Everyone has a junk drawer somewhere. I’ve just put frames around mine and called it art.
Back when I was still in artistic diapers I read a story about Joseph Cornell, the eccentric loner who made mysterious idiosyncratic shadow boxes. You might enjoy looking at his work. At first, Cornell started out making them for his brother who was confined to a wheelchair, but as time went on, the assemblages and boxes encompassed tiny worlds that seemed on the verge of explaining secrets to the universe. Looking inside one of his wooden boxes is like going to a yard sale on a different planet. There are good finds everywhere, and nostalgic bits of magic for those who looks inside. When I look at Cornell’s work I always wonder, “Where did he find this stuff?”
In some of my readings on his life, I read an article about a couple of famous artists (Rauschenberg among them) who went to visit his studio when Cornell was old. Down in his basement studio, he had shelves filled with jars of marbles, shoe boxes of butterfly wings, metal spirals from broken clocks, iridescent wallpaper samples, pictures of exotic parrots, and many other collections of what might be for us just more visible residue, but for Cornell became a doorway to his private spaces of memorabilia.
As an artist, I learned a lot by reading about his accumulations. First, I learned that it’s important to look at great art in books to “edumacate” yourself, but there is nothing that replaces looking at the piece closely in a museum. When I saw my first Joseph Cornell in a museum I observed the intensity behind his well-crafted wooden boxes, dovetailed and stained within an inch of their surrealistic lives. I also noticed how every object, regardless of how unexceptional it first looked, was exceptional in some detail. I was also drawn into his illusory compositions which through his deftness with texture, magnetized my view and kept me captive. I was instantly a fan.
I also learned another valuable lesson. If you are going to be an artist that deals in assemblage, collages, or “combines,” you must cultivate your collections. In fact, when you are going to do anything creative, whether it be cooking or candlestick making, you must become an astute connoisseur of your ingredients, picking, choosing, and discarding discriminately. At my home, I have six shelves where all my street finds go so I can pick the best one for the right spot when the right artwork needs it. They range from odd instruments to broken bottles to odd-shaped sticks. They are the flotsam and jetsam washed up along my daily paths. Some fit in a piece of art better than others, but the collecting is part of the work I do that connects me to my craft. Many times, the act of collecting is only a few minor adjustments away from being the finished piece.
I once had a neighbor who had five of everything. Just a look around his shop told me he had brought the same screwdriver and can of WD40 every time he went to “the Walmarts.” His garage was a chaotic jumble of purposelessness, with a doctorate in junk and a minor in messy. When I went over there, he could never find anything because he was living in a Ground Hog’s Day of Repeated Purchases. I can safely say that I’ve had nightmares that ended better than his garage. I think you get the picture. Still, as I looked around each time I visited, I began to realize I was standing with the ghost of Joseph Cornell. I wasn’t in a nightmare at all. I was watching Cornell’s ghost walk through the walls and into my art. All I had to do was open the junk drawer and let him in.