On a street in Paris, just off the Place Vendôme and around the corner from the Ritz, sits a small storefront that, the other day, a passing German tourist referred to as a bordel—literally, a bordello and, figuratively, a “massive mess.” The comment was overheard, and translated, by Jasper Sharp, a British-born curator and art historian, who is partly responsible for the massive mess in question—the latest installation in one of two galleries that the New York art dealer Larry Gagosian maintains in Paris. Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for. The faux studio—part Santa’s workshop, part dank suburban toolshed, part hoarder’s paradise—may have appeared to need tidying up, but, Sharp said, “you have no idea how much work went into making it look like this.”
With the exhibit opening in just a few days, a team of eight workers was beavering away inside the gallery, moving stacks of old magazines, rearranging tchotchkes on shelves, applying a patina of grunge to new jars and boxes to make them look as if they’d been sitting in a cellar since the Eisenhower Administration. The gallery’s normally pristine white walls had been painted to resemble water-stained cinder blocks. A professional set decorator had added fake cobwebs to the corners. (Fine steel wool does the trick.) One could almost smell the mustiness.
Sharp, whose long face looks a bit like Prince William’s, was standing outside on the sidewalk fielding questions from colleagues and a stream of smartphone missives from his chief collaborator on the project—the movie director Wes Anderson, the installation’s headliner. According to Sharp, Anderson was squirrelled away on the other side of the Seine, writing a new screenplay, but responding to texted queries and photos, and biking over periodically for brief inspections. (Fans of Anderson’s movies and their retro detailing may be disappointed to learn that he rides a perfectly modern high-tech sort of bike, not a vintage Schwinn or an iron-and-wood velocipede.)
One of Anderson’s late-breaking suggestions had been to mount the installation’s fifteen Cornell boxes close to the gallery’s windows, so that viewers can practically press their noses up against them (although a stern Gagosian employee in a black puffer jacket will likely discourage that). It’s hard to describe Cornell’s work, which is playful, allusive, and deeply personal. Some of his boxes look like miniature cabinets of curiosities, others like Surrealist dioramas, windows into dreamlike worlds. Their wit and whimsical theatricality have an obvious echo in the droll, stylized staging of Anderson’s films. Sharp had consulted on Anderson’s most recent film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” wangling real paintings—including a Renoir and a Magritte—to be hung on the set representing the baronial home of a dodgy industrialist played by Benicio del Toro. Knowing that Anderson has an affinity for Cornell (the exterior of the title locale in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was inspired by a Cornell box), Sharp suggested a collaboration when he pitched a show on the artist to Gagosian. Because Anderson spends most of his time in the French capital, Sharp further suggested that the show be held in Paris if they “wanted to rope Wes in.” Gagosian agreed; so did Anderson. In essence, Sharp said, they were turning the gallery’s shallow first-floor space into a “ginormous Cornell box” of their own.
Cornell’s actual studio was in the basement of a house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, where the artist lived for most of his adult life, along with his mother and a brother who needed caretaking, owing to cerebral palsy. (Cornell has been misdescribed as a recluse, but he did stay close to home.) The studio’s contents had been scattered after his death, in 1972, so putting the whole thing back together again, as scrupulously as circumstances permitted, was a feat both curatorial and imaginative. Old photographs and archives were consulted, and, of the thousands of objects on display at Gagosian, more than three hundred belonged to Cornell (including a View-Master and a Smith Corona typewriter); the rest, Sharp said, were either “reverse engineered”—like a wall of boxes labelled by a pair of sign painters Anderson knew, who spent weeks studying Cornell’s handwriting—or sourced from eBay, Etsy, local flea markets, and Sharp’s father-in-law’s workshop, in Salzburg.
Curators are trained to be sticklers for detail, and Sharp seemed mildly embarrassed by what others might view as perfectly understandable compromises—a “question of poetic artifice,” as he put it. Will civilians care that the box of Rinso soap powder on display is not the exact box that used to sit on Cornell’s sink? “There’s a bit of forgiveness baked into the whole thing, maybe, or a request for forgiveness, because we’re not in Queens,” Sharp admitted. The twinkling of elaborate Christmas lights swaddling a nearby Louis Vuitton store underscored the point. ♦
