Christine Krol’s Sherman Boxes@ 450 Broadway Gallery

Jamey Hecht


“O God, I could be bounded in a nut
shell

and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have bad dreams...”

HAMLET, Act II, Scene ii

 Joseph Cornell made box art into a viable
artform that transcended craft. In all their joyful tenderness, his cabinets
were indirectly descended from 19th Century museum installations, those grim
specimen cases in which butterflies and moths, for instance, were permanently
pinned to the back wall. This was a tidy triumph of positivism, that caught so
many wildly ethereal insects, labeled them in  Latin, and locked them in
transparent shrines to science. But like all the projects of the Enlightenment,
this one turned upon its own designers: to reduce nature to an inert field of
specimens is to imprison oneself in a permanent economy of scarcity. A “natural
history” like that one develops alongside a “sociology” (a term
coined by August Comte) whose rigid categories frightened T.S. Eliot: “when
I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.” At the same moment when Rilke’s
panther paces in his cage and sees “all bars and no world,” Max Weber
calls modern urban life “an iron cage.”


 How is the human imagination to perform
the remainder of its freedom? By doing what Jean Genet does in his prison novels:
make love in jail. Do as Buckminster Fuller and Biosphere 2 have done, and build
Eden in a sealed dome. Install a soaring, playful, elegant assemblage of artistic
insight inside the confines of a box.


 Cornell’s work seems to silently accuse
art history of a Victorian reductive rationalism, with particular contempt for
the 20th Century art criticism that ought to know better. If it isn’t part
of a movement, it’s outsider art; if it doesn’t achieve novelty, it’s
servile; if it’s lovely, it can’t be beautiful; if it’s beautiful,
it can’t be deep; if it reaches for sublimity, it’s too naïve;
unless it’s creepy, it’s effete. It’s as if Cornell and Max Ernst
were saying, “you want it all in little boxes? All right, I’ll give
you your boxes.” Theirs are always open, always generously surreal, and
adverse to the taxonomical project shared by museums of art and museums of natural
history.


 Christine Krol’s box collages are
distinguished from those of her contemporaries (e.g. Marcy Baker, Nicole Tuggle)
by their spatial magnitudes and by their historical memory. Each collage is constructed
on the two (upper and lower) inner surfaces of an empty Nat  Sherman cigarette
box, which measures 4.5” x 3.” These are tiny, fragile objects compared
to Cornell’s wooden constructions, and they don’t accommodate three-dimensional
elements. Their physical smallness intensifies the enormous volume of the represented
space internal to the picture. Big paintings can’t do this; they seem like
mere windows, but a tiny image of a big landscape, or the sky, or a whale, seems
to give on a grand distance like the eyepiece of a telescope.


 The characteristic subject matter of this
work is the diversity of environments in which people find themselves. But there’s
no catalogue of juxtaposed snapshots, nor a randomized montage of the urban and
the rural. Instead, elements of nature and culture from various centuries are
composed into a sort of family that populates the box; and beyond this, the entire
set of boxes constitutes an extended family. Each box seems to configure a matrix
of atmospheric experiences and emotional smells that might comprise an individual
personality. Quietly alien to any contemporary art movement, Krol’s collage
project might best be compared to those eleven pictures made by eleven artists
in the 1946 competition whose subject was “The Temptation of Saint Anthony.”
There we find Dali, Ernst, and  Leonora Carrington making visually giant
moments in physically small places.