Nina Simone’s chewing-gum, The Museum of Innocence, and Joseph Cornell’s boxes

‘Untitled (M’lle Ferretti)’ by Joseph Cornell

Courtesy Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation

One evening in 1999, shortly after Nina Simone had finished an overwhelming performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the musician Warren Ellis found his way to the stage, took the piece of chewed gum that Simone had left on the piano, wrapped it in a towel, and brought it home with him in a plastic bag as a relic, an object of reverence. Aware, of course, of the absurdity of what he had just done, he didn’t know what to do with the gum, and for a long time afterwards he didn’t show or mention it to anyone, because he assumed that it would be of no interest. Curiously, however, it gradually took on a life of its own, temporarily ending up in a reinforced glass display case as part of ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, an exhibition about the career of his friend Nick Cave.

It also provided the title and ostensible subject of Nina Simone’s Gum, a rambling and entertaining autobiography where, along the way, Ellis makes a passing reference to Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Museum of Innocence’, which is both a novel set in 1970s Istanbul and an actual place in the same city. Kemal, the book’s main protagonist, is an overindulged playboy from a wealthy family, and Pamuk’s novel begins with Kemal’s recollection of what he considers to be the happiest time of his life, the days of his brief affair with Füsun, an impoverished 18-year-old distant relation, which took place shortly before his engagement to another woman, Sibel, who is more obviously suited to him. Füsun disappears, Sibel breaks off their engagement, and Kemal retreats to his mother’s spare apartment where he conducted the affair, slowly immersing himself in a world of objects that Füsun has touched. This obsession later inspires the ‘Museum of Innocence’ that Kemal creates in the home of Füsun’s family, and which Pamuk reproduced in reality.

The most engaging aspects of Pamuk’s long book are the passages that vividly evoke the city of Istanbul, its inhabitants, and their hüzün, or melancholia; the ‘real’ Museum of Innocence, which houses objects that are supposed to have been collected by Kemal, has the same appeal. Set in a restored old building in the district of Çukurcuma, the museum contains eighty-three display cases, each corresponding to a chapter in the book; some of the exhibits, such as the framed stubs of thousands of cigarettes supposedly smoked by Füsun, were created or realised by artists; others, perhaps more compelling, are everyday items that relate to the novel. As a whole, it is an extraordinary installation, and although there are many other museums and galleries that collect and show similar vernacular objects, there are probably none as extravagant and fanciful as The Museum of Innocence.

Some of Panuk’s carefully curated vitrines inevitably evoke the equally obsessive boxes of Joseph Cornell, whose personality was as modest as Kemal’s was immoderate. The self-taught American artist, once described as ‘a meek, monkish, well-read man who never spent a night away from home’, became celebrated for his enigmatic boxed assemblages made with arrangements of objects and images that included such things as reproductions of Renaissance portraits, cardboard parrots, toys, bottles, glasses, and photographs of ballerinas and astrological charts. Cornell was a compulsive hoarder and collector; from the 1930s to the early 1970s he incessantly sifted through the book and junk shops of New York, storing his purchases in the house he shared with his mother and disabled brother in Flushing, Queens. In the evenings he worked in the basement, making the small wooden boxes and the assemblages that were constructed from scores of objects that had been painstakingly filed and set aside for eventual use.

Strangely, despite his introverted and eccentric personality, Cornell was as well-connected in the American art world as most of his peers. He knew many of the prominent artists, gallery owners, and collectors of the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Warhol, and André Breton, but while he occasionally enjoyed their company, he preferred to work, to wander alone around the city or to go to concerts and the theatre. As one biographer, Deborah Solomon, has put it, Cornell was ‘the quintessential New Yorker - the loner who couldn’t stand to be alone, and who looked to the city as a place in which to live out his dream of connectedness’. While not exactly a recluse, he led a quiet and reticent life: devoted to looking after his brother, he also went to church, didn’t drink, never learned to drive, and had few close friendships. His inner life, however, was strikingly vigorous. He idealised women, especially film stars and ballerinas, nurtured many unrequited infatuations, and sublimated his physical desires. Feeling deep respect as well as passionate yearning for the women to whom he was drawn, he was unwilling to allow himself anything as uninhibited and physical as a love affair, and while his unusual commitment to purity and chastity led to much loneliness, it was also the source of the intensity of his work. In that respect, Cornell’s art forms an intriguing contrast to the louche nostalgia of the Museum of Innocence, both in its literary and physical forms, and to the self-conscious quirkiness of Nina Simone’s chewed gum, incongruously exhibited in a reinforced glass case.

For further exploration:

A review of ‘Nina Simone’s Gum’: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/02/28/nina-simones-gum-warren-ellis/

An interview with Warren Ellis about ‘Nina Simone’s Gum’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/15/warren-ellis-on-how-nina-simones-gum-book-interview

A review of Orhan Pamuk’s ‘The Museum of Innocence’: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n01/adam-shatz/wanting-to-be-something-else

The Museum of Innocence website: https://www.masumiyetmuzesi.org/

The Museum of Innocence: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150112-turkeys-most-creative-daring-idea

An extract from Deborah Solomon’s biography of Joseph Cornell: https://lithub.com/utopia-parkway-the-life-and-work-of-joseph-cornell/

A review of a recent Joseph Cornell exhibition: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/25/joseph-cornell-wanderlust-royal-academy-exhibition-london

Nina Simone’s chewing gum, cast in silver by Hannah Upritchard