This work came with a description email to our project email address (watchable@ ) that said this:
“I put out a recreation of a Joseph Cornell box at the Brooklyn site. He was facinated by surreal imaginary space, and used his creations as a means to that end. Mr. Cornell would have liked SL, I too make space ships
and am a filmmaker in SL, doucumenting my life there.
Enjoy, and thank you for your curiorsity. Pen C”
I’m a big fan of Joseph Cornell, and i go visit the ones they have at the MoMA whenever I can. He used the means of the dadaists to the ends of the surrealists, and part of what always gets to me about his work is the particulars of how everything was arranged- there’s a lot of love in them- how the parts are arranged just so.
It seems to me that a big part of what creates the romantic attachment to his work in my heart is the fact that these were mostly found objects. Each object had its own (unknown) history and was picked up in a thrift store or whatever and then Joseph found a home for them and put them into evocative relationship with other things.
Now it occurs to me that Penumbra’s Box kind of feels like a tribute to Cornell’s boxes when it could be more interesting if it tried to take on the challenge of doing in SL what Cornell did in RL all those years ago. Lets say you took a bunch of “found objects” — maybe you could get them over at the giant trash pile commissioned by Rhizome, and lovingly situated them in some way so that they were evocative… This is kind of what the hobo living room we talked about on podcast 12 did.
Maybe that’s what Penumbra has done here…. I’m not sure, the picture of the Vermeer could be a found object, the sign from a hotel.. i’m not sure if this is a duplication of a particular Box or not…. on no, i guess it alludes to this one.
Anyway- to me it more points the way to something really interesting rather than feeling like its actually arrived itself at interestingville…. but i’m curious to know what the rest of you think.
there are some subtle and interesting things happening in Penumbra’s box- and an exciting question raised about virtual world applications of real world ideas…
the box itself has some intriguing details- and I think the way it was built speaks more of care and obsessiveness than the overall result
makes readily apparent…
a box like this could have easily been made with a dozen prims or so, all the work being done in the texture-making part of the process (built-in shadows, changes of pattern, even the holes in the top beam)- but instead, the artist has primmed and aligned every detail- it’s quite a little puzzle if you look at the way it’s constructed.
I think that lends a bit of the “the parts are arranged just so” element to it.
I really like this sort of work, I always got a big kick out of Louise Nevelson’s found object assemblages, and I think it’s a neat idea to take these techniques one step further by making them out of “found” virtual objects- but also a much greater challenge, in some ways, because of how the objects are made…
I think the Nevelson technique of painting everything the same color would at least address the “technicolor jello salad” issue that building out of SL objects might create.
so yah, this work took me on a little trip to interestingville, (I can geek out a little on art history…) and I think its subtlety is in line with the sort of work Cornell produced.
nifty.
Left by Hollow Prim on July 14th, 2008