The · Affected · Provincial’s · Almanack

One of my favorite artists in a 1961 performance of his famous miniature circus, which can be seen in its entirety at the Guggenheim (correction: Whitney) in New York. If I recall correctly, Calder spent the thirties building his homemade circus from cork, wire and wood, then performing it in countless apartments for delighted audiences all over Paris. It was what he was known for before that fateful visit to Mondrian's studio that inspired him to make the first mobiles. In an age of visual spectacles made all too easy by technology, the small, hand-wrought clockwork feats performed by Calder's beautifully stylized junk-creatures are even more astounding. They're all imbued with a kind of rickety grace and formal elegance which goes beyond a mere puppet show.

Calder was a son of Philadelphia, and his father's and grandfather's sculptures still grace Franklin Parkway in front of the Philly Art Museum. His engineering background and childlike playfulness combine beautifully in this classic footage. In it, he appears as a sort of thinking man's Santa Claus--a merry, lumpen yet worldly troll with a great gift for the absurd and a twinkle in his eye. I hope to be just like him when--if--I grow up.

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~W

In 1936, the brilliant collage/assemblage artist Joseph Cornell--a shy, reclusive man who lived in Queens with his aging mother and invalid brother--came across a copy of a b-movie entitled "East of Borneo". He cut up the film, taking scenes out of order and splicing it with other stock footage, taking the entire film out of context, creating a surreal, dreamlike effect. There is a wonderful moment towards the end where Cornell has edited the stock footage of a solar eclipse in such a way as to suggest that one of the heavenly bodies has fallen from the sky.

To distance the film even futher from its origins, Cornell would project the film through a deep blue glass while playing a hokey tropicalismo record. Cornell prefigured the use of camp in art, long before Warhol--making boxes devoted not just to long dead 19th-century ballerinas and silent-era gamines, but also everyday waitresses, box office cashiers (seeing a beauty in a glass box was likely too irresistably poetic for him to resist), and contemporary female film stars like Lauren Bacall and Audrey Hepburn--who once returned a box Cornell had made and sent to her.

When Breton, Dali and the other surrealists came over from Europe for their first New York exhibition, Cornell was asked to do a screening. A couple minutes into the screening, Dali became incensed, believing that Cornell had somehow stolen a very similar idea he hadn't yet implemented, screamed at Cornell and pushed over the projector. Cornell was so shaken by Dali's insane behavior that he never showed the film again.

Below is an incomplete version:



That said, most lovers of his work agree that Cornell's true genius is expressed in his marvelous shadow boxes, particularly those from his dovecote, celestial, and aviary series (my opinion). Literary, delicate, plaintive yet slightly unsettling, they embody a uniquely gentle strain of surrealism (term used broadly here) that the likes of Dali could never match in sophistication and lyricism.

~W

Addendum: Sebastian Mekas makes a pilgrimage out to suburban Queens to visit Cornell's house on Utopia Parkway.