NARRATOR: This is just a little box lined with paper cut from sky charts and maps of constellations. In it you see a few small objects: a cork ball, some glasses. Yet the artist, Joseph Cornell, has given this small work a large title: he calls it Celestial Navigation.
DEBORAH SOLOMON: He is trying to remind us of the transporting character of the heavens. The way they can carry us someplace else and move us through space in our minds.
NARRATOR: Deborah Solomon is author of a biography of Joseph Cornell. She points out that he led a life which, from the outside, must have seemed quiet, even boring.
SOLOMON: He was the great homebody of the twentieth century. For most of his life he lived with his mother and his handicapped brother in their small framed house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Cornell was no bohemian, just a gaunt man in drab clothes whose days were spent mainly in his basement workshop.
NARRATOR: Yet Cornell traveled great distances in his imagination.
SOLOMON: On countless nights, Cornell stood in his backyard looking up at the heavens and felt transported by that experience. And he was scientifically knowledgeable about the constellations. He could walk into his backyard and identify the individual constellations, but, of course, that is not the feeling we take away from his work. It’s not a science lesson. The works really are about the experience of daydreaming. And that was pretty much how Cornell spent his life.
