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Arts Magazine
summer, 1967
p.p. 53 + 54

JOSEPH CORNELL
W. V. Quine relates the following paradox: "The judge announces to the prisoner on Sunday that at noon on some day in the following week he will be hanged, but that he will not know on the fatal morning whether or not his last day has come. The prisoner argues that if he is still alive on Saturday morning he will known he is to be executed that day, since it is the last possibility; but that violates the second condition, so he eliminates Saturday. Once Saturday is out, a similar argument disposes of Friday and so on back through the week. The prisoner congratulates himself at having caught the judge in an inconsistency, but when the hangman arrives on Thursday he is surprised after all and the judge is vindicated." 
Logic is not a guide to anything but logic. But illogic has been though of by some as a guide to making art. It has had vaguely to do with putting things together 'out of context.' Poetry is non-sense because it doesn't use language according to common usage. This doesn't mean that anything which doesn't make sense is poetry. Symbolism is held in disrepute today as it seems to imply a schism between what something is and what it means.
Joseph Cornell has based his art on the cryptic, symbolic and literary aspects of Surrealism. His pieces are catalogues of memorabilia from a Victorian childhood preserved in boxes which rarely exceed 15" x 10" x 5". The arrangements often contain such items as maps, glasses, balls, bird, mirrors, reproductions of old paintings, sand, bits of torn paper or broken wood, bottles, wire, spring, etc. These items are then painted or damaged, glued or nailed or simply placed inside the box which is viewable only from the front. The make-believe that this or that fragment or object is something lost or forgotten, broken or destroyed, cherished or dismissed is nostalgic and precious. It requires a suspension of disbelief not proportionate to the artifice. Cornell has made the decision to work within a limited area which is modest. His terms are that his work is personalistic and divorced from