If Cornell felt released by box-making he also felt confined by it. The very metaphor of imprisonment and hoped-for release is evident throughout his production. It was as if he were looking out from Plato’s shadowy cave towards the purer light beyond, glimpsed but never attained. Gallery owner David Mann reported the following conversation with Cornelclass="underline" “I once praised a new group of things that he was working on and he said, ‘I’m glad you find them beautiful’ and then he became very sort of depressed. I said well that’s a funny way to take a compliment and he said ‘you don’t know how terrible it is to be locked into boxes all your life, you have no idea what a terrible thing it is’”.27 In other words, the boxes alone did not assuage spiritual desire, or even always meet his esthetic demands. By giving disciplined form to feelings and impulses, they were no more conclusive as to spiritual states than were journal entries reporting “moments of being”. Cornell was extremely demanding of himself, each new achievement a way-station on a journey into the unknown. He may not have studied Plotinus’s Sixth Tractate: Beauty but he would have completely agreed with it: “Let the Soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it ... Our interpretation is that the Soul—by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being—when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight ... We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion with Ideal Form”.28 Plotinus’s idealism resonates with the best of Cornell’s practice, however faltering his own verbal articulations of purpose may have been. Scholarly discussions of the inherent beauty of form in materials was not for Cornell, but his intuitions were a reliable enough guide. Cornell was expected by dealers serving an eager public to manufacture yet more wondrous boxes. Yet to satisfy a market was far from his purpose, and the demands and restrictions he chaffed against were his own. He had trouble relinquishing boxes as finished specimens and was known to call them back from owners for modifications. An unresolved box that had been around too long became an encumbrance on his journey. A compulsive collector, nonetheless Cornell had to clear the way ahead by relinquishing even his most cherished achievements, and the commercial world was there to free him for yet another try at the ineffable.
We should be realistic about both the incentives towards, and the limitations placed upon, Cornell’s creative endeavor. Becoming a visionary of the Plotinian Nous was really an impossibility, not only because of crass America around him—he deplored how real estate development on Long Island destroyed nature—but because of his own psychology. Unresolved developmental hardships spurred the creative effort while also impeding its highest reaches. Christian Science taught self-abnegation, even elimination of personality, as if that were possible. Plotinus taught much the same, with similar (though more excusable) neglect of motivating psychological conflicts. it is the course of Cornell’s developmentally-caused attachment conflicts that we are trying to elucidate in order to better appreciate the attainments and limitations of his art. Without being overly formulaic, it can be suggested that Cornell’s creative psyche was a product of: (a) depression-inducing unmourned childhood loss of father; (b) developmentally learned and internalized avoidant attachment to mother; (c) obsessive-controlling manifestation of sadness and avoidance, leading to techniques to manage externality by keeping persons (and things) within his control so as to protect his vulnerable, unrealized personhood. in other words, a survival strategy was built up to operate automatically, and thus unawares, in the face of challenges. (it can be suggested that much this same formula applies, in some degree, to the other three artists studied here. While their work differs enormously in range and quality, the underlying defensive motivation is virtually homologous.)
Cornell’s limitations are palpable. Attraction to, and avoidance of, female allure was never understood, let alone overcome. one of his most disturbing images is Sequestered Bower (1948) a scarcely adolescent naked female doll, restrained around the waist and lodged between two vice-like gnarled pieces of wood. This doll reminds Jodi Hauptman of Hans Bellmer’s perverse Poupees. She comments, “Although far less violent, Cornell shows in this work similar attempts to ‘master’ his desire”.29 This doll is more threatened than Bebe Marie who is more lost in an entanglement than menaced from outside. Yet Bebe Marie—to which Cornell was especially attached because made from an actual doll purloined from a female cousin—is also a kind of idealized fetish kept in a box. There is an implicit confession that the fascination is not quite grown up since, like many adolescents of the time,
Cornell could only worship girls at a safe distance, not encounter them as persons in their own right. As we have seen, he also adored and fetishized glamorous, but distant, movie stars. Wish for obsessive control and subsequent guilt feelings went much beyond this when Cornell followed girls sighted in the streets. The girls he fancied were sometimes embarrassed by his strange sort of attention. It is reported that he was “hounded by police because of his infatuation with young women and girls”, that he failed to understand the girls’ alarm when he thrust gifts into their hands, tributes to their youthful beauty and innocence, he believed. He might phone girls late at night or offer “quirky cartoon drawings of the male organ distorted into the shape of a snail”.30 These were not the deeds of a saint, or even of a saint-to-be, and Cornell’s erotic feelings, while easing with time, remained entangled. He may never have caused any young female to fear for her safety, but he too often conveyed a sense of weird menace that was never understood.
If the psychobiographical task remains incomplete, its essentials have been assembled. We are unlikely to learn in detail about Cornell’s earliest relations with his mother. It is too easy simply to label her a “pathogenic parent”, she too meriting compassionate understanding. The interactions preparing for his life-long avoidance and tendency to dismiss attachments are indistinct from this distance. Further, we would like to know how the dead husband and father was remembered, how he was spoken about by the survivors. To what extent did grandparents substitute for his loss? Even Robert is something of an enigma, and verbatim reports of exchanges with brother Joe would be valuable. Growing up with two sisters could also be problematic for Joe’s sexual adaptation. These sibling ties are, at best, sketchy. Temptation should be resisted to invent interactions for which evidence is scant. But the depressiveness, avoidant and dismissing tendencies, obsessions and inhibited predatory sexual urges are palpable. They carried risk of mental illness had creative counter-measures not been taken. By turning to Christian Science, then to an art of visionary wonder, Cornell self-regulated depressive moods and invoked impersonal healing forces. Archetypal reality was brought to his assistance through the boxes and collages which re-assembled an imagery of nature and the rare objects he collected. Cornell knew that his task was to write integrating narrative and to invoke healing archetypes, which emerged naturally from the story he told himself in the journal. The creative process was thus continuous, drawing on cultural resources in art, literature and music as it went along. By activating the psyche’s self-righting and healing resources, dangerous pathology was averted. It is sometimes said that because Cornell did not paint, sculpt or even draw, he wasn’t strictly an artist. In this respect he followed Marcel Duchamp away from the tried and true tradition of western art. Cornell nevertheless got to the essence of art as self-healing which is why he will always fascinate when so much else is forgotten.