if Cornell did not make boxes actually emitting music, neither did he suggest that his constructions should be viewed to musical accompaniment. He well knew that if, for example, he had asked that the box be called Swan Lake for Tamara Tourmanova (1946) be accompanied by the actual ballet music, experience of the box would not be enhanced but suffer or be negated (pp. 192-3). Another music than the well-known Tchaikovsky is implicit, and temptation should be resisted by the viewer to “play” it in imagination. There is a deeper music to listen for via visual stimuli which can have the effect of de-familiarizing hackneyed ballet music. Yet, in a sense, actual music went into the boxes as they were constructed. Cornell listened to music on such New York stations as WQXR while assembling them in his workshop. He also had a large collection of classical and other recordings which he played at will. Throughout his journal he makes enthusiastic and insightful comments on the music of Mozart, Debussy, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt and Satie, each contributing something special to controlling mood. Music was a mind-altering drug with lasting good effects. For instance, Cornell wrote: “Satie music. This seemingly almost miraculous accomplishment amidst vile days of sluggishness—depressing lethargy” (p. 210). Cornell perhaps never got closer to the healing he sought, to the spiritual “unfoldments” of religion, than by listening to music that roused him to start another, yet more satisfying, box. Unlike Paul Klee, another extraordinarily imaginative creator who cherished music, Cornell does not press allusions to music in his constructions. Klee would ring the changes from witty to serious musical signs in his paintings, something Cornell had no need to attempt. There are no musical notes written into the boxes. What need was there when the best of them convey a powerful synesthesia, combining in subtle formal relationships musical and, sometimes, literary associations? Cornell was aware that synesthesia was characteristic of Symbolist poetry, especially that of Baudelaire, and thereby open to appropriation for his own art. Thus music was far more than a distraction in Cornell’s life when it entered directly into his search for the perfected esthetic object.
Music in his workroom released Cornell to play with ideas and images, freely associating emotionally laden images that were more than fanciful or witty. To relax inhibitions he needed to feel what he called “the Mozartian disquiet” (p. 275), together with the “playful”, in the creative sense used by Donald Winnicott.24 For instance, Cornell wrote: “Mozart #25 came 1st movement playful motive breaking thru—‘clear’” (p. 199). Mozart, the master of play, amidst disquiet and tinges of sadness, gave exactly the atmosphere for many of the boxes. The example of The Medici Slot Machine (1942) is eloquent, sad, quirky and faintly comic—a young Don Giovanni-like aristocrat is imprisoned in the architecture of his own privilege, caught in the cross-hairs of his own time and place. He is isolated, even trapped, by the associated female visages, his direction in life, suggested by the compass, unknown. The play of associations never ends conclusively when viewing this mysterious box. Many boxes seem only remotely musical. Those, such as the Sand
Fountain series of the 1950s can suggest disquietingly humanoid forms yet convey uncanny allusions to the passage of time and the sea’s timelessness. Cornell walked the beaches as a scavenger, a lone man caught by the eternal sea, yet there is also a kind of reassuring rhythm to the sea. It is unwise to try to pin down the meaning of any of these constructions as Cornell did not succumb to formulae or parody himself. Associative openness to a range of experiences, including the disquieting, is characteristic of the journal, but he always returns to the healing effects of music; for example: “miserable & neurotic all day until phone call in eve. to Lee [Bountecou] home all day—Mahler #4 AM from experiencing slightly on the edge of something wonderful” (p. 287).
For all their imaginative fecundity, Cornell’s boxes mainly fall into recognizable categories such as soap bubble sets, chests and cabinets, ballet themes, Medici slot machines, habitats, aviaries, dovecotes, hotels and observatories, celestial navigation systems, sand trays and fountains being the most notable. A thematic series was produced over a period of years until inspiration declined, but there was certain to be overlap with another line of enquiry. variants were often constructed, and tinkering with detail went on endlessly. He was reluctant to part with any box even when it became a finished object. Cornell never wanted for new ideas, or went dry, because he could free-associate to virtually all areas of experience—and the boxes helped to access walled-off dissociated feelings. Had it not been for this accessing of lost information (in tolerable doses) Cornell might have stopped. The play went on because it was so productively rewarding.
some of the most ingenious boxes suggest games or toys of the sort devised to amuse Robert. Even the more exotic boxes, such as that portraying a sultry Lauren Bacall (1945-6), invite play—in that case a ball suggestively rolls down a sort of pin-ball obstacle course. Others on the hotel theme convey lonely and bereft moods reminiscent of Hopper paintings, while Chocolate Menier (c.1950) features an adolescent girl, seemingly belonging to the distant past, gazing through an opening in a tattered wall behind two prohibitive bars. Desire for the unobtainable feminine is the obvious theme, but one should never be satisfied with the obvious when it comes to a Cornell box. The parrot boxes and collages of the 1940s and 1950s give a similar feeling of lonely creatures trapped in spaces which their backgrounds of newspapers cannot quite explain. in contrast, the swan boxes convey an otherworldly grace associated with the romantic ballet. Although falling into categories, each box conveys a nuanced mood arising from uniquely recombined elements. All belong to a never-never land of desire for ideal objects and nostalgic frustration at their being out of reach while tangibly before us.
As noted, Cornell readily admitted, his “own penchant for collecting way back leading into preoccupation with Tobject’” (p. 409). But while the true compulsive may boringly collect thousands of teddy bears to honor his childhood, Cornell explored the strangeness of his shifting moods with a sort of reflexivity from chosen objects. He wanted to emphasize that the world of ordinary objects is indeed a mysterious and disturbing place, that by multiplying cubes or glass lamp chimneys enclosing blue balls, he could upset viewers’ expectations as his own had been upset. Andy Warhol was to turn multiplying objects into a gimmick, draining them of all mystery but Cornell was no ironist of the consumer age. His genius was for recombining and positioning in defamiliarized settings ordinary animate and inanimate objects (such as birds, window frames and celestial maps) so that we look upon them in all their strangeness. By gently thwarting customary visual expectations, Cornell takes us indirectly to the moods that troubled and intrigued him. This could be termed mere escapism, or toying with the unconscious; but it seems to be deliberate self-therapy, an experiencing of moods in order to learn to feel more adequately.