Artful juxtapositions: from billboards to Joseph Cornell.

The Port Washington train from Manhattan to Queens passes a squarish, tapered white chimney mounted at the center of a building and painted with the strange fading words, EUTECTIC CASTOLIN. I have no idea what it means, though a dictionary informs me that "eutectic" refers to the solidification of a mixture - alloys especially - at the lowest possible temperatures. It is an oddly monumental thing. It seems to loom up from another time, maybe the late thirties, and it reminds me of my favorite comic strip, Ben Katchor's "Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer." Katchor is the most brilliant comic artist since George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, and his work is full of odd businesses and fraternities, sweet regret, and a nostalgic sense that is dreamy without being sentimental, though it can be very moving. The sense of something mysterious that just barely evades our attention is there in every strip. (Katchor's work has been collected in Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer - Stories, published by Little Brown.)

It turns out that EUTECTIC CASTOLIN is just around the corner from the home of Joseph Cornell, a wonderful artist who lived in Queens and is best known for boxes that combine ordinary objects (bubble pipes, mirrors, small plastic toys, wine glasses, sections of magazines and newspapers, art reproductions, astronomical charts, pictures of birds) in ways that the painter Mark Rothko rightly described as magic. Cornell, who died in 1972, lived with his mother and a brother who was confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy in a house on Utopia Parkway. I discovered the juxtaposition of Cornell and EUTECTIC CASTOLIN while looking for his house and getting lost, and it delighted me - it seemed right that a man who made the ordinary seem so mysterious and full of magic, or rather revealed it to be so, should live around the corner from a place which had the same strange effect on me that so much of his art does.

Cornell is the subject of a recent biography, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, by Deborah Solomon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). When my wife spotted a showing of his work in Manhattan, we called to see if it was open to the public (it was presented as a sale of his work), and were told we could drop by. We did, and it was good to be there. I had never seen so many Cornells in one place.

The gallery was within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where "The Glories of Byzantium" is showing. The Met exhibit is astonishing. It presents icons, sections of murals, manuscripts, liturgical vessels, coins, jewelry, and much more, all from the era following the church's condemnation of iconoclasm and extending to the end of the Byzantine Empire. The work is glorious. It still lives, and you can find it living in many Orthodox churches (though not usually so gloriously as it is found here). It was an art that was meant to be more than art - it was meant to be a way to prayer, to a sense of God's presence, to the depths of the world which open beyond the world. There is a sense in which the icon gazes at us, as we see it. It is beautiful, but that is not all it is meant to be.

I wondered, after moving from the magic Cornells to the beautiful icons, about what connections might be there, and might not be there. Obviously, Cornell's boxes and collages are in one sense as private as dreams, unlike icons. They bear the same relationship to icons as a composition by Erik Satie bears to liturgical chant. The art of the icon is meant for a community that shares a common faith, a common understanding of the world and our place in it. Cornell's art was produced in a world which has no such common understanding, though there are communities within it who still share that faith. (Cornell was himself a Christian Scientist.)

The contemporary situation has led some Christians to a somewhat puritanical reaction. Unless art instructs in some obvious way, unless it points us explicitly to belief and worship, they see it as a distraction at best, or downright evil. I have heard abstract art denounced as "immoral."

This misses the spiritual importance of any great art. I can remember the first time I walked away from an exhibit of abstract expressionism and saw the shapes and colors and light of the street in a new, refreshed way. Art does not need to represent anything to be wonderful, any more than a rock formation or the colors in an oil slick need to represent something. The juxtapositions of common objects and astronomical diagrams in Cornell's work restore a sense of mystery to the ordinary, reminding me of the poet Paul Eluard's wonderful line, "There is another world, and it is in this one." There is a great difference between Cornell and icons, but also something spiritually important in both. Although I may worship the Lord before icons and would never think of using Cornell liturgically, both the icon and Cornell can bring me to a profound feeling of gratitude, and that is no small thing. The delight any great art leads us to is in a way a participation in divine delight, the joy of the Lord who looked upon his creation and saw that it was very good.