Joseph Cornell

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.

A lucid dream turned nightmarish reality. A ship sinking into a world of fear. A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of America's most prolific twentieth century artists.

Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment.

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

A shorter version of Joseph Cornell's Nymphlight, an experimental film shot in New York City's Bryant Park, featuring scenes of birds, fountains, people, etc. Edited to the length of Debussy's prelude of the same name.

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"Cornell's editing has not been tampered with. It is sometimes minimal (the editing), sometimes extensive, always sensitive. I did not change it, as when I did the entire re-edit of Cornell's Legend for Fountains. JACK'S DREAM, for instance, is a puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots from other material - just enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. Whereas CARROUSEL is a fully edited animal piece. There is no way now of determining the order in which the films were made, or even the exact years, but it was some time in the '40s." -Larry Jordan in 2003

"I have not changed the editing structure. I have made the films printable. They are the first known fully collaged films, i.e., films made from found footage, and were done sometime in the ‘40s. Cornell combines Vaudeville jugglers, animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. He collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard – impossible – to describe. But it’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art." —Larry Jordan

The contents consist mostly of found footage, similar to the repurposed imagery favored by Cornell in his other films. Edited with Cornell’s distinctive splicing tape, the 23-minute film was composed by the artist sometime between 1940 and 1955.

Short film with sound by Rudy Burckhardt, assembled from the footage shot by Joseph Cornell for his own silent "Mulberry Street."

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.

An untitled Joseph Cornell film from the MOMA collection

Smoke, sparks and steam dance together in Cornell's found-footage collage. Backwards title cards (or an alien language, if you like) punctuate this mishmash of the industrial and the ancient.

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

A short film where circus performers entertain children.

A sombre day in the city. "A Legend for Fountains" is the 16-minute version, "A Fable for Fountains" the 6-minute version.

Footage shot for Cornell by Rudy Burckhardt in December 1955 of a woman buying chestnuts from a street vendor and watching people and birds in a city square.

A couple on a street corner and in a cafe, birds circling above the city street, window displays in a shop.