An Evening with Joseph Cornell

Lights out. Sound up: the recorded voice of professional trance medium Valerie Winborne speaks as the spirit of the seminal American artist Joseph Cornell. Cornell muses on his work, his reputation, his legacy, his dreams. Lights come up, and the authors of "An Evening with Joseph Cornell", Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick, step to the lectern. For the next hour, Walsh and Kubick lead the audience on a journey that explores biography, storytelling, spirituality, art history, and mythology.

The primary material of their performance is a series of audio recordings documenting "interviews" Walsh and Kubick conducted in 2002 with Cornell at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Professional spirit mediums were brought by Walsh and Kubick to the museum, and in the presence of Cornell's box constructions, his spirit was invoked, with the mediums serving as translators and interpreters for his messages.

"An Evening with Joseph Cornell" presents samples of the five mediums through whom Cornell communicated, framed by a Walsh and Kubick's witty and thoughtful narration, and slides of Cornell's enigmatic works, journal entries, paper ephemera, family photos, historical photos of his NYC "haunts," film stills, and related themes. The audio is a musing on Cornell the man, artist, legend, spirit. The narration includes discussion of the various ethical and practical issues involved in the making of the "Art After Death" series of which the Cornell work is a part: the odd conflation of art historians and spirit mediums; the uncanny "truths" which emerge; the meaning of "inspiration"; the ownership of an artist's legacy, and much more.

Recent performances have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, the Centre for Surrealism Studies, Essex, U.K.; ISSUE Project Room, NYC, San Francisco Art Insititute; and GrandArts, Kansas City; Royal College of Art, London.

For more on this project, please visit the page devoted to our compact disc, Visits With Joseph Cornell, volume 2 of our Art After Death series.