygmalion (1898). In it a sculpture works on the statue

of a woman who suddenly comes to life. A real woman nearly identical to the statue stands in an

identical pose. She begins to move around the studio, taking various classical poses as the

sculpture watches in disbelief. They play a game of cat and mouse as the sculpture reaches for

the woman at the moment she disappears and reappears across the room. After taunting the

sculpture she returns to her pose and turns back into stone. Wood argues that this film was

Méliès’ story of cinema itself: “what was still comes to life” (189).

Méliès is most famous for A Trip to the Moon (1902), which came to be admired by the

surrealists. In Artificially Arranged Scenes, John Frazer argues that Méliès’s stop-substitution

was, “entirely dependent on the ability of the camera to interrupt and reconstruct time” (193).

He blurred stage magic and film magic in The Vanishing Lady (1896). In the film, Méliès enters

the stage with a woman. He places a newspaper on the floor, sets a chair on top of the paper,

gestures to the woman to sit down, and covers her with a cloth. When he removes the cloth the

woman is gone. Suddenly, a skeleton appears in the woman’s place. Frazer points out that up

until the skeleton the trick is a theatrical illusion (the woman exits through a trap door).

However, the appearance of the skeleton marks the transition from the stage to the screen

because the skeleton is made using his stop-substitution technique. Both of these films deal with

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making the inanimate animate as well as appearing and disappearing women. Jodi Hauptman

argues that through the combination of cinematic techniques and live magic, Méliès exerted his

control over the human body (92-93).

Méliès’s blending of science and visual magic was inspiring to Cornell as was his

manipulation of time in his films. Méliès was credited for being the “father of narrative film,”

however his narratives dealt with the fantastical and the magical. He used film to experiment

with ways that the medium itself can transform and transcend our understanding of time. His use

of fades, stop-motion, layering, and juxtaposition are techniques that created an experience of

time that is different from our traditional and everyday understanding of time. The impossible

becomes possible in Méliès’s cinema. People and objects can disappear and reappear at the drop

of a hat; objects can transform before our eyes. He used the form and all of its possibilities and

limitations to experiment with new and alternative modes of representation that embraced

whimsy and the poetic. Additionally, Méliès used film to capture illusions or tricks of

vision/perception, i.e. making static images move, which is the trick of cinema itself. It is

temporal paradox: film is composed of hundreds of still photographs, but when run through a

projector they become animated. In the Mark Stokes film Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991),

Cornell is quoted as writing in his journal, “Perhaps the definition of a box could be as a kind of

forgotten game, a philosophical toy of the Victorian era with poetic or magical moving parts.”

Like the pre-cinematic optical toys, Méliès’s films function as little trick boxes that exploit

film’s illusion of movement. Hauptman explains that through Méliès, Cornell discovered that,

“film need not obey the laws of empirical reality, as his predecessors had supposed, because film

was in some sense a separate reality with structural laws of its own” (93). Through studying

Méliès’ techniques, Cornell learned that he could use film to upset traditional readable filmic

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chronotopes. Film could operate within its own set of rules. Film could challenge received

understandings of space and time, allowing the filmmaker to work within a chronotope specific

to the materiality of film and the potentials, limitations, and manipulations specific to it as a

medium.

Cornell as Filmmaker

In the 1950s Cornell began directing films and working in collaboration with Stan

Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan. The nature of these collaborations ranged from

Brakhage following detailed instructions from Cornell to photograph the El film to Burckhardt

claiming that the work was a collaboration split sixty-forty between the artists. In the original

films Cornell never operated the camera himself. Rather, he had Brakhage, Burckhardt, or

Jordan as his cinematographer, giving them copious notes on how and what to film.

Time and space operate differently in Cornell’s original films than they do in his collage

films, which I focus on in this chapter, because he is working within a different chronotope that

allows for different kinds of events to occur. I discussed Cornell’s original films as performance

of memory in Chapter Two and as archives of the ephemeral in Chapter Five.

Film Scenarios

Cornell wrote three film scenarios, two of which were published, one in Dance Index, the

other in Julien Levy’s Surrealism (1936). I have discussed Nebula: The Powdered Sugar

Princess (1941) in detail in Chapter Five. Like closet dramas, the scenarios were to be read and

imagined, not to be literally filmed. In his scenarios Cornell drew on stereopticon images,

daguerreotypes, and other still images of the past as beginning points for his imagination to

create moving images. Obsolete technology inspires Cornell to write scenarios that would be

imagined as filmic rather than fixed images of the past

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The Collage Films

Although the exact date is unknown, at some point in the 1930s, in order to vary the film

screenings for his brother and himself, Cornell began altering films in his collection. He added

scenes or changed endings of films to create a new and surprising endings. This technique

originally used for personal entertainment became the basis for his practice as a filmmaker of

collage films. In her online essay, “A Slot Machine for the Solitaries: On Joseph Cornell’s

Films,” Imogen Smith explains that in 1936 Cornell came across a warehouse in New Jersey that

was selling off old film reels, which most people bought to melt down for silver nitrate. Instead

of melting the films down, Cornell recycled the footage and used it to make found footage

collage films. In his collage films Cornell works intimately with found footage to manipulate or

illuminate spatial and temporal dimensions. Once he found old films, he deconstructed them, cut

them apart, rearranged them, and reassembled them to create new narratives or even non-

narratives. Hauptman notes:

Cornell ignores strict chronology, freely mixing subjects from different contexts,
countries, epochs, comfortably placing living and long-dead figures side by side. By
joining them inside his museum--a storehouse for monuments to long-gone eras--Cornell
imposes a certain temporal organization onto his subjects: he sends them, together, into
the past . . . . (17)

He manipulates time and space from film that already has manipulated time and space. He

rearranges someone else’s rearrangement of time and space and makes his own where the

expectation of what can occur is drastically different than in the original. Breton explains that

collage works by “disorienting us in our memory by depriving us a frame of reference” (177).

The collaging chronotope is malleable and characterized by mutability of time and space. The

collage artist has the ability to create ruptures where continuity previously existed as well

unexpected associations between collaged materials.

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Cornell’s first and perhaps the first collage film, Rose Hobart (1936), was compiled from

scenes from the 1931 jungle drama, Universal Picture’s East of Borneo. He screened Rose

Hobart at the Julien Levy Gallery along with Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926) and

Man Ray’s L’Étoile de Mer (1928). Salvador Dali, who was in attendance along with other

European Surrealists, became enraged and exclaimed, “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my

unconscious mind!” (Levy 231). After that moment, Cornell very rarely screened his films for

public audiences but did show them privately. He would show his films at the New York Public

Library around Christmas time to the staff of the Picture Collection.

Cornell created the collage film by cutting, rearranging, and reassembling clips from East

of Borneo (1931), as well as adding sequences from scientific documentaries from his personal

film collection. Melford’s East of Borneo told the story of a woman, Linda (played by Rose

Hobart), who travels to the made-up island of Marudu to find her husband. Her husband is a

physician who is working for the kingdom’s evil prince. The prince claims to be a descendent of

the island’s volcano. The physician has become a drunk because he believes that his wife has

been unfaithful to him with the prince. The prince attempts to seduce Linda as the volcano is

about to erupt, at which point Linda shoots the prince. Then husband and wife return home,

happily, and the volcano destroys the island.

The film is a cheaply made B film with a poorly constructed volcano and “an assortment

of jungle terrors” (Sitney 75), including crocodiles, a python, and a panther. Additionally, the

acting is typical of a B movie, that is, overly dramatic without a storyline to match the level of

dramatic facial expressions. Sitney explains, “Hobart can only make quick, nervous gestures

with her hands and quickly shift her expression from terror to laughter at herself when she see

that her fright is unfounded” (75).

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B films were very popular in the 1930s as studios needed revenue and there was a high

demand for quick turnover of new pictures. Usually, B films were put on a double bill with a big

budget movie with stars, high production value, and decent scripts. B movies on the other hand

were cheaply made with pre-existing sets, B list actors, and formulaic plots, and fit into an easily

identifiable genre. The Jungle film was a popular genre for B films with stereotypical plot lines

and characters. As Eikhenbaum would say, East of Borneo triggers readymade inner speech with

its predictable storyline and generic actions.

East of Borneo’s lead actress, Rose Hobart, was the subject of Cornell’s film. Cornell’s

film is his attempt to save the actress from the B film jungle chronotope. He does this by

extracting her from the film and putting her into a new chronotope that uses the poetic fragments

or “passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to

evoke an ideal world of beauty” (Sitney 73) to create a new portrait of the star.

Susan Sontag, one of Cornell’s friends, called for an erotics of art. In Against

Interpretation, she argues, “Real art has the ability to make us nervous. By reducing the work of

art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art

manageable, conformable” (8). Though Against Interpretation was written thirty years after

Rose Hobart was made, the film does what Sontag calls for. Cornell condensed and re-edited the

seventy-minute film into a twenty-minute short film. He extracted scenes that she was in as well

as certain action sequences and discarded the rest of the film, effectively doing away with the

“readability of the film” or the readymade inner speech of the jungle film with its villain,

heroine, challenge, and happy ending for the good and bad ending for the evil.

The action or plot of Rose Hobart revolves around an impending eclipse. The film

begins with music, Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil 78 RPM recording. The first image is of a

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crowd looking skyward. Cornell mixes characters’ responses to personal interactions with

responses to natural phenomena. As a result we see Hobart repeating poses, facial expressions,

movements, and interactions throughout the entire piece. She often appears looking upward or

off-screen. Often her actions don’t match up with the action that accompanies her. She looks

worried and then laughs at herself. Cuts in the film cause her to appear suddenly in a similar

stance, but in an evening dress rather than equestrian riding clothes. One of the most beautiful

images of the film is when she walks in slow motion down a long hallway directly toward the

camera. She stands behind airy curtains then suddenly appears in the same point of the film

frame, but in a different room, in a different costume, arguing with the prince. She looks

worriedly at the sky, then crocodiles, then monkeys, and finally at the volcano.

Tension in the film escalates as a solar eclipse occurs and suddenly the sun seems to fall

from the sky to a puddle, which Rose overlooks. The film cuts to the sky and the sun, then cuts

to Rose looking upward and then talking with her husband. It cuts back to the sky. Suddenly,

Rose is again with the prince. She looks upward and to her husband, and the film cuts back to her

and the prince. Cut to the prince lying down and Rose looking coldly at him. Cut to Rose in her

overcoat, then her evening gown. Then the sun is eclipsed. Cut to the sun appearing to fall from

the sky into a puddle. The puddle ripples. Cut to Rose in her evening dress looking down sadly.

End of film.

Hobart is cut out of East of Borneo (1931), where the chronotope requires that the female

lead travel to the jungle of Borneo to search for her husband, be challenged by jungle animals, be

seduced by an evil prince, and live happily every after. She is pasted into Cornell's collage

chronotope where jungle and scientific documentary genres are combined, and narrative and

readymade inner speech are abandoned in favor of poetic expression. Cornell’s film is not only

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an attempt to “save” the actress from the jungle chronotope, but an attempt at creating images

that elicit Barthes’ third meaning, which he describes: “the epitome of a counter-narrative;

disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a

quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences and syntagms (technical or

narrative)- an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet ‘true’” (63). The third

meaning frees the visual from the verbal. It emanates from moments that are fleeting, but prick

us or stick with us. The climax, the eclipse, is an example. The editing trick of the eclipse is

also reminiscent of Méliès. The sun is small in the sky as it is eclipsed. After the eclipse passes

the film cuts to an image of a glass sphere (the same size as the sun in the previous sequence)

falling through the sky and landing in a puddle. Cornell creates the effect through montage. The

sun has fallen from the sky and landed just before Rose in a puddle rippling in slow motion.

For Rose Hobart (1936), the third meaning arrives in the editing. Cornell exerted control

over the human body as did Méliès; however, he exerted his control in Rose Hobart through his

editing process. He controlled how the audience perceived Hobart through editing her gestures,

facial expressions, speed of movement, and juxtapositions of her action in different scenes.

Hauptman notes, “By forcing the actress to speak with her body rather than with her voice,

Cornell transports Rose into the past and revives her as a silent diva” (99). He deconstructed a

film that had little artistic merit, extracted the parts that reminded him of the beauty of silent

film, and collaged them together on the basis of a vertical reading or filmic moments. He also

stripped away dialogue and added mood music, and filtered the film through deep blue glass. He

screened the film at MOMA running the projector at a slow speed (the speed silent films were

projected though the original film, East of Borneo, was a talkie and talking films were projected

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at a faster speed). Liotta describes the effect in a pamphlet for an exhibition of Cornell’s films:

Cornell “transforms its banality into an oneiric mystery.”

For years Rose Hobart was thought to be his only collage film. However, in 1968

Cornell gave his collaborator/assistant Jordan Lawrence specific instructions to finish a series of

three films he began in the 1930s, which together make The Children’s Trilogy: Cotillion, The

Children’s Party, and Midnight Party. These three films are all collaged from the same found

footage including shots of ballerinas, vaudeville acts, a children’s party, circus acts such as

trapeze artists and animal acts, and scientific footage.

The first film of the trilogy, Cotillion, opens with an upside down and backwards title,

“The End.” A curtain opens to reveal the heavens and a young boy peering out of frame as if up

to the heavens. Personified constellations appear (Orion, the Bear). Then we arrive at a

children’s party with vaudeville performers and children watching happily. The children’s party

is spliced with different types of performers such as vaudeville performers, tightrope walkers,

acrobats, animals, a chorus line, and child dancers. Freeze frames are used to capture the

children’s reactions to the performances. The children look directly at the camera. They

perform for it by smiling and laughing; they look surprised, as if the camera caught them off-

guard. The performers, on the other hand, are not aware of the camera. There are two images

that “prick” me. One is a slow-motion shot of a tightrope walker with an umbrella bounding on

the tightrope. The second is a woman swinging mid air, suspended by a rope that she holds in her

mouth juxtaposed with an image of birds flying. The image of the woman seems painful if not

violent, as if she is trying to fly and can only achieve it through pain.

The middle film in the trilogy, Children’s Party, uses almost no footage from the other

two films in the trilogy. The film begins with an observatory. A telescope rotates as a title

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appears but disappears before the audience can read it. By slowing the film down and freezing it

I am able to read the title or prologue: “Photography is the best means of studying the heavens.

Very long exposures are required.” The observatory opens to the heavens, then the film cuts to a

still image of a girl sleeping and holding a baby doll. The film cuts to an animated comet

crossing the sky and then to another title that vanishes before it can be read, “A speed maniac in

a world of speedsters,--a comet caught in the act.” The comet fades into the heavens and a distant

moon appears. Back in the observatory (presumably) gears rotate at a rapid pace and the film

cuts to a girl with long hair on a white horse (Lady Godiva) in a dark and enchanted landscape

surrounded by stars, trees, and a distant castle on a hill. The film cuts to get a close-up of the girl

looking over her shoulder. After a few moments she leads her horse out of the frame.

The third film, The Children’s Party, remixes images from the first film, Cotillion. The

three films of the trilogy share editing strategies such as splicing together images from multiple

sources, repetition, upside down and reverse footage, and freeze frames. Freeze frames are used

to stop the movement of the image as well as freezing time.

The chronotope in The Children’s Trilogy is one in which relationships are made between

unrelated times and spaces through montage. Cornell took what appears to be home movies of

children’s birthday parties, various films of performers, and documentaries of constellations and

wove them together to create an imaginal contiguity. The performers perform for the celebrating

children. Children peer back at us and look through windows to the constellations above. Like

Méliès, Cornell “abandons narrative for association” and mixes whimsical editing of disparate

footage to create a sense of the magical on film. Time and space become fragmented while

simultaneously becoming linked and metaphorically infinite through the incorporation of

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astronomy. The ephemerality of the performers is made infinite by fading into the stars above the

big top.

Cornell mixed still images and moving images. For Barthes, the third meaning is

achieved through extraction and fragmentation, i.e. a still image rather than a film in movement.

He explains, “The centre of gravity of the film is not between shots, but inside the shot. It is not a

specimen chemically extracted from the substance of the film, but rather the trace of a superior

distribution of traits of which the film as experienced in its animated flow would give no more

than one text among others” (67). Cornell invites Barthes’ third meaning by incorporating still

photographs that cause the image to pause for a few moments before giving way to movement.

The photographs come across as moments to which Cornell wants us to pay particular attention,

moments that perhaps prick him. Additionally, the stills disrupt the flow of time and allow for

vertical readings. Barthes continues: “The still, by instituting a reading that is at once

instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time (which is only an operational time); it teaches us

how to dissociate the technical constraint from what is the specific filmic and which is the

‘indescribable’ meaning” (68). Within a collage film that already disrupts traditional conceptions

of time, Cornell adds in a technological wink that time can be manipulated further not only by

rearranging sequences, but also by manipulating the collaged sequences themselves. The still

images draw attention to the deterioration or damage to the film occurring though the image is

not moving. The audience can still see the scratches though the image remains “still.” The

image is still changing, fading, disappearing.

The Children’s Trilogy and Rose Hobart are examples of how Cornell embraced the

filmic collage chronotope to create heterochronotope films by splicing together films from

different genres that operated by their own rules of time and space.

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Cornell’s Collage Process

Most of Cornell’s collage work happened in his studio, which he used as an editing room.

He used techniques such as cutting and splicing, which means to feed film through a viewer, find

the frame to cut, cut the film, scrape the silver nitrate off of the edge, apply glue, and attach the

strip to another strip of film. As he cut and spliced, he often rearranged scenes, included clips

from multiple sources, reversed and flipped the film, stripped away the dialogue, slowed the film

down, and tinted the film.

For example in By Night With Torch and Spear (1930s), we see an upside down steel

factory. The images are beautiful and disorienting. Images move both backwards and upside

down. Sparks from the steel fly upside down and backward, making them look like stars or

sparkly rain. Titles and typed narration appear backward. The materiality of film allows Cornell

to manipulate time and space intimately. The films become oneiric and otherworldly through

Cornell’s process of collage. The manipulation of the film takes the viewer out of the linear

narrative of the original films that he took the footage from and into a collage chronotope that

creates routes of narrative escape in favor constellations of associations. Central to his technique,

Cornell leaves in slips, mistakes, and accidents. By leaving in the mistakes that occur during the

collage process, Cornell’s collage films also document contingency just as his original films do.

Sitney speaks of Cornell’s techniques, “Despite its illusion of crudity; the editing is never

haphazard” (76). He goes on to explain that his editing procedures were “unorthodox in the

extreme, and probably incorporated accident as much as deliberation” (76). Manipulating the

film, including projecting it could cause damage resulting in visible deterioration. Sitney notes

that, “While most collectors regard these [accidents] with horror and would prefer to ignore

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them, Cornell made these accidents of deterioration the formal model for his first film” (75).

Leaving in the accidents forces the viewer to remember that the film itself is not permanent.

The Heterochronotopicity of Cornell’s Collage Films

We experience the past, present, and future simultaneously and constantly. Time is not

clean and linear, but confused and circuitous. Cornell is known for dreaming and reverie and

being taken with people and arts of eras that passed before he was born or when he was young.

He experienced his life as multi-temporal and so made films that challenge the linear notion of

time and space and make it impossible to experience the past, present, and future as distinct.

Instead they flow into one another and affect each other. Artist Stan Douglas refers to this

multiple consciousness as “temporal polyphony” (Birnbaum 91).

Though he is better known for his boxes and although he rarely publicly screened his

films, Cornell’s films have been influential for younger experimental filmmakers and praised by

film critics. They were revolutionary in that they dealt with issues of source material,

authorship, ambiguous use of time and space, and narrative structure as well as experimental

techniques that anticipate avant-garde techniques of assemblage. Stan Brakhage, who

collaborated with Cornell in the 1960s said, “I think Cornell’s contribution to the art of film far

exceeds anything he did in any of his boxes or his collages” (qtd. in Rowin). In “Tokens and

Traces of Chance: Thoughts on the Cinema of Joseph Cornell,” Michael Rowin notes, “These

short, almost unassuming films are exercises in pure reverie and wonder, attesting to the

sensibility of a man at once enchanted by the magic of film and entirely aware of its bittersweet

nostalgia.” And finally, Sitney notes Cornell’s influence on future experimental filmmakers:

“Just as Cornell himself was an intuitively brilliant reader of the poets he admired, seeing

complexities and tensions in their expression which could inform his visual dialectics, so these

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(Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and Jonas Mekas) quickly apprehended

hints and directions in Cornell’s films that they could explore on their own” (87).

As I watch Cornell’s films I am met with the same difficult-to-describe feeling that I have

when peering into his tiny three-dimensional boxes. His films resist interpretation. They fight

against the inner-speech of narrative films and instead evoke moods, emotions, and associations.

It is difficult if not impossible to put the experience of watching Cornell’s films into words. And

perhaps that was Cornell’s goal, to make films that asked questions about the importance of

meaning making and interpretation. Cornell’s processes of collage allowed him to take films

operating within pre-existing chronotopes with readymade inner-speech and free them from

language. He challenged narrative, the concept of time as chronological, and sense-making

through cutting and splicing found footage based on these motifs, ideas, and associations. As a

result, Cornell developed a model for producing heterochronotopic films, films that have

multiple chronotopes operating simultaneously. This model developed through Cornell’s

practices of filmic collage is central to my project in the following chapter.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: SONG OF THE NIGHINGALE

In this chapter I describe my process of creating a collage film, Song of the Nightingale

(2011). Like Cornell, I acquired obsolete films and used the cut and splice method in order to

make an original film made from pre-existing footage. After studying Cornell’s processes,

techniques, and motifs for creating his collage films, I took cues from each. Song of the

Nightingale draws on Joseph Cornell’s collage chronotopes to create an original film that

challenges our notions of memory.

I began by adapting “Maria,” a story by Cornell that concerns the tension between

creation and decay. Cornell’s story is about how nightingales lead short but beautiful lives

because in the midst of their beautiful song they die. The tension between creation and

destruction is central to the nightingale’s existence. Cornell’s story is inspired by Keats’s

romantic "Ode to a Nightingale," which explores themes of mortality, ephemerality, and death or

disappearance inherently tied to beauty.

Rather than searching for films in secondhand stores I looked online for vintage 8mm

films to use for my collage film. I bid on several films on eBay and won three of them including

Camera Magic, a film distributed by Castle Films presenting 1940s photography tricks; Deep

Sea Adventures produced for Castle Film’s Adventures and Animal Movies series from the

1950s, and a film about the Ice Capades called Gay Nineties from the 1940s. These small-format

films were produced for home projection. Much like the Cornell brother’s home viewings,

families would have gathered around for their evening entertainment with these films. And I, like

Cornell, sat in my darkened living room watching these films, looking for moments that struck

me because of their beauty, moments of escape from narrative, and ways to deconstruct and

reconstruct to create my own non-linear collage film. As I watched the films, I took notes on

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specific scenes that intrigued me. Working from these notes, I began to cut the films. I labeled

the clips and hung them with clothespins from the blinds in my living room.

Next, I obtained film editing equipment including a viewer, splicer, and cement. When I

began assembling the film I selected clips one at a time. I did not want to create a narrative from

the found footage that I included. I wanted to create a film that did not rely on readymade inner

speech but evoked moods, associations, and oneiric mystery. So, I took the narratives of the pre-

existing films apart and began to reassemble them. I did want to include motifs Cornell often

incorporated in his work such as birds, women, children, magic, and natural history so I tended

to select clips that focused on these themes. As I pasted them together I would re-wind the next

entire film, re-watch it up to its current point and pick the next section based on visual qualities

that created interesting relationships to the prior clip(s). The result was that the collaged sections

began to converse with each other and/or create interesting juxtapositions.

As the finished film opens, the sound of the film reeling through the projector begins as

Philip Glass’s Metamorphasis 1 fades in. A sepia toned image of hundreds of birds taking flight

towards the sun appears. The image shakes, revealing that the image is a projection of a film.

The shot cuts to a long shot of birds in flight over the ocean and shoreline. It is blurry, out of

focus. The birds are only identifiable by their flapping wings. Women in bathing suits saunter

towards the camera with sly grins. They are overexposed, causing their bodies to fade into their

surroundings. They stop and look into the camera as the image cuts to shadows of birds in flight

on the sand. The film flickers and jumps, revealing a moment of deterioration. Time and repeated

use have damaged the film, leaving scratches and holes in its surface. A close-up shot of a blond

woman blinking and looking at the camera reveals that her head has been doubled through a

camera trick. Perhaps a mirror was used? A child picks up an unidentifiable sea creature from the

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sand and displays it to the camera. An overweight man wearing a formal suit and hat walks

across the screen. He passes behind a tree and disappears. Three women in formal dresses, fur

coats, and hats walk out from the behind the tree in mid conversation and exit the screen. A man

and woman in sequined costumes spin, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise. Their

movements mirror each other. The screen flickers and cuts to a title that reads, “Escape—to the

protection of the deep.” The camera is now underwater tracking fish as they swim about the

algae and coral. Above, a man in a boat holds a spear and looks into the water as the camera

bounces up and down with the waves. Fish flit about underwater, creating moments of light

against the dark background as the sun catches and reflects their scales. Above, two men in a

boat toss fish into the water only for the fish to jump back into their hands and the boat. A

woman in sequins leaps towards a man who catches her and holds her above him as they spin. A

child pokes at a sea creature he has found or trapped on the shore. A woman in a swimsuit sits in

profile with her hand reaching out in front of her. There is a miniature man in the palm of her

hand. She drops her hand and the man is still there. We see that our perception has been tricked.

She laughs and looks toward the camera. The body of a clown is seemingly drawn into existence.

Once he has arms he picks up and takes a bite of a sandwich. He is deeply moved by the taste. A

single baton twirler does a routine for the camera. A caption reads, “The Mirror Trick” as an

unseen person’s hands set up a mirror and old still camera to enable the trick. The baton twirler

is multiplied. Five or six images of the same woman twirling a baton and wearing a sequined

costume rotate around the screen clockwise and counter-clockwise. Deep sea divers follow a

blowfish to show it to the camera, continuously poking it with a stick. The blowfish seems to

have human looking eyes. A stingray slowly glides through the water and makes its way through

fish toward the illuminated surface, and the baton-twirling woman continues her solo dance. The

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image shakes again. The baton twirler tosses her baton and it flies through the air and descends

to the depths of the ocean amongst the fish. A giant octopus twists its enormous arms about. The

film cuts to the multiplied baton twirler catching her baton as if it had only momentarily been

lost and is now returning to her from the depths of the sea. A title appears: “Hook baited to fool

the fishiest eye.” A single female ice skater glides across the ice in all white. She jumps, and

spins, and smiles. As she spins the image cuts to a stingray elegantly floating through the water.

It moves like a bird and ascends toward the sun through thousands of tiny fish. The ice skater

continues her spin, extending her arms and legs to look more and more birdlike. Suddenly her

partner is assisting her in her spin. He embraces her and dips her as if to give her a kiss. But just

before he spins her again she tosses her arms into the air and falls backwards into his arms. Their

routine is over. One of the women who appeared from behind the tree earlier repeats her

movement but something is different. She stops and looks behind her toward the tree. The man in

the suit finally reappears from behind the tree and follows the woman out of frame. A deep sea

diver ascends through the fish toward the sun like the stingray. The tiny fish turn into dozens of

seagulls flying above the water. The screen returns to darkness as the projector sound and piano

music continue for a few seconds before fading out.

Birds turn into fish and female ice-skaters twirl like birds in flight. There is a link made

between the various habitats portrayed: the deep sea, the sky, and a performance space--an ice

rink or stage. Cornell often linked women to birds or other animals and children. Deleuze and

Guattari argue that children, animals, and women are “characters who offer a mode of escape

from fixed signification or static binaries” (Leppanen-Guerra 124). They “Allow escape routes

within the narrative itself, segues into other scenes within the film”(124). Analisa Leppanen-

Guerra says that Cornell often conflates women, children, and animals. Perhaps he not only

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incorporated these beings to offer a mode of escape from the narrative, but also as an escape

from materiality to eternity. Perhaps he uses them to preserve the vanishing. As I was cutting

and splicing together images of women and animals I realized that they in themselves do not

inherently offer escape routes from narratives. Instead the technique of collage creates

opportunities for escape for these characters that are often locked into a specific type of

performance. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that

traditional Hollywood narrative cinema uses conventions that cause women to play inferior roles

to men. They are subject to the “male gaze,” or the object of desire, while male characters drive

the narrative. In collaging found footage I learn how to combine images to create moments,

however short or extended, that challenge readymade inner speech. For example, rather than

baton twirlers catching their batons or ice-skaters landing their double axels, they transform into

seagulls flying in formation or deep sea divers following stingrays. In other words, I learn the

techniques of collage that create moments outside of readable narratives and instead function

within Barthes’ third meaning. And I learn that perhaps by making women, children, and animals

the subjects in his film collages, Cornell was able to free them from their often limited role and

stereotypical performances in traditional film.

Once reassembling was completed I ran the film through an 8mm film projector to watch

my work. As I watched the projected images I noticed something I had not when I ran the films

through the viewer: the images were deteriorating. I saw sections of the film with holes from the

heat of the projector light bulb. The chemical make-up of the film as a whole was deteriorating,

creating images that were grainy and unclear.

In order to screen the film for an audience I needed to have a digital version of the film. I

was taking the film to a conference in San Francisco and it was not possible to bring along the

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film projector. Additionally, I planned to submit the film to online journals, which required

digital files of video. No one accepts 8mm films anymore. Because I didn’t have a converter I

opted to project the film and use my digital video camera to record it. This was no simple task.

The projector that I used was at least fifty years old, and as I was recording the film it would

malfunction, making it necessary to re-wind the film and begin again. The projector would cause

the film to skip, slip, and repeat at times. The transferring of the film to video took several

attempts, and I was never able to get a completely clean run. As I projected and recorded the film

I played music in the background. I wound up having to edit digitally or splice together the first

and second halves of the film because of the projector’s willfulness. Though this editing is not

immediately apparent in the digital image, it is noticeable in the sound. The song is incomplete:

it repeats, skips. It doesn’t sync up. This digital detail is juxtaposed to the mechanical sound of

the projector.

Following Cornell, I chose to leave in the evidence of the messy transference from film to

video, analog to digital. Slips in the footage, deteriorated images, external sound, and the sound

of the projector are all present in the digital version of the film. What Sitney calls “accidents of

deterioration” are inescapable in this process, and rather than attempting to escape them, I chose

to feature them. Cornell embraced these accidents and even used them to create his aesthetic, so I

did as well.

The camera trick footage became particularly significant because it highlighted the tricks

of film in general and collage in particular. Sitney explains, “As an illusionist, the maker of

collages always exposes all his tricks. The synthesis he creates is an ad hoc illusion for the

viewer who wants to experience the transfiguration of substance into something less tangible”

(82). The image of the photographer attaching a mirror to a camera to create the visual tricks

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along with the captions “Mirror Trick” and “Hook Baited to Fool the Fishiest Eye” became ways

for me to acknowledge my process reflexively.

Like Cornell, I used found footage that is already obsolete. I chose footage from the

1940s and 50s that I felt aligned with Cornell’s aesthetic. Many of his collage films incorporate

performers as the subjects (film actresses such as Rose Hobart and circus performers in the

Children’s Trilogy films). The films I chose had performers as their subjects including ice

skaters, deep sea divers, and camera trick performers. My film, through both subject and form,

allowed me to be reflexive. I was able to comment on what I was doing as I was doing it.

I chose footage that was kitschy, which marked my film as “retro” or “vintage.” But in

addition to this quality, it carries five to seven decades of decomposition. That is, the films

themselves have begun deteriorating. They are blurry, tinted with age; some frames have

blemishes or holes. Some of the films are brittle and fragile. I was not just giving these films a

new life. I was acutely aware of the death of a technology as well as decaying film as I

constructed the piece. The presence of obsolescence marks Song of the Nightingale. However, I

transferred the decomposing, collaged film to video and though I had the digital ability to clean

up the film and cover up the mistakes and accidents that occurred during transfer from film to

video, I let the edges show, I left in my mistakes, “accidents of deterioration,” and traces of

obsolescence.

Each time the projector malfunctioned, the film was damaged. I saw that my own

attempt to capture the fleeting was undercut by the attempt to see what one has made eternal,

which inescapably leads to its disappearance. For me, the relationship between recording and

disappearance in film was troubled by digitization and through my option to leave in or edit

away the evidence of deterioration, as well as by the fact that I was essentially using video to

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capture and represent the analog project. However, digital technology wasn’t strictly used as a

representational format or simply as a way to show my project to an audience without an 8mm

projector. I left in clues of digitization such as the unsteadiness of the video camera and the

accompanied sound. In other words, rather than smoothing away the messy materiality of

working with the 8 mm film, digitizing added another layer of traces of its own materiality.

Cornell’s collage films predate other attempts at collage films by avant-garde artists by

thirty years. He was experimenting with the possibilities and restrictions of technology to

explore theoretical and aesthetic issues that were already central to his work. I am not

experimenting with new technology, but combining the digital with obsolete technology. But

even the notion that some technologies are “obsolete” is troubled in my process. Not only are

the viewer, splicer, and projector obsolete to me, they are also new in that I have to learn how to

use them. I am used to using computer software for such endeavors. So, my use of the analog

technology was often ad hoc and inefficient. My unfamiliarity with analog technology is

portrayed through the mistakes that I chose to leave in the digital film.

Like Cornell’s collage films, Song of the Nightingale (2011), intertwines the past and

present. Cornell began making his found footage films in the 1930s. However, the footage that

he used to make his films was already dated. Similarly, I drew from obsolete images to create

my film. Multiple temporalities are experienced simultaneously through the combining of films

from different decades ranging from the 1940s to the 1950s. Even if the viewer did not know that

the films came from different decades it would be evident through the performers’ costumes and

hairstyles. Additionally, all of these films are operating within their own chronotopes including

the ice capades, deep sea

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adventure, and camera trick chronotopes, which all have different characteristics. For example,

the ice capades must take place on an ice rink, must include extravagant costumes, and a story of

love performed between the male and female skaters. The deep sea adventure must take place

under the sea, includes divers in diver gear, and the divers must track elusive deep sea creatures

to capture on film. And, the camera trick chronotope is characterized by defying viewers’

expectations to create a “How’d they do that?” effect for the audience. The camera trick

chronotope at first masks the trick, making it seem like magic is happening before the audience’s

eyes, only to reveal the secret and thus satisfy the audience’s curiosity. By combining each of

these genre-specific chronotopes the viewer experiences heterochronopicity, meaning they

experience multiple chronotopes simultaneously.

Further, in Song of the Nightingale the process of digitization adds another level of

chronotopicity. For example, the digitization process is revealed through accidents that occurred

during the transferring process such as the camera moving revealing that we are watching a

recording of an analog projection, and accidental sounds that occur in the recording that I chose

not to edit out, as well as the digitized editing of originally analog footage such as fade-ins and

fade-outs. The decision to digitally manipulate some footage while leaving in some mistakes

highlights the potentials and limitations created by each technology. So, in a sense each

technology provides its own chronotope, which interact through the digitizing process.

Cornell’s films escape stable meaning. They exist somewhere else. Moments prick me,

give me shivers, and stick with me: Rose Hobart walking toward me in slow motion down a long

corridor with her dress billowing in the wind. A tightrope walker’s feet bouncing in slow motion.

I am left with moments that I can identify, but my description fails.

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Instead I try to respond creatively by embodying Cornell’s practices of collage.

Additionally, I try to create a piece that is similar in mood to Cornell’s collage films: oneiric,

otherworldly, magical, whimsical, and a little unsettling. I made a number of significant

discoveries through my process. This project allowed me to manipulate time and space through

cutting, splicing, and re-mixing multiple films. The processes of collaging film together made

me realize that the processes itself allows not only the potential for rearranging time within film,

but also for creating narrative escape that contributes to films that foster Barthes’ third meaning.

Further, creating Song of the Nightingale gave me the opportunity to create my own temporal

polyphony through collaging films from different decades and through the digitation process.

And finally, I find that film itself is an ephemeral medium and the attempt to capture the

ephemeral present is full of contingency and immediately slips into the past. To make it present,

i.e. to watch it, inevitably contributes to its deterioration. Film, as a medium, contributes to

Cornell’s complex chronotope of métaphysique d’éphemera.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ASSEMBLAGE CHRONOTOPE

To create his work Cornell performed in multiple chronotopes, constantly wandering,

archiving, and collaging. Each of these performances produced different ways of being in the

world, orienting to time and space, and creative insights and output. Ultimately, Cornell brought

together all of these performances to create assemblage art.

In this chapter I focus on the assemblage chronotope. I begin by reviewing various

conceptualizations of assemblage. Then I discuss how my understanding of the performance of

assemblage engages the wandering, archiving, and collaging chronotopes. Next I turn my

discussion to a description of my own assemblage, the theatrical performance Métaphysique

d’Éphemera (2011). I describe the assemblage chronotope’s quality of openendedness by

discussing a restaging of Métaphysique d’Éphemera three years after the first staging. Finally, I

theorize assembled performance as re-assemblage and re-re-assemblage. To conclude I discuss

the significance of using the method of assemblage to produce live performance.

Theorizing Assemblage

Traditionally, an assemblage artist collects found or ready-made objects and places them

in relation to each other within a three-dimensional space. Assemblage differs from collage in

that it extends the two-dimensional plane of collage to an environment within three-dimensional

space. This distinction between collage and assemblage draws our attention to the work of art,

but not the process of its making.

I understand assemblage as an activity, performed within a chronotope that also

assembles the wandering, archiving, and collaging chronotopes. I also understand assemblage as

a method that can be used for the creation of creative and scholarly projects. My

conceptualization of assemblage insists that it is heterochronotopic. The assemblage artist moves

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among the wandering, archiving, and collaging chronotopes and sometimes operates

simultaneously within more than one of them to create a piece of work.

Assemblage is also heterochronotopic because although the assemblage chronotope fixes

and displays objects in a specific artwork, it is not meant to stabilize them within space and time.

The simultaneity of times (the past via the objects that have been taken from their prior contexts,

the present via the current piece of artwork, and the future via the potential for creative

extensions and responses) is fundamental in the assemblage chronotope. The spectator is always

aware that the objects that make up the assembled artwork originally existed in entirely different

contexts. When they are re-purposed to create an assemblage, they create new meanings while

always carrying traces, at least partially, of their pasts.

While the objects come together to create a piece of art and work together to create a

particular aesthetic, they remain independent. In New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory

and Social Complexity, Manuel DeLanda explains, “Assemblages are made up of parts which are

self-subsistent and articulated by relations of exteriority, so that a part may be detached and

made a component of another assemblage” (18). The relationships created by the placement of

the objects evoke multiple, different, and unexpected associations for the audience. Because

decontextualized objects are recontextualized within an assemblage, the work does not appear

entirely unified, nor is unity a goal of the assemblage artist.

The assemblage chronotope is open to change or “unfinalizable.” Assemblage leaves

open the possibility for alternatives or extensions of works of art. The assemblage chronotope

values collaboration between artists and sharing or borrowing creative and intellectual property,

and the recycling and remixing of materials.

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One does not have to be a trained artist to work within the assemblage chronotope.

Assemblage art is a set of practices that sees the past not as nostalgic or sacred, but as a place for

creative interpretation and production. Additionally, assemblage art reveals rather than conceals

its process thus demonstrating that process in a way that can be repeated by other artists.

Cornell’s boxes demonstrate that we can lift images and objects out of one context and place

them into new contexts to make new ideas. Cornell’s use of found, everyday materials and

placement of them into a box invites me to do the same.

Currently, artists are exploring the archive via digital media. In Postproduction, Nicolas

Bourriaud argues that DJ culture operates by assembling pre-existing digital audio texts and

images in order to radicalize decontextualization. He calls this type of art “postproduction,”

offering that “an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of

preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by

others or available cultural products” (13). Though contemporary digital artists have politicized

this move through challenging questions of authorship and ownership of images, their techniques

are drawn from traditions of assemblage art that predate the digital era. Cornell was in this sense

ahead of his time; his practices of assemblage anticipated assemblage practices to come with the

production of digital technologies.

Assemblage Performance

Performance studies scholar Amy Kilgard offers a paradigm of performance as collage.

She explains that components of performance have a double function:

Doubleness functions in several distinct ways in thinking about performances as

collage. For example, components of performance often have distinct lives outside of the
performances. When we use the elements as props, costumes, movement sequences, or
texts, they each bear traces of their previous worlds in the performance. Each

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performance choice we make for a staged work carries with it its history in a world or
worlds outside the performance. And we, as critics and audience members, carry our
histories with these choices/fragments into the performance too. (7)

I extend Kilgard’s paradigm to consider performance as assemblage. Audiences gather for an

event, bringing their pasts and a multiplicity of perspectives with them, while never creating a

singular understanding, and finally disperse taking traces of the performance with them for the

potential of future productions. Performance allows a rich mixture of chronotopes because events

also carry their own chronotopicity, framed within which the audience sees the multiple

chronotopes unfolding within the artwork before them. The audience experiences the

simultaneity of the chronotopes in motion as multiple temporalities intersect with the present.

Performance guided by assemblage maximizes this heterochronopicity.

Live performance has its own chronotopicity. Theatrical performance chronotopes may

consist of many theatrical conventions with which we are familiar, such as particular spatial and

temporal demarcations. For example, in many genres of live performance the audience

understands how to behave when they enter the theatre by taking their seats, turning off their

cell-phones, and not talking as the lights dim. Audiences recognize that they are expected to

suspend their disbelief and use particular meaning making structures based on the framing of the

performance. Some performance practitioners have challenged and critiqued these conventions.

For example, Bertolt Brecht devised techniques of alienation to challenge the passive interpretive

role of the audience. Rather than linear narrative structures, Brecht worked within different

chronotopes; he utilized montages of episodic scenes, which challenged the audience to interpret

the meaning created in the juxtaposition of the scenes. In Brecht’s Epic Theatre, audience

members simultaneously participated in the time/space of theatrical performance while

maintaining a critical self-awareness. So, while there are traditional theatrical chronotopes there

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are also theatrical chronotopes that experiment with those conventions. The theatrical

chronotope is assembled into the mix of the other chronotopes at work in an assembled

performance. The assemblage chronotopes unfold within the particular performance chronotope,

which itself may be heterochronotopic.

Assembled performance includes live bodies within the assemblage. The performers

move about and continuously manipulate the performance so the assemblage is constantly

changing. With live bodies on stage, contingency plays a huge role. There is always the chance

of the unexpected occurring live. Performers may adapt to contingency through improvisation on

stage. Audience members may either subsume contingency into the established frame of

meaning or the suspension of disbelief is disrupted.

Further, audience members apply their own memories and associations to the objects and

events on stage. The individual cannot stand in for the whole in the case of assemblage art. Only

through combination and the individual associations that occur from the combinations does

assemblage art occur. As such, the performance is located as much in the audience as it is the

materiality. Different iterations of the same assemblage could evoke drastically different effects.

Therefore, spectators have a fragmented understanding of stage elements that opens the

possibility of interpretation rather than limiting components of a performance to a singular

understanding.

A performance does not end and become generative only in the published critical essay

that is written in response to the creative work. It also disperses into the memories and bodies of

the audience, the cast, the director, and anyone that was involved in the production. And because

of this, bits and pieces are repeated and extended to create future artwork. Chronotopicity may

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cling to these bits, thereby potentially adding to the complexity of the heterochronotopic mix in

subsequent re-assemblages.

Métaphysique d’Éphemera: A Performance Inspired by Joseph Cornell

In the following section I discuss a live performance inspired by Cornell and created by

embodying each of Cornell’s chronotopic practices of assemblage. Métaphysique d’Éphemera

was a reassemblage of Cornell’s assemblages in that I de- and recontextualized elements from

his work to create my own original piece of work. Ideas, language, objects, motifs, and themes

are recycled, remixed, and repeated in the assembled performance. The interactions and

juxtapositions of many different objects, costumes, props, and performers created an entity that

evoked Cornell. Alone, none represent Cornell.

I co-wrote (with poet Christopher Shipman) and directed Métaphysique d’Éphemera for

performance in April 2011 in the HopKins Black Box laboratory theatre on the campus of

Louisiana State University. My process as director mirrored that of Cornell’s processes of

creating his work by wandering, archiving, and collaging found materials to create a new piece

of work.

Assembling the Performance

Wandering

Like Cornell, I began by wandering. I read scholarly books, art historical books, and

biographies about Cornell’s life. I read his journals, which included his dreams, memories,

moments of reverie, letters to friends, and moments of inspiration. I also read creative

extensions of his work such as books of poetry and short stories inspired by his work. I watched

his films and documentaries about him. I searched for sources that Cornell referenced in his

journals. I explored the Smithsonian’s digital archives, The Cornell Papers. I went to museums to

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visit his work in person and studied reproductions of it in art books. In many ways, the research

for this artistic project doubled the research for the present study. (I will have more to say about

that aspect of my work in the concluding chapter.) Initially, my approach was not

predetermined. Rather, wandering brought about inspiration. I followed my interests and let

chance guide my journey through Cornell’s work as well as people who have written about him.

Over the course of wandering through research on Cornell, I encountered a theme that

was very important to Cornell’s understanding of time, memory, the material world, and

ultimately his artwork: “métaphysique d’éphemera.” This concept explained the feeling I have

when looking at Cornell’s work and what attracted me to him in the first place: the mystery and

the tension of wanting to remember and hold onto the past and wanting to let it go at the same

time. With this discovery, I knew that the production would be based upon this concept that

troubled and intrigued him throughout his career and life. From here I moved into collecting by

searching for sources that expressed this tension. I expanded my research to artists including

musicians, poets, and authors whom I felt also touched on my theme. I explored artists admired

by Cornell as well as artists whom I admire.

Archiving

As I wandered, I collected fragments of songs, poems, literature, quotes, associations, and

moments of inspiration to include in the show. By the end of my wandering, I had filled a

notebook with notes, a bookshelf with books containing earmarked pages and sticky notes, and

my computer’s hard drive with multiple digital files including typed texts, copied and pasted

images, lyrics, and fragments from online sources. I had accreted an archive of my findings

during my wandering. In a sense, I created my own Cornell Exploration with both material and

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digital collections. I used the materials, ideas, themes, and motifs that I collected and archived

through my wanderings as source materials for the creation of the script and stage elements.

Collaging

At the same point at which my explorations and discoveries made through wandering,

collecting, and archiving became generative, I was no longer working alone. I brought other

researchers, artists, and performers on board to help with the next steps in the process. This part

of the process was characterized by a company of artists and performers collaborating to produce

an assembled performance. And it was my job as the wanderer, archivist, and now director to

communicate my vision of the performance to my collaborators.

At this point I began to work with my co-author, poet Christopher Shipman. I shared with

him the overall theme that I wanted to explore in the show and the general mood and aesthetic

within which I wanted to work, and together we came up with a cast of characters and the world

they would inhabit.

I came up with the initial premise for the world of Métaphysique by spending time gazing

into Cornell’s mysterious tiny boxes and imagining the world inside. Partly influenced by my

scholarly and biographical research and partly inspired by surreal daydreaming, I imagined

animating the miniature worlds and characters. The story Shipman and I wrote unfolds inside the

decaying memory of a voyager prince. In this surreal space a bird, a ballerina, and a rabbit are

surrounded by a once pristine but now decaying landscape. The show is a voyage into Joseph

Cornell’s imagination and memory as well as our own. It explores how we link memory to

objects and images, how memory can be beautiful but also how it can trick us, creating gaps and

confusions between different states of consciousness that are halfway between nightmare and

fairytale. The prince travels into his imagination, where there is no distinction between past and

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present, where stars hold secrets of the universe, animals can speak, and people and objects are

repositories for memories.

While Shipman was responsible for writing the poetic dialogue, I worked on creating

texts compiled from various sources including songs, poems, fiction, and Cornell’s original

writings. Some of the scenes that I created were compiled from one or two different sources

while others were compiled from four or five texts. I wove in my own stories and experiences,

included passages from stories such as Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943),

song lyrics, and Cornell’s journal entries and original writings. Rather than treating Cornell’s

work as sacred and mimetically representing it, I gave myself the freedom to create a new piece

of art. The script of Métaphysique is a collage in the sense that much of it is compiled from a

variety of sources along with the co-author’s original dialogue. While the dialogue is original, it

is inspired by our interpretations of Cornell’s boxes and the miniature yet magnificent worlds

within.

Together with the poetic dialogue and the compiled texts, each scene was an embodiment

of métaphysique d’éphemera. I began to think of the show as a large memory box with a

compartment within for each scene. Each scene was its own vignette with its own aesthetic and

mood that contributed to the overall tone and mood of the whole, yet each was individual. Rather

than contributing to a straightforward, linear narrative, each scene in the performance evoked an

emotion, a feeling, or an impression like a dream. The relationships of the contents in each scene

are associative. Individually the contents do not represent Cornell, but assembled together they

evoke the tone of his work. The writing was highly poetic and associative as if the audience

entered one of Cornell’s boxes, but the boxes slowly turn from one into another without clearly

demarcated boundaries.

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Assembling the Characters

In a sense we created the characters by taking them out of Cornell’s boxes and placing

them into the show. All of the characters are subjects that Cornell used and reused throughout his

career including a prince, a bird, a rabbit, and ballerinas.

The Prince (see Figure 7) is influenced by Cornell’s life and his Medici Box series. The

character is also inspired by The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, all of which

Cornell admired.

Figure 7: The Prince

The Rabbit (see Figure 8) is inspired by the rabbit from Cornell’s boxes that were in turn

inspired by his brother’s drawings of rabbits and thus often represent Cornell’s brother and

innocence in Cornell’s work. In Métaphysique d’Éphemera, the Rabbit represents responsibility

to the Prince and eventually triggers the Prince’s anger because he forces the Prince to face

reality. The Rabbit experiences moments of intense, genuine anger and sadness toward the

Prince for not accepting his reality.

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Figure 8: The Rabbit

The Bird (see Figure 9) is adapted from Cornell’s Aviary Series. The Bird, as opposed to the

Rabbit, is concerned with imagination. Since the Rabbit triggers the journey from reality and the

Bird is the symbol of imagination, the Rabbit and the Bird could take turns narrating and

commenting on the action.

Figure 9: Bird in her Perch

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Sometimes they intertwine. The Rabbit always represents the way back to reality; the Bird, to

imagination. They are sometimes in conflict and sometimes work together to pull the Prince in

opposite directions.

The Ballerinas (see Figure 10) are based on three female archetypes over which Cornell

obsessed and to which he dedicated much of his art throughout his life. They include a childlike,

ethereal fairy ballerina, a playful sylph avant-garde ballerina, and a tragic, temperamental,

seductive ballerina. Marie Taglioni, Fanny Cerrito, and Tamara Toumanova were our

inspirations for these characters.

Figure 10: The Ballerinas

The ethereal childlike fairy was inspired by the story of Marie Taglioni dancing beneath

the stars for a Russian highwayman. Fanny Cerrito inspired the playful sylph ballerina in her

famous role as the water nymph, Ondine. And finally, the tragic seductress ballerina was inspired

by Tamara Toumanova's character in the ballet Le Papillon (1860), in which the main character

plays the role of a butterfly who perishes in the flame. The ballerinas can be interpreted as three

distinct characters or as different sides of one female dancer. The Ballerina(s) is present but she

is always moving away from the Prince. She is innocent, sweet, witty, ethereal, angry, sad,

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irrational, abusive, and seductive. She is always changing. Her mood toward the Prince can

change immediately from sweet and innocent to irrational and angry. She sparks a momentary

intense relationship with the prince only to resent him quickly. He cannot hold on to her; she

refuses to stay locked in his memory. The Ballerinas also comment on Cornell’s obsession; they

resent that he has turned them into objects.

Assembling the Stage

The next step in the process of creating the show required another chronotopic shift. I

moved from collaging the two-dimensional script with my co-author to assembling the three-

dimensional stage with a crew. The set designer, Ariel Gratch, and I spent time drafting the set

and eventually settled on making a large-scale box made of cardboard inside the theatre. The

stage is a box constructed from found cardboard boxes of various shapes and sizes pieced

together by rope with the seams left showing and suspended from the theatre’s light grid.

Looking into the box, the observer sees three large wooden boxes with curtains made of feather

boas. The Ballerinas are stored within these boxes. On the opposite side of the box is a wooden

perch elevated three feet above the stage. The perch is covered with twigs and leaves and is

enclosed by three suspended window frames. The Bird is stored in this enclosed perch. On each

side of the box are small projection screens that play a looped video of found footage I

assembled and which created odd juxtapositions and associations with the action on stage. The

stage (see Figure 11) is lit by Edison bulbs dangling from the light grid just above the

performance space. These illuminate the stage but also create the stars. A phonograph horn and

cardboard leaves hang from pulleys, and a disco ball hovers above.

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Figure 11: Cardboard Walls

Inside this box set, objects are piled up and overflowing out of their storage boxes. They

include a chess board, skates, movie reel, rotary telephone, lunch pail, decanter, chord organ,

music boxes, tins, scarves, boas, fan, suitcases, bread box, baby doll, slide projector, film

projector, watering can, carrots, table lamp, lantern, Mardi Gras beads, picnic basket, trunk,

ottoman, birdhouse, dollhouse, washboard, mannequin head, aviator hat, children’s books,

lampshade, typewriter, and windows. Métaphysique d’éphemera includes the idea that memories

are attached to physical objects.

I had collected all these objects during the past few years and wanted the stage to be

filled with objects that meant something to me. As I collected objects over the years I did not

foresee that what I collected would be a part of the production. Rather, as I began assembling the

set I realized that many of the objects in my house could become the objects in the performance

(see Figure 12).

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Figure 12: Collected Objects

Reassembling Cornell’s Boxes

Mixed in with these objects that carried personal significance, I duplicated bits and pieces

of objects found in Cornell’s boxes for the performance. Objects from his boxes become props,

costumes, or effects. Examples of specific stage elements that were inspired by Cornell’s boxes

include:

The entire set is inspired from Untitled (Pink Palace) (1948), with its cardboard structure,

mirrored windows, and glittered branches overtaking the decaying castle.

Cornell’s white feathers and glitter from A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova (1946)

become the white feather boa curtains for the ballerina’s boxes, and the glitter becomes falling

snow from the snow machine above the stage.

Twice during the show, the entire set is still except for snow falling from the snow

machine onto the Prince standing below. This image was taken from Snow Maiden (1933). The

falling show is used to represent memories and associations coming to life as they fall around the

Prince.

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A phonograph horn is a direct visual reference to the collage advertisement Cornell made

for the first Surrealist exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery.

The Edison bulbs, which were transformed into stars, come from Observatory Corona

Borrealis Casement (1950), which portrays constellations.

The bird’s perch is taken from Untitled (1948-1950), which is assembled from a

cockatoo, clock faces, and a music box. The perch and the Bird’s role are taken from this box.

The Bird is a sort of live music box with her violin and amplified loop and distortion pedals.

The concept of the multiple forms of the same woman appearing and disappearing

repetitively is from Cornell’s box Variétés de Minéralogie (1953), which depicts replications of

the same woman that fade away with each repetition until only her outline is visible.

The Production

The theater has been transformed into a large scale Cornell box, and as the audience

enters the theatre they enter the world of this assembled memory box. The sides and back of the

stage have given way to cardboard boxes suspended by rope and ribbon. The box is falling apart

at the seams. Exposed Edison bulbs hanging from the rafters at varying heights are dim, barely

on; only the wire is illuminated. The stage is nearly dark, but piles of objects are visible on

stage. Three large wooden boxes with boa curtains, a large elevated perch covered with

branches, and a set of rolling theatre chairs stand out amongst the piles of junk on the stage. The

deep, raspy voice of Tom Waits sings “All the World is Green” as the audience takes their seats.

The house lights dim; the show begins.

The Chronotopes of Performing Métaphysique d’Éphemera

The unexpected is always at play in a live performance; this is part of its chronotope.

There was a full house on the opening night of the show. The performers took their places and

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began moving about the giant Cornell box. Suddenly the lights started to go haywire. The light

board operator had no control over the light settings. The stage lights had a mind of their own,

coming on and shutting off randomly. Shutting the grid down did not turn the lights off or fix the

problem. This unexpected situation caused the cast and crew to improvise. The cast improvised

their movements in order to stay in the light as best they could. The light board operator, the

house manager, and I came up with an impromptu plan to get the lights back on track. We

discovered that if we shut everything down, cut the breakers, and booted everything back up the

lights cooperated for a time. So, we came up with a relay system to communicate between the

three of us to troubleshoot this process. Between the cast’s and the crew’s improvisation, the

audience was unaware that something out of the ordinary was occurring.

Cornell’s boxes are surprisingly small. “One must go beyond logic in order to experience

what is large in what is small” (Bachelard 150). Although the viewer cannot physically enter the

boxes, as she peers into the boxes, the tiny objects became life size within their small worlds.

His windows that open up to the night skies and birds perched in windows, or even empty

windows looking out to a blank white wall, all ask the viewer to change perspective. We take the

perspective of the bird in the widow. We peer out the window to gaze up at the infinite universe.

In terms of the spatial axis of the chronotope, Métaphysique d’Éphemera contrasted with

Cornell’s boxes in scale but in other senses aligned with them. A chronotope that spatially

condenses yet imaginatively expands is at work in Cornell’s boxes. Because this chronotope

physically condenses the objects within the box, it amplifies the objects inside. Cornell’s boxes

created an intimate space for his objects to interact. However, the miniature size of his pieces

allowed imaginative expansion for the viewer. A tiny vial holding a ribbon takes the viewer on a

journey of a memory far beyond the dimensions of the box itself; “Cornell had to negotiate

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issues of scale within a space that he deliberately confined to the small and intimate” (Hartigan,

Shadowplay 27). The boxes open an infinite imaginative space within the dimension of a frame.

Cornell sometimes uses hidden mirrors in the corners of the boxes to create reflections of

objects within the boxes. This effect creates a sense of expansiveness within a confined space.

Cornell tricks our perspective and our sense of time and place. Hartigan explains that by

positioning ourselves in the experience of the box, we also engage in the illusion of perspective

(Stargazing 27). And if we go along with this change of perspective, we begin to daydream.

Bachelard tells us, “In the presence of an image that dreams, it must be taken as an invitation to

continue the daydream that created it” (152).

Thus considered, his boxes are tiny memory theatres. In The Art of Memory, Francis

Yates discusses the historical reliance of memory on images beginning with the Greeks and

continuing through the Renaissance. She spends much of the book discussing the contraptions

and architectural structures, such as memory theatres, that were built based on the occult idea

that memories and knowledge could be projected and held safe in objects and images. Often

memories were attached to and structures were built based on astrological images. Guilio

Camillo was born in 1480 and spent most of his life working on a mysterious memory theatre to

mark divisions of memory. In 1530 he was commissioned by the King of France to build a

memory theatre. People were under the impression that Camillo’s project was a model

amphitheater. However, when Camillo allowed others to view it, “the object was thus clearly

more than a small model; it was a building large enough to be entered by at least two people at

once” (Yates 131). Camillo’s theatre was never perfected, and the book he intended to write

explaining the theatre’s secrets and designs for future reference was never written. What we do

know is that Camillo based his memory theatre on a traditional Roman theatre.

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Cornell’s practices and aesthetic products were strangely similar in mood and appearance

to those created during the Renaissance. Granted, many of Cornell’s boxes included astrological

images, but the boxes themselves remind me of the occult practice of the art of memory. It is

impossible to know for certain if Cornell consciously modeled his boxes in this hermetic

tradition, but the similarities are too great to ignore. The poet Charles Simic includes a poem

about Gillio Camillo’s memory theatre in his volume Dime Store Alchemy, inspired by Cornell’s

boxes.

Similar to the memory theatre Cornell’s boxes utilized perspective and scale in ways that

simultaneously condense and expand time and space. Camillo borrowed from the traditional

Roman theatre, which is constructed of, “seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven

gangways representing the seven planets” (Yates 136). Actors make entrances and exits through

the seven gateways that have images of gates painted on them. Camillo adapts the theatre

archetype for mnemonic purposes. The gates are imaginary for Camillo. Instead of being actual

gates, there is painted imagery where the gates would be. Yates explains, “The imaginary gates

are his memory places, stocked with images” (137). Surprisingly, there is also no audience for

Camillo’s theatre. Instead, one person stands where the stage would be and looks out to where

the audience would be located. From that vantage point, the individual would look upon the

images of the gates in order to recall a memory that the particular image held within. Yates

notes, “The solitary spectator of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks toward

the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades”

(137). Camillo’s theatre is described (and I think this can apply to Cornell’s boxes as well) as a,

“highly ornamental filing cabinet” (Yates 145). Just as Cornell’s tiny boxes mixed small scale

with the infinite, Camillo did the same with his memory theatre built for one. By gazing at the

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hermetic images, the spectator gains understanding of knowledge and secrets of the universe.

Métaphysique d’éphemera seems to have been Camillo’s goal. In Camillo’s case he was

attempting to make knowledge eternal, while Cornell sought to make memories, objects, and

people eternal.

In the performance I assembled, transferring the feeling of Cornell’s boxes to my own

memory theatre was my main goal. I wanted the juxtaposition of the intimate and the infinite to

be realized in the staged performance. Though the scale was hugely exaggerated, I wanted scale

and perspective to remain key characteristics of the performance as they were in Cornell’s work.

Detail, patience, juxtaposition of scale and perspective all played a role in making this happen.

Every aspect had to be intricately assembled. I thought of Bachelard’s paradox: “If a poet looks

through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing” (172). The scale of the show

in contrast to a Cornell box was immense: twelve-foot cardboards walls with lights hung above

creating a twenty-five by fifteen performance space. Cornell’s intimate space was amplified on

stage. I had to figure out ways to keep the juxtaposition of the intimate and magnified.

I achieved the effect with boxes inside of the cardboard box. Smaller spaces within the

box created a differentiation between sizes. Small, yet key props were scattered about the stage.

Also, I created a sense of a universe outside of the stage universe by creating projection screens

in the walls that functioned much like the windows in Cornel’s aviaries by suggesting an outside

world. For example, in the final scene (see Figure 13), the Bird begins to play on her violin the

song “I’m Not Here,” by Radiohead. She loops the song as the Prince walks towards the bird’s

perch. The Prince helps the bird from her perch and takes her place. He moves toward a

microphone as the Bird, for the first and only time throughout the show, leaves her perch and

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circles the stage. She settles center stage and slowly moves her arms up and down as if she is

flapping.

Figure 13: Final Sequence

All the clutter is pulled into the Bird’s body and now there is a stark contrast of former clutter

and present starkness and emptiness. As the Prince sings into her microphone, the Bird, now

free, dances upon an empty stage.

The scale was amplified; however, the performance maintained an intimacy, as if the

audience was pulling off the door of a dollhouse and peering inside. It was as if we got to see

what happens at night when we go to bed and the dolls come to life inside their house. Susan

Stewart argues, “The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a

diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated

and projected from contamination” (69). However, this dollhouse is not a pristine environment

that protects objects from the passing of time. Instead, the objects within are worn, obsolete,

forgotten, and broken. Cornell’s boxes and my production display the objects within as decayed

by time.

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Another key component of the performance was the incorporation of digital media. Three

video screens were built into the cardboard walls. The size and placement of the video screens

created individual compartments within the box, a common characteristic of Cornell’s boxes.

Each displayed different versions of a digital collage film that I assembled from multiple found

videos including Coney Island circa 1920s and 1940s with carnival rides, sideshows, freak

shows, and carnival games. I also assembled videos of ballet dancers, which included the famous

“Dying Swan” dance by Anna Pavlova, water ballet dancers, stars, snow, a 1970s animation of

The Little Prince, and Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963). I downloaded each of these videos

from YouTube and collaged them together with digital video editing software. I added my

original video work of the performers in rehearsal performing actions that did not occur in the

performance itself. Each of the three videos was made from the same found footage; however, I

rearranged the order in each sequence. The videos were rear projected using an old theatre trick

of projecting into an angled mirror to manipulate the size of the projection. This trick became a

necessity because the cardboard walls were built very close to the actual walls of the theatre,

leaving only a narrow walkway between faux and actual walls. Because of the narrow space and

the small size of the square projection screens built into the walls, the projector was unable to

project small enough to fit the screen. In this way, much like a Cornell box, the performance

included hidden mirrors that created mysterious visual effects for the onlookers.

The footage repeated multiple times throughout the show and chance created moments

where the videos synched up and projected the same images. The multiple projections functioned

as small memory boxes within the theatre memory box, as the Prince’s memory, dreams, and

longings. However, as the audience learns, the Prince’s memory plays tricks on him and is

continuously decaying as the show progresses. The repetition of the memories throughout the

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performance communicates the obsessive replay of that which is lost in the Prince’s mind. The

projections become replay of his memories (archives) as he tries to figure out what went wrong

and how he can get back what is disappearing before him or is already gone. These videos work

within the collage chronotope within the assemblage chronotope, creating ruptures where

continuity once existed, offering meaning through juxtaposition, and manipulating time and

space.

The collage chronotope of the video offers a different experience of time and space than

the live performance that contains it. They constantly jump, switch, and contradict time and

space. What the audience sees in the projections is not happening in the present (though they are

seeing it in the present) but in reference to the past. The videos are the Prince’s memories and

imaginative longings. The lively content and mood of the videos contradicts the melancholic

mood of the live performance.

In Digital Performance Steve Dixon tells us when the live and mediated co-exist “the

one we watch more (our attention will flirt between them), the one with the most presence, is the

one engaged in what we find personally the more interesting or emotive activity. In this sense,

presence in relation to audience engagement and attention is dependent on the compulsion of the

audiovisual activity, not on liveness or corporeal three-dimensionality” (132). The audience

could choose to privilege the live or the mediated or let their attention go back and forth,

allowing for moments of harmony and dissonance between the live and mediated.

In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan claims that the disappearance

of live performance is its defining quality. She insists that mediated performance and live

performance are polar opposites explaining, “Performance cannot be saved, recorded,

documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation or representations: once

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it does so it becomes something other than performance” (147). Philip Auslander disputes

Phelan’s claim by explaining that mediated performances can be just as ephemeral as live

performance. To Phelan, live performance is identified with disappearing, while mediated

performance is identified with repetition. Auslander counters:

Each time I watch a videotape is the only time I can watch that tape in that state of being
because the very process of playing it alters it. The tape that I initially placed in my VCR
or audio player started disappearing the moment I began watching or listening to it.
Disappearance, existence only in the present moment, is not, then, an ontological quality
of live performance that distinguishes it from modes of technical reproduction. (45)

Theorists such as Phelan claim that there is in fact a binary between the live and the mediated.

Auslander challenges this constricted view by stating that live is only live because of the

invention of mediatization. He describes liveness as an effect of mediatization. He describes this

relationship through Baudrillard’s example of simulacrum:

Live performance has become the means by which mediatized representations are
naturalized, according to a simple logic that appeals to our nostalgia for what we
assumed was the im-mediated: if the mediatized image can be recreated in a live setting,
it must have been “real” to begin with. The schema resolves into an impossible
oscillation between the two poles of what once seemed a clear opposition: whereas
mediatized performance derives its authority from its reference to the live or the real, the
live now derives its authority from its reference to the mediatized, which derives its
authority from its reference to the live, etc. (39)

I suggest that digital and analogue media are evanescent, albeit in different ways. While

there is no film to dematerialize each time the film is viewed, digital video can disappear. As I

addressed in Chapter Five, Wendy Chun argues that ephemerality is a defining characteristic of

digital media. Digital memory constantly refreshes and updates, erasing that which came before

to make way for the new. Mediatization, whether analog or digital, does not guarantee

permanence. We might like to believe that documentation and archivization create stable and

fixed materials protected from the deteriorization of time. But, like performance, mediated

documentation is subject to change and even disappearance over time. Mediatized works

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embody the tension of preservation and ephemerality. Cornell’s use of media to explore this

tension and keeping the tension in play is, I argue, more generative than attempting to separate

live and mediated performance.

The use of simultaneous live and mediatized performance becomes a way to challenge

these binaries as well as a way to suggest that not only are they not binaries, they are always

already wrapped up together, influencing and contributing to one another. I used video in

Métaphysique to represent memory and imagination, two themes of the performance. The media

thus operated within multiple chronotopes. The videos were heterochronotopic because they

were produced using the collage chronotope, which combines footage from pre-existing

chronotopes to create a disjointed, non-linear film. Because the content of the films functions as

memory, the audience shifts between chronotopes throughout the show. They shift between

present deteriorating interior of the Prince’s kingdom (the live performance) and the past pristine

kingdom (the video) that is decaying before them on stage. The past and the present cannot be

separated within the show.

Post Show

The performance elicited the same mood that I feel when I gaze, transfixed, into

Cornell’s boxes. Creating a performance inspired by a great visual artist is an intimidating task.

It was a labor of love; however, I felt very vulnerable because I not only directed the show, but I

also co-wrote the script. So, my daydreams, memories, fears, and longings were put on display,

and by the end of the show I felt that the performance was more about me and my struggles of

letting go than it was about Cornell. A significant result of this undertaking is that I found a

generative process by embodying or “trying on” Cornell’s practices, and this experience

transformed how I now approach my own creative projects.

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When the show was over, the set disassembled, the cardboard recycled, and the Edison

bulbs taken down, I took all of the found objects home. I have re-used the phonograph horn,

rabbit mask, and a ballerina’s costume in other performances since the show. In many ways I feel

like the show was my first experiment with Cornell’s chronotopes. The show in a sense was a

springboard for my research for the present dissertation. As I write about my process of making

Métaphysique d’Éphemera, I realize that the process illuminated themes that have shaped my

research and artistic production since then, and the overall theme of the show has had a major

influence on the theme of my dissertation. Métaphysique d’Éphemera staked out Cornell’s

philosophical and emotional tension that manifested through his artwork. Each scene became an

example or vignette about this chronotopic tension. After the performance, I extended the

concept as a way to understand Cornell’s practices, process, and artwork.

Restaging Métaphysique: A Re-Reassemblage

Like Phelan, we may think about performance as something that disappears. However,

people remount or make new versions of performances all the time. When shows are restaged,

language, props, characters, video clips and other elements are recycled to become a re-

assemblage of a prior assemblage or a re-re-assemblage. In 2013, characters, dialogue, props,

and video from my production were reassembled, creating a new, yet re-used performance.

In September 2013, director Craig Gingrich-Philbrook staged Métaphysique d’Éphemera

in the Klineau Theatre at Southern Illinois University. Gingrich-Philbrook, my undergraduate

mentor, had always wanted to direct a show about Cornell. When he heard that I had created an

assemblage performance, he agreed to adapt the show as an experiment in re-assembled

performance. Shipman and I provided multiple versions of the script to Gingrich-Philbrook and

told him to mix, combine, alter, re-arrange, add to, and delete from the script in any way he

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wanted. I wanted see how a new production re-used, remixed, and re-assembled the script and

staging. Additionally, I did not want to influence Gingrich-Philbrook’s staging so together we

decided that he would not look at any documentation of my production. He would not attempt to

recreate my re-assemblage but instead would use the script as raw source material. Rather than

describing and discussing the entire project here, I confine myself to talking about the more

radical re-assemblages that happened in Gingrich-Philbrook’s version of the show.

Similar to the original staging, the stage was an assemblage of found materials

containing references to Cornell’s boxes (see Figure 14). However, the materials were not the

same as the found materials in the 2011 production. Also included were objects from previous

shows Gingrich-Philbrook directed. Compared to my 2011 staging, the stage was stripped down.

Figure 14: Bird and Ballerina

There were no cardboard walls, elevated bird perches, or wooden ballerina boxes. The Klineau

Theatre is a traditional theatre with a proscenium stage, whereas The HopKins Black Box theatre

is a large room that can transform into anything. These spatial differences provided different

opportunities and limitations for staging the two productions.

As the audience entered the theatre, the stage included a prince’s chair and telescope, a

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ballerina’s box, a bird’s swinging cage, and a space for a new character, “The Means of

Production,” to run her equipment. Scattered about were tiny figurines, a tribe of weasel

ballerinas (the ballerina’s babies), and objects from previous performances (see Figure 15).

There were no longer three ballerinas. There was now only one. However, a new

character emerged. The theatre itself became an active character personified through “Means of

Production.” Means brought the theatre alive through projecting and manipulating live- live feed,

pre-recorded digital and analog videos (see Figure 16), and found footage with a VJ mixer; she

also narrated actions of the characters and addressed the audience directly. The audience was

constantly reminded that the action on stage (within the box) was unfolding in a theatre, of which

they were an essential part.

Figure 15: Full Cast

Even more than in the original staging, this production exposed the means of production.

The edges were not hidden, but instead the production operated from the acknowledgement that

it was a performance occurring in front of a live audience in a theatre. The creation of the

projections happened live on stage. Even though there was no mystery as to how the projections

happened, they were still magical. In this version of the script, there is a scene in which the

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theatre curtain is the main character and does an opening and closing dance across stage. Means

of Production sits on the edge of the stage and narrates the curtains’ movements as the curtain

inches closed then sweeps across the stage then inches back and forth behind her.

Figure 16: Means of Production Set-Up

The characters in Gingrich-Philbrook’s production had different attitudes about their

situation (being trapped inside the Cat-Prince’s memory) and also had different relationships

with one another. For example, The Bird seemed already to know the outcome; consequently she

allowed herself the freedom to do what she wanted with the knowledge that none of it mattered.

The Rabbit is almost disappointed that she cannot be convinced of the Cat-Prince’s imagination,

but eventually becomes angry with the Cat-Prince’s inability or refusal to accept his reality. The

Ballerina is happy with the Cat-Prince and attempts to be what she once was in his memory.

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The Cat-Prince remains oblivious to his reality and spends the show trying to protect the

Ballerina from the reality of the present (the Rabbit). He attempts to save the Ballerina from the

passage of time.

As in the 2011 production, scale was a key component of the show. Scale was

manipulated in the show primarily through the video work, which created a sense of

miniaturization and amplification that is characteristic of Cornell’s work. Large projections were

used to create a sense of amplification. Means of Production would use her live feed camera to

amplify miniature rabbits and cats, which created a disorienting sense of scale. The projectors on

stage were focused toward both sides of the theatre’s seating, creating a sense of immersion for

the audience. Projections were always visible in the periphery of the audience’s vision. Scale was

also manipulated through a puppet theatre within the theatre box. Miniature toys appeared as

puppet versions of the live performers. When the puppet theatre’s curtains opened (see Figure

17), the backstage was exposed, which created a sense of scale, depth, and an opening to a world

beyond.

Figure 17: Theatre within the Theatre

As I reconsider this version of the performance, I realize that it was directed and

performed as I understand Cornell now. As I began writing about Cornell, I thought of his work

as nostalgic and melancholy; consequently, I staged my version of the show in that tone. Now, I

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understand that Cornell was working with a tension throughout his career and sought multiple

generative ways of exploring, understanding, and presenting the tension of métaphysique

d’éphemera, which for Gingrich-Philbrook was connected with the nature of performance itself.

This process created a mood and tone for his work, but it also imposed a creative and technical

challenge around which to work.

The Métaphysiques of Performance

A performance is just one moment of a subject’s trajectory. The performance does not

end with the closing of the show. Performance, created within the assemblage chronotopes,

necessitates that materials including staging elements, costumes, characters, props, and texts are

tied to and extensions of a particular past and are constantly on a forward trajectory. Though a

specific performance ends, themes, motifs, and moods extend into future creative projects such

as another staged production or another form of art made in response to the production.

Performance provides a unique opportunity for assemblage work because it affords the

opportunity to exploit maximally the heterochronotopicity of assemblage. Multiple temporalities

exist and are highlighted within assembled performance allowing the audience to experience

temporal and spatial polyphony as they watch a performance. A practitioner of assembled

performance finds value in the reuse and remixing of sources. Performers engage with the past or

even embody the archive to breathe new life into it, extend and re-mix it. The past and present

are equally generative and productive for the assemblage practitioner. Finally, an assemblage

artist embraces the idea that once an assemblage has been created it is no longer hers. It belongs

to no one and everyone. Just as the materials in the production came from pre-existing contexts,

they can now be picked up, re-used, and re-mixed by someone else. In this way, assemblage

becomes an offering to fellow artists and scholars of one’s work.

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CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION

At the end of this project I am left with a question: is the embodiment of Cornell’s

practices inextricably tied to his chronotope of métaphysique d’éphemera? It certainly was for

Cornell. What initially drew me to Cornell’s work was his expression of métaphysique

d’éphemera. However, as I progressed through each chapter I became more interested in the

chronotopes of his processes rather than the aesthetics of his art-works. That being said, in each

of my projects I sought to create works that operated within the metaphysique d’ephemera

chronotope. So, at the beginning I was compelled by the aesthetics and worked textually from his

products to produce works with a Cornellian aesthetic. But over time I focused more on the

chronotopes of his assemblage practices. The two are entangled in my work. But, if a practitioner

chooses to work with these practices as methods of production do the chronotopes of practice

produce works that inherently embody métaphysique d’éphemera? Could the performance of

Cornell’s assemblage chronotopes lead in a different direction to produce a type of aesthetic

completely different from Cornell’s play of preservation and decay? Does this project produce a

method that artists can use to create any type of assemblage work or does it lead only to a

particular Cornellian aesthetic? Cornell never took his art in a different direction that was

independent of métaphysique d’éphemera. For Cornell, métaphysique d’éphemera or “everyday

magic” was inextricably tied to his chronotopic processes because of his dedication to or

fascination with mixing the past and present, the decaying and the preserved, the old and the

new, and the obsolete and the innovative in both form and content.

In this vein, some contemporary artists use Cornell’s chronotope of métaphysique

d’éphemera as their inspiration and goal for their own creative work. For example, contemporary

poet Charles Simic wrote Dime-Store Alchemy (1992), in which eight of Cornell’s boxes become

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metaphors for Simic’s poetry. Robert Coover’s book The Grand Hotels (2002) springs from

Cornell’s hotel box series into imaginary rooms and worlds that Coover writes into existence.

Recently, Kristina Marie Darling wrote The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph

Cornell (2012). Darling’s entire book is composed of footnotes at the bottom of otherwise blank

pages. Ann Bogart directed Hotel Cassiopeia (2007), a performance that explores the mind of

Cornell. There have also been contemporary art exhibitions that are inspired by or situate

Cornell’s work as a kind of creative preface. For example, Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell

Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011), an exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art,

put Cornell’s work in conversation with contemporary work to demonstrate the timelessness of

his pursuits as well as to offer historical grounding to new art. The Walker Gallery in

Minneapolis exhibited a show called Midnight Party (2011), dedicated to the explorations of

dreams, fantasies, and meditations with Cornell’s Midnight Party (1940s) collage film at the

center of the exhibition. Installation artist Jee Young Lee constructs life-sized rooms that are her

interpretations of children’s fables, memories, and imagination in her Seoul studio. She spends

months creating each environment. Once the room is complete she places herself within the

room, becoming the focal point of the scene, and creates otherworldly photographs. Her work is

classified as sculpture, photography, installation art, and performance art. It has the intimacy,

detail, and mystery of Cornell’s miniature boxes, yet the human scale and her presence in the

small worlds she creates depart from Cornell’s aesthetics.

On the other hand, contemporary digital and media artists draw on his chronotopes of

assemblage to produce radically different assemblage aesthetics. Additionally, they may use the

chronotopes of assemblage to cerate works that challenge, critique consumer culture and

consumption. These artists are more interested in the processes of assemblage. For example,

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artist Perry Bard initiated a global, participatory remake of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie

Camera (1929) by inviting people to interpret shots from the original film and remake them in

their own contemporary settings and with contemporary technology in response. Participants

upload their videos to a website that has software specifically designed to sequence uploads in a

film sequence; thus the project changes daily. This collaborative project creates the possibility

for multiple people to upload submissions simultaneously creating infinite versions of the film.

Natalie Bookchin creates video installations that are assemblages of personal video archives

found on YouTube. She searches and collects videos from the digital database of YouTube and

creates her own pieces that often center on specific themes. Both of these artists exploit

chronotopes of assemblage, expanding them to the digital art world with global collaboration and

unfinalizability.

Some of these artists, such as Simic and Bogart, are inspired directly by Cornell’s

assemblage work and extend his themes and motifs to create their original work. Others such as

Lee, Bard, and Bookchin, are engaged in Cornellian chronotopes of wandering, archiving,

collaging, and assembling. I situate the creative work I have produced throughout this project

with both types of artists. My work functions both as creative productions created through the

embodiment of Cornell’s chronotopic practices as well as Cornell’s textual chronotope of

métaphysique d’éphemera.

Artists and scholars can choose to work within both the chronotope of métaphysique

d’éphemera and the chronotopes of assemblage. I believe that artists can choose to embody

Cornell’s practices of assemblage to produce assemblage works that are radically different in

tone and purpose from Cornell’s. However, I also believe that “everyday magic” is inherently

tied to the chronotopes of assemblage because assemblages embrace the old, obsolete, found, and

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forgotten. Though overall aesthetics and purpose of the artwork might look nothing like

Cornell’s, there is still a value of reusing materials and giving the everyday special meaning in

assemblage art.

This project began with an immediate sense of intimacy I felt when in the presence of

Cornell’s work. Upon first viewing his odd boxes I had the delightfully unsettling feeling that I

was almost home from some long voyage. Urged on to discover how Cornell had placed me

inside the strange box in which I found myself, the only real course of action was to travel the

path of learning everything I could about him--his greatest influences, his interests, his

background, and his processes and techniques of production--and along the journey of my

research Cornell continued to prompt me to produce projects of my own.

As my research into Cornell progressed the project came into sharper focus. I ultimately

realized that as a performance scholar, performer, and media artist what I was most interested in

was his processes. This obsession with process that stemmed from an obsession with a feeling

has produced, in the end, a project that brings performance into a dissertation that analyzes the

work of an artist. I have re-performed Cornell’s processes to create the projects within this

dissertation. In a way, this dissertation is a heterochrontopic assemblage born from the expansion

of my research to creative work. Such a process of researching and creating has provided diverse

experiences with, and understandings of, the kinds of things that can happen within diverse times

and spaces, with each creative project inhabiting its own particular chronotopicity. Bringing

research and heterochronotopic projects together with writing has created a multi-temporal

experience for the reader. Overall, the dissertation becomes an assemblage of my research,

Cornell’s practices, and embodiments of multiple chronotopes to produce artworks.

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In simplest terms, this study combines scholarship and the creative. I am not suggesting

that the two are the same, nor are they completely different. However, chronotopic similarities

resonate within each. The process and experience of writing my dissertation was like creating an

assemblage of theorists, artists, films, boxes, and critics that I encountered and collected on my

scholarly wandering. I collected, re-used, and re-mixed ideas, theories, concepts, and examples

that already existed to help me shape my arguments and frame my creative projects. Along the

way, some research became pivotal to my study, while other research was not included in the

final draft at all. The work was constantly cut, edited, and rearranged. In many ways I de-

romanticized art by tying the creative process to the everyday through activities such as

wandering, collecting, archiving, collage, and assemblage, but these same everyday activities are

parts of the research and writing process, thus de-romanticizing scholarship.

It was my goal to demonstrate the advantages of theoretic and creative learning

performed together. Though I drew from multiple fields of study I was committed to the

performance studies belief that embodiment of research offers new and richer understanding of a

subject. This type of scholarly and creative research values the unending via collaboration, reuse

of materials, borrower’s rights, and creative extensions from multiple researchers and artists

across time and space. This project also crossed disciplinary boundaries, contributing to the

significance of interdisciplinary research with a performance studies emphasis. Throughout my

project I drew on research from various fields such as memory studies, media studies, art history,

cultural studies, and film studies to inform and guide my performances as both scholar and artist.

Although not anticipated from the outset, my work also engages media archaeology, an emerging

field that studies new uses of obsolete technologies. The medium Cornell used to create his work

became just as important to my explorations of métaphysique d’éphemera as the content of his

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work. Cornell’s methods of re-use and repurpose of technologies in his works informed how I

used, re-used, and re-purposed both old and new technologies in my extensions of his work.

If I were to extend this project I would work to re-create it in a multi-media format. An

exciting challenge would be adapting the dissertation into a digital format incorporating my

writing, images of Cornell’s work, and each of my projects. Similar to how I argue for the merit

of content Cornell’s process accomplishes, the form and content of my dissertation would inform

one another by allowing the form and process of the project to be as much a vehicle for argument

as the content. The present study does, however, produce multi-mediated, multi-chronotopic

research that values learning, discovery, and creation through embodiment.

This dissertation has also allowed me to explore the tension of holding onto that which is

ephemeral, the quality to which I was originally drawn in Cornell’s work, and the same quality

that I have come to understand how to embody through multiple iterations over the course of this

process. Early on I recognized part of myself in Cornell’s work. The attraction to the past, the

combination of the whimsical and the unsettling, and negotiating the pain of progress were all

qualities of his work that appealed to me. My desire to collect objects is indeed so great that the

uninformed visitor to my apartment may find it to be part modern living space and part makeshift

museum.

Much of my work on the dissertation was active; I wandered toward it like I would

wander through a collection of Cornell boxes or the streets of a magical city like New Orleans.

Such a project has created many memorable experiences that have been consumed by my work

and my life which will resurface whenever I think of Joseph Cornell, when I think of my work as

a performer and performance scholar, and when I am prompted to ponder how I view the world

around me by the world itself. In sum, my dissertation has become my personal archive. As I

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continue to interact with it memories come flying back and new memories are forged--some of

them grounded in grappling with and assembling research, some with processing that research

and transforming it into my own creative projects, both dancing between preservation and decay

in the creative works that assemble this dissertation.

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VITA

Sarah K. Jackson grew up in Carbondale, Illinois. She attended Southern Illinois

University, graduating in 2006 with her Bachelor’s of Arts in Speech Communication. She

attended Louisiana State University for her Master’s Degree, graduating in 2009 with a Master

of Arts in Communication Studies. She will graduate with her Doctorate of Philosophy in

Communication Studies in May 2014.

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