Exhibitions: Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…In Resonance

Duchamp, famous for the signed urinal and The Large Glass, and Joseph Cornell, not so famous for living with his mother in Queens, N.Y., and making densely intricate boxes of ephemera such as apothecary jars, photos, paper clippings and decorated wood cubes, formed a kind of pack-rat pack of two in the ’40s after Duchamp enlisted Cornell to work on his portable museum, Boite-en-Valise. Cornell’s collection of the trimmings–notes, receipts, old glue boxes–of their meetings forms the Duchamp Dossier and the centerpiece of this show. Neither a great Cornell nor a great Duchamp exhibition, this is a mesmerizing shuffle through the meeting of two wonderfully awkward minds.

–By Belinda Luscombe