Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:
Toward the end of “The Light Room,” Kate Zambreno’s memoir of the early pandemic, she describes corresponding with a friend, the author and professor Sofia Samatar, about the difference between hoarding and collecting.
At this point in the book, Zambreno is thinking about the artist Joseph Cornell—specifically, about how he cleaned out the cellar of his mother’s house in Queens so that he could use it as a workshop. He had to organize the old miscellany and sort it into boxes, which he then gave whimsical labels: “notions,” “cordials,” “wooden balls only.” Zambreno posits that this collecting-and-cataloguing project “became as much a part of [Cornell’s] art as the construction of his collages.” In his diary, she notes, Cornell compared the “creative arrangement” of clutter to a “poetics.”
As is often the case when Zambreno is writing about another artist, she is also implicitly writing about herself.
more here.