Joseph Cornell notes

an informal talk on joseph cornell (notes by david brazil) at the home of taylor brady & tanya hollis in attendance -- taylor, tanya, rob halpern, lee azus, brandon brown, alli warren, david brazil, jason escalante following -- a transcription of the notes i wrote that evening -- supplemental memories in brackets -- direct quotes indicate speech my point of departure for conversation was the coincidence that both brian whitener and i, who went to see the show together, independently found ourselves thinking of the work of walter benjamin & specifically of the arcades project which led me to pose the question: is there a theory of history in the work of joseph cornell? (cf. this quotation from 'the arcades project': "method of this project: literary montage. i needn't *say* anything. merely show. i shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenuous formulations. but the rags, the refuse -- these i will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.") [tanya talked about her early encounter with cornell & its formative character -- as well as wendy kramer's simultaneous discovery of jess --] [tanya also spoke of the emotional quality she saw in cornell's work -- the boxes as a way of communicating --] [the conversation turned to chance] "chance as objective hazard" [TB] Cornell as furtive "a set of foregone conclusions" [TH] destroying surface "a set of procedures that undo that at every stage" [TH] decollage Duchamp v. Cage (aleatory v. stochastic) [everyone asked TB to define 'stochastic'] [BB spoke of Rrose Selavy, the perfume bottle, etc. as well as the curational savvy of the Philadelphia Duchamp room as against the facile thematization of the SFMOMA show] [DB mentioned the 'Portrait of Ondine' as displayed in the show, as a riff on Duchamp's Green Valise] "domesticated chance" [TB] "I haven't actually regularized the stop" [TH] is aesthetics about the stop? the anti-archive. a series of decisions about appearance. "a series of decisions made by someone as random as me" [TH - referring to archival work] Blaser on chance -- [Taylor read extracts from robin blaser's essay, 'mind canaries,' on the work of the sculptor christos dikeakos, collected in 'the fire': "christos dikeakos's show is a splendid occasion to turn back and really think about duchamp and to come forward to understand this artist's contemporary mind. i must imagine chance which is comprised of time, event, and condition in contrast to traditional illusionism, abstraction, ideality or immortality. the thought that is art is operational in both the small and the large, the private and the public, because it does not define the self as closed into itself, but in relation to an outside of persons, society, politics, and cosmos. i do not want this to be confused with contemporary apocalyptics, -- that haunting millenarianism that wishes desperately for an end of time or history, and that ends in a despotism of spirit or matter. dikeakos presents the relational condition of the present. He has thoughtfully considered hans arp’s sense of chance: 'chance opened up perceptions to me, immediate spiritual insights. intuition led me to revere the law of chance as the highest and deepest of laws, the law that rises from the fundament. an insignificant word might become a deadly thunderbolt. one little sound might destroy the earth. one little sound might create a new universe' (arp, 'dada') [...] the devastation of the western sense of order, of 'reality,' of the transcendental forces us to imagine that god, ourselves and the world are incomplete -- a matter of continuous creation."] [RH spoke about melancholy in Cornell's work, about introjection as against incorporation -- in the language of Abraham & Torok unless I am mistaken] "disturbing forms of repetition" [RH] "a more productive relationship to loss" [RH] an object unable to enter encounter with chance melancholia engagements that would catalyze "uninterrupted set of exceptions" [RH, quoting wall text from SFMOMA] the relationship of chance to meaning chance as a figure for loss an unrepresentable place from which to render judgment "a disabling stability" [RH? TB?] "a deep page" [JE -- the boxes as not essentially sculptural -- "as close to two-dimensional as you can get"] "a problem in that body" [TH, referring to Cornell] pure image, real essence [JE talking about the tenets of Christian Science, Cornell's church] "things falling out of grace" deliquescence into 'base matter' (Bataille), recrudescence into aura (Benjamin) [tanya brought out a triptych of works] "the page allowed to become fleshy" (TB, referring to tanya's artwork)