The art that we find Jackson making in his studio with colorful palettes, sifting light inside a thicket of shapes, shows him to have been a minor master worthy of a midlife portrait of himself by himself. Instead of applying makeup, he daubs flesh tones from a palette to form a cheek on the canvas set before him. He lends himself vigor and authority, like Bozzini before him crafting a self-portrait—endoscopists as anachronistic Renaissance men—or like an Emersonian self-reliant man whose becoming a doctor is most fully realized in becoming an artist who can picture himself as such. He could be Velázquez in his studio in a photo taken at Old Sunrise Mills, or Vermeer with one modern accoutrement—a telephone (see figure 41). In the photograph, Jackson wears one kind of collar, the kerchief of an artist, and paints himself wearing another kind of collar, the starched formal-wear of the accomplished man. He reserved for in-person encounters the less subdued purple collar of his lab coat, the color of a priesthood: it’s the regal hue of those inducted into the French Legion of Honor.
In his autobiography, Jackson broaches the possibility of an aesthetic philosophy whereby “nature and art are diametrically opposed to each other” (LCJ, 197). The kind of fascination produced by an encounter with the natural world, he concludes, cannot be reproduced in a painting, and when a viewer “appreciates” a landscape painting, it’s not the infinitude of nature that astounds him but something that he does not go on to describe or to name. To say that art can only approximate nature is one thing, but to say that art and nature are “diametrically opposed” presumes that they cancel out or negate one another. Jackson may have believed this where his landscape painting was concerned—that it was a poor imitation of a finitude—but then his landscape painting doesn’t venture much by way of the sublime: one step away from conventional genre painting, his landscapes are usually resolved, balanced, flatly harmonious, and even quaint. They are indeed, “appreciations” of nature rather than investigations of it. Art and nature are allowed to overlap, whether Jackson knew it or not, in the marvelously weird medical illustrations—sometimes in charcoal, other times pastel, often in oil—that he made of the views through his scopes.
Fig. 39. One of numerous black-and-white photographs of Chevalier Jackson’s oil paintings donated to the Smithsonian Institution by Jackson’s granddaughter Joan Jackson Bugbee. In Jackson’s handwriting, on verso: “A Woodland Path, Sycamores in fall folliage [sic] Morning Effect, Arroyo, Pasadena, 25 × 30.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History.
This strictly endoscopic art (see figures 7, 8, 11, and 33) is a kind of genre painting all its own and of a moment. The first acceptable color photographs of the insides of the stomach weren’t produced until 1937. This was about the time of Jackson’s formal retirement; insofar as he remained active for the next twenty years, he continued to work by way of the naked eye rather than the camera eye, the hand that draws the body forth rather than the camera that records what it sees. Yet his illustrations in some cases can be compared to the first medical photographs of any kind: the microscopic daguerreotypes made by Dr. Alfred Donné of Paris in 1839, later improved upon by Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward of Philadelphia and assistant surgeon Edward Curtis during the Civil War, described by Gretchen Worden in her introduction to the book Mütter Museum: Historical Medical Photographs, in which exquisite examples appear.
Fig. 40. From a black-and-white photograph donated to the Smithsonian Institution by Jackson’s granddaughter Joan Jackson Bugbee. In Jackson’s handwriting, on verso: “Yvonne, Portrait of my daughter when 12 year old, painted in 1922. 25 × 32.” Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History.
Rather than attaching a camera to the microscope, Woodward and Curtis made the microscope into a camera. The room was dimmed save for a thread of sunlight that streamed through a tiny hole they drilled into a shuttered window. Directing this beam through the scope and focusing it on a photosensitive plate, they coaxed along a finely tuned alchemical process that they timed with a metronome set to strike at one-second intervals. Much like Jackson, photomicrographers would magnify the images of what they saw microscopically but maintain the perfect circle or aperture as the picture’s frame so as to accentuate the specialized vantage afforded by the technology, as if to remind a viewer that, from inside the furtive purchase of a peephole, the world is not what it seems.
Fig. 41. Chevalier Jackson at work on a self-portrait in the summer kitchen at Old Sunrise Mills. Courtesy of Parks and Heritage Services, County of Montgomery, Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Presented with a photomicrograph, you first think what you are seeing is a bit of the natural world—a beautiful landscape painting of delicate boughs interspersed with trunks through a break in the clouds—only to learn that this is a magnified micrographic image of the blood vessels of the human retina injected with silver nitrate. From the vantage of the pho - tomicrograph and of Jackson’s endoscopic illustrations, art and nature do not oppose each other but meet, and they do so at the threshold of the body. When the effect of the photomicrograph or the medical illustration is to confuse anatomy with nature, Jackson’s aesthetic dictum must be revised, because art in these instances does not oppose nature but interprets nature. Here it locates nature inside the human body. In both cases, the technology creates affiliations and likenesses, tempting us to imagine, if not believe, that human anatomy at its minutest level mimics the sublime arrangements of forms found in nature and faithfully depicted in landscape painting. Through portals that display human physiology as a kind of “nature scene,” fascination bests appreciation; or art hints at an infinitude reserved for nature at the threshold of the body.
Take, for example, a typical set of illustrations of the larynx (and a few of the bronchus) rendered by Jackson in black and white, each image set at the exact same distance apart and arranged in rows of a, b, c, and d. In every case, it is the same feature represented, and not the same feature; in each case, it is the same bit of physiology, and not the same bit of physiology (see figure 42). Something is altered, something is changed, something is distinctly different and yet the same, and we glimpse it in the interval between each image as though we were watching seriated film stills. It is clear from the protuberances and suppurations apparent in every still that we are being made to look at symptoms of disease—to remark, “This is what disease looks like”—yet it’s impossible not to see each image as an image, see each depiction as art, and beautiful as such. As each image departs in this way from one kind of knowledge and toward another, it seems imitative, familiar. From another point of view, these images also look like pathways into mines into which a coal cart could enter at any time. These black-and-white illustrations are studies in vibrating shadows. What is it about them that makes them seem so much more than detached parts? Pulsing, each becomes an organism unto itself—part of a self, yes, but more than a self. Other. If, in one image, arteries resemble branches rising toward the horizon, exactly what kind of scape are we seeing through the scope? Endoscopic art is made of images that make the eye want to peer inside, to look inside, to find something there, to look for what is lurking beyond the throat and into the stomach, anatomy’s (or nature’s?) mysterious keyhole.
Fig. 42. Seriated endoscopic views, mostly of the (diseased) larynx, black-and-white media, by Chevalier Jackson. Collection of the Mütter Museum, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
After day of typical futility shaved and put on a good pair of trousers to go over to Fort Totten waterfront to find some glasses for sand boxes washed in from the Sound.... Some fine pieces of jetsam—one especially a toy metal horse beautifully corroded, lead with green and reddish coloring after the sea change . . .
—JOSEPH CORNELL, diary entry, October 5, 1945
Creative filing
Creative arranging
As poetics
As joyous creation
—JOSEPH CORNELL, diary entry, March 9, 1959
Inserting Chevalier Jackson into a history of art, we
might think immediately to pair him with his near-contemporary, the Philadelphia realist par excellence and depicter of Samuel Gross in his famous clinic, the painter-anatomist Thomas Eakins. The artist whom his work and even his life most echoes, though, is not Eakins, but the modernist master of portals and maker of assemblages: the American visionary, untrained artist, woodworker, collector, metaphysician of ephemera, and box-maker Joseph Cornell.
The ur-scene of a Cornellian art opens onto an Alice in Wonderland playspace—a party at which the cake is more than it seems. It’s edible and inedible, tantalizing and secretive, enchanting and surprising, more lasting than icing or sugar-shaped flowers. It leaves each child with an object to cherish. It marks each child as separate and distinct, and makes each child feel part of a whole. It’s not a cake at all, in fact, but a pie—the Little Jack Horner pie (a specialty of Cornell’s mother, according to his biographer Deborah Solomon), which is nothing more than a paper box filled with tissue-wrapped favors: “a colorful ribbon led from each plate to the gift-filled ‘pie,’ so that everyone at the table could become the Jack Horner of the age-old nursery rhyme, pulling out a plum.” Bullied as a child, Chevalier Jackson would claim as an adult to eschew such sport. He would be horrified by a device that encourages the immanence of objects in appetite—all things are secretly edible—even if his own pleasing arrangement of swallowed Things is just such a pie for any visitor who opens its drawers in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.
Cornell delivered gift packages to children in hospitals that were filled with assortments of “dimestore objets” and designed the last exhibit of his art for children: he set the boxes at a child’s height and served cherry soda instead of champagne. Child-identified Cornell thought like a child, according to the filmmaker Marjorie Keller, revisiting childhood games, investigating the special nature of the object that is the toy—especially the toy that has been forgotten, abandoned, no longer played with, the toy sans child as remnant. The Cornell box is a toy that museums don’t allow adults (or children) to handle but only to view.
Joseph Cornell and Chevalier Jackson meet for dinner as adults—not really, because neither went in much for dinner or for socializing. They meet for sweets. They both existed on food reserved for childhood—in Cornell’s case, a diet of cookies and pies, pudding and donuts, Jell-O and chocolate éclairs; in Jackson’s, according to Alice in a letter to his mother, “fried mush with bacon fat and brown sugar like he used to eat when a little boy. He still gets his angel cake with the candy icing.” Is artistic genius dependent on a sweet tooth, or a refusal fully to “grow up”?
Like Jackson, Cornell started out as a collector of objects but soon became a maker of objects, as he called most of his early work, and then a maker of boxes inside which he arranged said objects in marvelous ways. “Sculptor” doesn’t describe Cornell, nor “painter,” but “assembler,” whose foragings and arrangements made mere objects into Things that delicately dramatized states of being. Like Jackson, Cornell might have been an artist, but he regularly described his studio as a laboratory.
Are those bingo chips amid the birds inside of a box? What kinship can be struck between bingo chip and bird? Is that box a bird-gullet inside of which bingo chips are stuck? Inside a Cornell box, bingo chips and birds discuss the difference between tumbling and flying; they relate at the level of gravity. In a Cornell box, someone has made art out of what was thrown up by the sea onto the shore—bits of coral, driftwood, and glass. Those objects that Cornell or Jackson collected, studied, framed, cherished, rescued, and arranged can only be so big. They can only be as big as a human stomach can handle.
Both Jackson and Cornell were ascetic accumulators whose self-denial only attenuated their sensuous gifts rather than tamping them down. They were both obsessive cross-indexers. Cornell’s work has been compared to the music of Debussy and Charles Ives, the poetry of Gérard de Nerval and Mallarmé, and the visual art of Ernst and Duchamp. Jackson has been compared to no one, but he should be compared to Joseph Cornell.
While best known for his boxes, Cornell also made collages. A letter from him might take the form of an intricate enfolding—a translucent envelope with the word “tinsel” inside but visible from the outside, and on the outside, the message “no need to open.” Cornell witnessed “acts of sudden grace” and gathered “blue dense,” bits of glass in his favorite color. He produced extensions and explorations, dossiers and constellations—a concept borrowed from Mallarmé, an infinitely expandable file box of items focused on a single burning issue, a group of trivial items linked to a grander philosophical system—in Dore Ashton’s words, “the centripetal force of a topic spreading out into luminous expansion.” Jackson’s three-ring binders with Naugahyde covers, mechanical workbooks, and fbdy X-ray albums—might they be his own brand of dossier?
Jackson places a teddy bear eye next to a tiny hinge, which lies next to a foreign coin inside a series of frames inside a drawer (see figure 21). Cornell fills a chest with tiny blue-capped bottles containing, according to a list on the box’s inside lid, watchmaker’s sweepings, juggling acts, souvenirs of Monte Carlo, chimney sweeper’s relics, Mayan panthers, white landscapes, and Venetian maps. Or is it “Venetian naps”? Each is a manuscript found in a bottle, à la Poe, or the deposit of castaways on a sand-swept shore, though Cornell calls the box a Museum. Of course, questions of contain-ability are at the heart of Cornell’s work, of diminution and expansion, of dream logic and an investigatory faculty.
It’s too simple a thing to conclude that objects are trapped in Jackson’s assemblages and liberated in Cornell’s, but the status of jackstones (aka jacks) offers an interesting case in point. You put a coin into a machine and it delivers a prize. You drop a penny into a slot, crank a handle, and watch a moving picture show. The penny arcades of New York inspired a series of gamelike boxes for Cornell, many of which feature the images of Renaissance boys and girls, members of the Medici family in particular. Often enough, a jack appears in the drawer or in the unswept corner of such a box.
Jackson’s work featured a jack-in-lung and Cornell’s a jack-in-drawer; Jackson studied the sounds that lungs make while Cornell, filling a drawer with ball bearings and springs, invited a meditation on the sound a drawer’s mechanics produces, the sound of drawers as such. Filling a drawer with sand, he invited a listening to the sound of the objects nestled inside drawers rattling and hissing, shifting and sifting when the drawer was opened. Opening a drawer is like opening a mouth, and the question of whether silence or language will issue therefrom is an either/or that invites more possibility than the tight-lipped terror of a knobless drawer (of which there are some). A jack jostles inside a drawer or gleams silver and red like a chocolate kiss seen through a tiny window. They orient a Renaissance boy at points to the right and left of his box.
A part of a jack in Jackson’s images is caught in the undertow of the alimentary canal. It’s a jack that can’t be burped up or coughed up but sticks like a stubborn weapon, in place. Inside Jackson’s drawers, a jack resists its fixed placement: it’s difficult to sew one in place with its points splayed in all directions (see figure 21). Here’s where Jackson departs from Cornell, because our doctor places in order to secure. Consequently, his objects are stripped of their threat but not of their menace: to pin them down is to bestow them with a vague and ambient danger, an auratic if not literal power inside a boundless fascinational field.
The prototypes of jackstones or “chackstones” (stones to be tossed) have been found in the prehistoric caves of ancient Greece and Ukraine, but before the six-pronged iron types, they were fashioned from the knucklebones of animals. Jackson’s jackstones seem nearer to those jacks made from cartilage, tinged with physiology and then shuffled like stacks of skulls in an ossuary, whereas Cornell’s jacks have the hand and the eye and the movement in mind of the game from which jacks hail, a game in which one act must be completed while another is suspended in midair.
Consider the uncanny likeness
between the plates that figure in Jackson’s Diseases of the Air and Food Passages of Foreign-Body Origin and a box made by Cornell categorized as a Forgotten Game, circa 1949 (see figures 33 and 43). Jackson’s portals arranged inside a boxlike frame, his medical illustrations of caught f bdies, certainly seem like versions of Cornell’s rows of bird-filled circles—or is it the other way around ? In place of vocal cords or cartilaginous bridges, Cornell places perches made of tiny dowels; every hole exposes not the view through a bodily canal but a nut-hatch, enclosing the sound an animal makes inside walls, the sound of contained fluttering. Cornell’s circles telescope down, as the images they capture grow more vast. They wend large to small to large again. They dilate incrementally, like a harmonic or mathematical order, whereas Jackson’s circles are like soap bubbles of different sizes, a menagerie ascending and descending in size, seemingly haphazard. Jackson’s circles are marked with numbers that seem arbitrarily out of order except that this same exact idiosyncratic numbering sequence (1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 5, 8, 6, 9) repeats in other illustration plates in the book. This could recommend the numbered cups on a Skee-Ball machine—that game of part skill, part luck—or a pattern that only he can master.
Jackson’s illustration is accompanied by an explanatory text, while Cornell’s title calls forth a narrative that we can only make up. In what sense is the game to which Cornell’s box refers “forgotten”? Is it forgotten because it has been abandoned, and do we therefore apprehend a halo of loss and neglect around the box, the unplayed game, stripped now of its original pleasure? Or is the game forgotten because this kind of fun, this sort of pleasure-making device, has gone out of style? Is it forgotten because amnesia has set in around a particular form of violence—the violence of the shooting gallery as a stand-in for some other form of 1940s violence (notice that the shooter seems to have hit and missed, shattering the glass in the game’s lower right corner). Or forgotten because we’ve forgotten what birds can tell us about weather—an impending storm, say. Forgotten Game cross-references Cornell’s Dovecote series, although it also fits squarely inside the Slot Machine or Penny Arcade series, which in turn cross-references the Aviaries and Hotels series.
Mary Cappello Page 29
