Stargazing

Driven into Cantor Museum by the heat, we found momentary respite in the small quiet confines—and expanses—of the museum's Cornell box, Untitled (Constellation).

I can't find an image of that particular art box, and will have to take my new digital camera with me next time I go to see it. But in the meantime I am charmed by this one, Verso of Cassiopeia 1—a seductive compilation of skycharts of the constellations and the myths they mark, overlaid on pages in Latin from Lucretius, De rerum natura, The Order of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe" (epic and Epicurian philosophical poem); and then in graceful counterpoint the mythical queen of Ethiopia, Cassiopeia, embodied in a classical statue standing between the groups of stargazers and their field of vision, stars shooting and still. Fragments of antiquity, letters reversed, worlds reflected in the glass of a telescope or in the glass of an art case.

It's possible to see a whole collection of Joseph Cornell's wonderful boxes without venturing out by visiting the WebMuseum, Paris.

And having been reminded of the irresistible lure of compelling fragments, I went back after some months away to the lovely and haunting daguerreotypes which Michael Shanks has digitized on his Web site (a vast museum in itself!), those eerie images resuscitated from the past as tentatively as the watcher's breath on window panes, entitled Ghosts in the Machine—or alternately in the mirror.


image: Joseph Cornell, Verso of Cassiopeia 1, 1960
http://josephcornell.org/boxes/index.html