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Joseph Cornell
[[image]] 
Joseph Cornell, Cassiopeia, No.3 (1954); 
courtesy Allan Stone Galleries, New York. 
touches of translucent color. The frames and backs of the 
boxes are frequently covered with pages of old books through 
which one reads tantalizing bits of text in a foreign language. 
Cut out of context and robbed of identity, these veiled phrases 
further encase Cornell's boxes in mystery. The sand moving 
over layers of glass in some of his "tray" boxes in tinted blue 
or pink like the exotic shores of Tahiti in Gauguin's paintings. 
But Cornell has a more basic affinity with Gauguin in that 
both artists deal in the realm of feeling which poetry evokes. 
In its reliance on metaphor and enigma Cornell's work is 
equally a fulfillment of the Symbolist poet's aims. 
One of Cornell's most enigmatic works, the Medici Slot Macine (1942)-- composed of parts of reproductions and 
photoengravings of paintings, fragments of maps (the Palatine 
Hill and other areas of Rome and a section of Sicily), a 
compass, a child's block, jacks and marbles multiplied by mirrors-stands behind Rauschenberg's combines. Certainly 
there are many other ancestors of Rauschenberg's work, and his 
rich and raucous painting is entirely different in spirit from 
Cornell's slightly melancholy, aristocratic and quietly symmetrical 
image withdrawn behind glass. Like the cabalistic 
texts on many of Cornell's boxes, the fragments of reproduced 
paintings in Medici Slot Machine are not intended to be precisely 
"read"; but rcohnizing such details as the head of Botticell's Giuliano de' Medici and Pegasus or the dancing 
figures from Mantegna's Parnassus makes the whole work, including 
the title, that much more piquant. A metaphorical 
coin in a magical machine sets in motion before us all the 
wonders of the court of Apollo and the muses preserved in the 
Renaissance. In the compartmented space of Medici Slot 
Machine the details from paintings are repeated with slight 
shifts in their placement behind the vertical bands like the moving frames of a film. Twenty years before Andy Warhol 
and other younger artists, Cornell used this cinematic technique 
in his constructions, and he too made films. 
But in spite of this interest and in spite of the actual motion 
of rolling balls and gliding rings, an effect of stillness prevails 
in all of Cornell's boxes--as it does in the application he 
wrote of Hedy Lamarr, which begins with significant statement
: "Among the barren wastes of the talking films there 
occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the 
profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke 
an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods 
of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison 
of silver light." Cornell pays tribute to "the enchanted wanderer, 
who again speaks the poetic and evocative language of 
the silent film" and whose "depth and dignity enable her to 
enter this world of expressive silence." 
Each box by Cornell is a "garden inclosed," suspended in a timeless silence. The boxes themselves, as the individual objects 
within them, exist so intensely that they create their own 
inaccessible and motionless space around them. Theirs is an 
Arcadian calm stirred only by such sound and motion as 
The rising of the sun 
And the running of the deer... 
Sweet singing in the choir. 
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