It's hard to do justice to the charm and power of Joseph Cornell's boxes. His reliance on collage, indifference to technical display, and Surrealist mining of private obsession make him very much a modern artist, yet his work also brings to mind bourgeois parlors, the tidy vitrines of collectors, and the odds and ends children carry around for comfort and distraction. It is an art at once hermetic and matter-of-fact, sophisticated and simple. Appropriately, this study is neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell's art nor a merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text: written by Simic ( Hotel Insomnia ), one of our best poets, it includes his own poems and reminiscences, as well as quotations from a variety of other writers. Simic mingles biography and critical discussion with selections of writings from the artist's notebooks. The book emerges as a piece of writing constructed along the enigmatic lines of Cornell's art. And that art, as Simic sees it, gathers from the scattered pieces of the American past a new, redeeming reality; at heart, this art is a religious practice. Only seemingly random, Simic's approach develops both the plain detail of Cornell's life and illuminates the nature of his work. Illustrations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"
Dime-Store Alchemy . . . is the most sustained literary response this
far to Cornell's boxes, montages, and films . . . Incisive,
freewheeling, dramatic?a mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid
and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates . . .
Dime-Store Alchemy is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art." --Edward
Hirsch,
The New Yorker "
Dime-Store Alchemy is a collection of crystalline paragraphs, of
irreplaceable miniatures, it is an act of homage, an ideal commentary,
suffused with the peculiar charm, the oneiric energy of its subject, it
is pure illumination, Simic at his very best." --Mark Strand
"A beautiful book that evokes Cornell's artistic spirit." --
Harper's
Bazaar "It's hard to do justice to the charm and power of Joseph Cornell's
boxes. His reliance on collage, indifference to technical display, and
Surrealist mining of private obsession make him very much a modern
artist, yet his work also brings to mind bourgeois parlors, the tidy
vitrines of collectors, and the odds and ends children carry around for
comfort and distraction. It is an art at once hermetic and
matter-of-fact, sophisticated and simple. Appropriately, this study is
neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell's art nor a
merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text:
written by Simic ( Hotel Insomnia ), one of our best poets, it includes
his own poems and reminiscences, as well as quotations from a variety
of other writers. Simic mingles biography and critical discussion with
selections of writings from the artist's notebooks. The book emerges as
a piece of writing constructed along the enigmatic lines of Cornell's
art. And that art, as Simic sees it, gathers from the scattered pieces
of the American past a new, redeeming reality; at heart, this art is a
religious practice. Only seemingly random, Simic's approach develops
both the plain detail of Cornell's life and illuminates the nature of
his work." -
-Publisher's Weekly
