Joseph Cornell: Celestial Navigator

The Navigating the Imagination, the exhibition of Joseph Cornell's work at the SF Museum of Modern Art is a fantastic experience. Cornell had an omnivorous interest in almost everything - Victoriana, French literature, fairy tales and mythology, the sea, ships, astronomy and the constellations, maps and navigation, nature (especially parrots), ballerinas and film stars, childhood, games of chance, clockwork, mathematics, physics, geometry, architecture - pretty much everything except the internal combustion engine. But he combined this breadth of fancy with a monomaniacal artistic expression: collage and three-dimensional assemblages.

Unlike other artists who experimented with collage as one technique among many Cornell never painted, drew or sculpted. Assembling snippets of pictures, text and objets trouves was all he ever did. This lends the exhibition a repetitive quality which might not be to everybody's taste: if you don't like the works in the first room you might as well skip straight to the exit.

The collages are well-executed: witty, sad, poetical even whimsical. Some of his work bears a resemblance to the collages of other artists (especially Max Ernst, because of his extensive use of Victorian engravings ). The difference is that Cornell was not interested in sensationalising or shocking the viewer. He preferred to create imaginary worlds by drawing connections between apparently unrelated things. There is no political or social commentary in any of the works. They are more like a child's dreams (except for some mildly saucy female nudes in a few of his later pictures).

The boxes are a real revelation. Pictorial representations inevitably flatten them; on the printed page they might just as well be collages too. You have to see them in real life to appreciate Cornell's skill in building up layers and using perspective. Some of the boxes have removable parts or working mechanisms (obviously we're not allowed to actually handle any of them). Some of the works are terribly sad in an undefinable way. One box consists of a grid of shelves, each one holding an identical clear glass bottle containing a small blue marble; it's called An Image For Two Emil(y)ies. Other boxes are genuine amusing. Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach) features a chorus line of bright red lobsters in gauze tutus.

The texts in the works are surrealistic but coherent. One work, Museum consists of a box of small glass bottles filled with an assortment of things. On the lid of the box is a list of its contents:

Watchmaker's sweepings - Juggling act - Souvenir of Monte Carlo - Chimney sweeper's relic - Thousand & One Nights - Mayan Feathers - White landscape - From the golden temple of Dobayba (conquistador) - Sailors' game - Venetian map - Mouse material

A woman next to me commented to her companion that Cornell must have had a lot of fun building these boxes. I don't think that's the case at all. The finished products are playful, because they often refer to games and toys and his themes are the enthusiasms of a child. But they are beautiful because Cornell had an adult's eye for composition. They are resonant because they are filled with an adult's longing for the certainties and comforts of childhood. And the compulsion to produce these boxes, the obsessive collecting and organising of materials to put in them, that's plain scary and sad.

The exhibition as a whole is melancholic. It's the same feeling we get from looking at ancient ruins. The older works with faded colours and acquired patina are more sympathetic than the more recent stuff. Cornell resisted the relevance of biography in the assessment of an artist's work. Perhaps he feared what his work might say about his own life.

Instant surrealism

I googled an e-mail domain this morning to see where an OTN forum poster was (literally) coming from. When I found it was a Chinese web site I couldn't resist clicking on the Translate This Page option. It's obviously an entertainment site and a description of a movie (or several movies???) generated this cool surrealist poem:

Neat icy cold one summer with beautiful woman bright one both eyes
- < Comedian clown wonderful soldier > wears the mask ??
- " Love map " three metropolises foreign lands love
- " Fords grain language " the militarism reactionary gang history
- < Sentiment confuses forbidden fruit > the Russian desire metropolis
- " Thirstily strives for ?? " and likes to the ethyl alcohol relying on
- " The Paris person " the amphoteric war initiation disputes
- " Paris sweetheart, New York sofa " fate
- " Milk price " lover and cows
- " Red apricot leaves wall " the classical family ethics piece

Andre Breton, you should be living now!

Programming: is it an art?

Ming Chow writes in his O'Reilly blog that a computer program is no different than a novel. Hmmm. Obviously both books and programs comprise words ¹ whose organisation is governed by syntax; both are written. But as activities writing a novel and writing a program are completely different.

For a start novelists are writing a story to please themselves. Programmers, on the other hand, are writing a set of instructions for a machine to meet their users' requirements. Novelists work on their own. Programmers usually work as part of a team. This means their work has to conform to common standards and have a consistent presentation. The only writers who have to work like that are a bunch of Parisian surrealist poets playing the Exquistite Corpse game.

I would particularly take issue with this statement:

Source code should be read like a novel, and great programs should be planned so like any great novel.

I don't think source code should read like a novel. Even back in the days when I was writing COBOL the code was modular. In the modern world of object-oriented programs, loose coupling, configuration files and code re-use any resemblence to linear narrative has gone right out the window.

Furthermore, few novelists do plan their novels in any great detail. Rather they start off with an initial idea, invent a character or two and see what happens next. It's not unusual to hear a novelist say in an interview that they were surprised by what one of their characters said or did. Most have only the vaguest idea of how the plot will resolve itself until they get to the end of the book. Which, on reflection, does sound a lot like eXtreme Programming. That doesn't do lots of planning up front either.

As someone who studied history at university rather than a scientific discipline I'm alert to the possibilities of regarding programming as an art. Although there are some similarities some similarities with novel writing I would regard film-making as a much more analogous activity. There's teamwork, the studio system, the need to meet a budget, open source as a Woody Allen/Russ Meyer independent movie maker, etc. Indeed, watching Lost In La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote was just like watching a film about a computer project crashing. But writing software is primarily an engineering activity. I find I get much more insight from pondering the metaphorical implications of structural engineering, classical architecture and town planning. These all feel like activities that have a greater bearing on programming than reading a biography of Charles Dickens.

---

^{1. Except for languages like BF of course. (back)}

Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes

Sunday afternoon at the Hayward Gallery to see its new exhibition Rebecca Horn - Bodylandscapes.

To be honest, we probably wouldn't have gone to this show except for a particular confluence of events: my mother offering to baby-sit, there being nothing worth seeing at the Clapham Picture House on Sunday and my wife having an annual membership to the Hayward Gallery. So off to the German avant-garde we went! The temptation to pursue the body metaphor and describe this exhibition of multimedia installations, performance pieces and drawings as "a bunch of arse" is childish and unfair but alas irresistible.

Actually some of the pieces are rather intriguing. The room of weird costumes - a unicorn headpiece, body-sized wing-like fan - are great. The blurb talks about the influence of surrealism, alchemy, esoterica but these seem like a Martian's attempts at fetishistic bondage gear. And why not?

Alas, it's mainly downhill from there. The installations are mainly mechanical pieces (not all of them working). There is a contrast between the solidity of the actual mechanics - gears, cranks, brakes, linkages, armatures - and the vacuous portentousness of the titles. Under no circumstances should you attempt to read the poetry on the walls. Maybe it is better in German.

One piece I quite like comprises a set of armatures hung with sheets of music. A crank lifts and raises the pages like wings. It's called Floating Souls (you see what I mean about the titles). Some of the music sheets are splashed with red or black ink and a raven's feather hangs from one of the armatures. Both of these (along with eggs, books and golden pointers) are what the Guide calls "recurring motifs", the technical term for shortage of ideas. It struck me as a rather teenage attitude: the repetitious drawing of symbols on your homework was supposed to imply hermeneutic wisdom, when all you were really doing was skulking in your bedroom. Also like teenagers, Horn often uses music (ethereal synthesised drones and overtone singing) to make her seem deep.

The worst offences are the drawings. Now that I have a four-year old I am more sceptical about the artistic merit of such scrawls and splashes. The major difference between the drawings of my son and Rebecca Horn is that hers are centred whereas Fred tends to start at the left-hand of the page and work rightwards. But I could take one of his drawings, give it a label like The Paradise Bird Pierces My Heart or The Burning Gardens Of Smyrna and you might think, 'Hey! I can almost see what the artist meant!" Art is whatever someone will buy.

Funnily enough, although I didn't like most of the work I find I have quite a lot to say about it. It certainly generated more conversation than popping over to the Joshua Reynolds exhibition at the Tate would have done. Makes you think, mmmm?