Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

Untitled (The Hotel Eden) (c. 1945)

Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged fragments of photographs or bric a brac, in a way that combines Constructivism with Surrealism.

These boxes, these hotels, are locales for memory. The trivial objects that Cornell picked up in dime stores and junk shops assume a significance beyond their triviality; through the vehicle of surrealism, their very placement as elements of a set activates their correspondence. Cornell's approach abstracts his objects, but arranging them into a set grounds them.


For me his box creations are fascinating, like mini-museums. Their meticulously construction shows a real passion for detail. Although Cornell was a shy, retiring person, and therefore we know little of his motivations. It was clear from certain works that he expressed the unattainable in his life through the boxes. His motivation was often to make them as gifts for individuals sometimes living, sometimes dead. Often people the artist had never met, but whom he admired from afar.

The concept here perhaps mirrors Cornell's own life of compartmentalisation, and collecting memorabilia, and the desire to communicate to the world visually in what he may have viewed as a "safe" method considering his reclusiveness.




Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.







References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell
http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/jcsfmoma_1107/jcni_08.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65K0ipTQHo
http://www.boxofjars.com/vol1archive/MarcJaffee1.html