A CultureGrrl reader who is a curator at a major museum but felt he could not allow me to use his name without permission from his institution’s communications department (which should tell you which museum it is—see third item in above-linked post) chided me for not mentioning, in my recent Peabody Essex report, what he called “the best Joseph Cornell book.”
It’s the 2003 Joseph Cornell Shadowplay…Eterniday, above, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan (curator of the Peabody Essex show), Walter Hopps, Richard Vine and Robert Lehrman. My anonymous correspondent seemed even more enthusiastic about the book’s companion multimedia tour de force, The Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell.
He called the latter “one of the greatest interactive DVDs on an artist.” It allows users to “turn hundreds of boxes around, zoom in on them, watch clips of their interactive features being demonstrated (sand being poured, balls rolling around), browse through his boxes of ephemera and materials, listen to interviews and watch excerpts from his films. It is like being able to handle everything he ever made. It is also exquisitely designed.”
Indeed, as I was scrutinizing the boxes, I was acutely aware that I was missing the crucial dimensions of manipulation and movement that were amply described in the labels but could not be experienced in devices that were, of necessity, immobilized in museum cases.
Now will someone please allow the Met’s curators to be interactive?
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's cultural commentary
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