Blue Horizon; Photo. More Ascender’s Photos.

~~~

Still lurking behind the stars,
31 August 1995 …
The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes
In the landscape,
such things, such avenues, lead to dust
And handle our hurt with ease.
Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue
waters above the earth:
Why do the great stories always exist in the past?

Black Zodiac by Charles Wright

Bird On A Wire, Pasadena Style; Photo.

I’ve done so many “birds on a wire” – here’s a unique angle; beneath a hummingbird on a wire in Pasadena. As difficult of an angle this was to get; it is going to be a bit more difficult to get the top of a bird on a wire. I grabbed this shot when we visited the Huntington Museum over Labor Day.

I was intrigued with this detailed bird on a post in the Virgina Steele Scott Gallery of American Art . This is an untitled collage by Joseph Cornell completed in 1967. I liked this feeling of being set in concrete and wondered how he created that.

Cornell worked on several pieces at one time and could take years to complete a piece. He began a series of clocks honoring the death his brother, Robert. The clock pieces reference the theme of mortality in general, while birds are symbolic of the soul’s ability to transcend earthly bounds. The clock sharing the same space as the bird; a space occupied by the constellation Cassiopeia. Brother Robert, crippled by Cerebral Palsy, enjoyed looking out the windows at the birds.

Another piece by Cornell, also Untitled – later to be identified as “Joyce Hunter“, an 18 year old waitress who “embodied his feminine ideal”. In September 1964 Hunter was arrested for stealing nine assemblages from Cornell’s garage, found murdered in New York in December. It was then that Cornell memorialized her in collage. Here she is surrounded by foreign newspapers suggesting she is in a far away place. On the back of the piece Cornell pasted a picture of a knife, fork and spoon referring to Hunter’s job at the diner.

“A teenage runaway and single mother from Pennsylvania … became Cornell’s first girlfriend, despite being forty years younger than him, and the elderly maker of collage and box assemblage renamed her “Tina” in his voluminous journals, praising her “adorable earnestness” and giving her several of his works as gifts (which she promptly sold, behind his back, to a private art dealer). She dropped out of his life in May 1962, and a lovelorn Cornell created his “Penny Arcade” collage series to commemorate the affair. In September 1964, Hunter and a new boyfriend raided Cornell’s unlocked garage and stole nine of his boxes; the artist reluctantly filed charges with the police, and Hunter’s arrest on September 18th made that day’s New York Times. Still smitten with the young woman, Cornell refused to testify against his one-time love and even attempted to bail her out of jail. Without the cooperation of the artist charges against Hunter, and her boyfriend were first reduced, then dropped altogether. Hunter met amiably with Cornell at least once after that, but two months to the day after her arrest, she was murdered by a mentally unstable acquaintance in her room at the Hotel Breton Hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The murderer, Lawrence “Frenchie” French, plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and later died in prison. Hunter’s family showed no interest in claiming her body, and only Cornell’s intervention saved her from a city burial in a pauper’s grave. Though Cornell never put up a stone at the gravesite he purchased for Hunter, he made many visits to the grave over the last nine years of his life, and retained his collaborator, Larry Jordan, to make a short film of the unmarked plot.” (findagrave)

Sad on so many levels

Here is the last piece … with my reflection in it. (Now I am memorialized by Cornell!). Untitled in 1969. This is the quince tree that stood in the backyard of his childhood home.

On the back of his pieces Cornell recorded his struggles to create this collage. Initially he rejected the piece, finally finishing it in ‘69. An obsessive collector of objects and experiences Cornell fills his diaries with minute observations of the world around him. (Having done a few collages, my Scatterlings etc, I have found that one has no choice but to become an obsessive collector of randomness!) He often wrote of the activity of the birds and squirells that visted the quince tree and the changes in the tree during seasons. On the day that he completed this he noted that jays and a sparrow had squabbled in the snow covered branches

I like the idea of recording struggles on the back of each piece. I wonder how often artists do this?

Need more of my birds on wires (plus assorted objects)? Check out these:

(Hitchcock) Bird On A Wire I,

(Let’s Talk) Bird On A Wire II,

(Leonard Cohen) Bird On A Wire III

(Heard It From A Friend…) Bird On A Wire IV

(Water Soaked) Bird On a Wire V

(Tangled Up) Bird On a Wire VII

(On Edge) Bird On A Wire VIII

(Twitter/Tweeter) Bird On a Wire IX

(Uninvited Guest) Bird On a Wire X

(Let’s Do Lunch) Bird On a Wire XI

(Birds Of A Feather) Bird On a Wire XII

(High Wire) Bird on a Wire XIII

(Bird Over A Wire) Bird On A Wire XIV

(Bird On A… Post) Bird on a Wire XV

(Bird On A Branch… and off) Bird On a Wire XVI

(Blessed By A Bird) Bird On a Wire XVII

(Bird Screameing on a porch) Bird On a Wire XVIII

(Bird In A Bath) Bird On A Wire XIX