Excerpts from Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic:
“Shadow box / Music box / Pill box / A box which contains a puzzle / A box with tiny drawers, / Navigation box / Jewelry box / Sailor’s box / Butterfly box / Box stuffed with souvenirs of a sea voyage / Magic prison / An empty box” p. 35 (“Matchbox With a Fly In It”)
“Cornell loved Houdini, who was famous for escaping from ingeniously constructed boxes. The boxes had secret trapdoors and exits… That art is called illusionist. Illusionists make it seem… There are two points to make about this: (I) philosophically, illusionism is a theory that the material world is an illusion; (2) illusionism is a technique of using images to deceive. It raises the question of whether perception can give us true and direct knowledge of the world… ” p. 38 (“Birds of a Feather”)
“The little box gets her first teeth / And her little length / Little width little emptiness / And all the rest she has // The little box continues growing / The cupboard that she was inside / Is now inside her // And she grows bigger bigger bigger / Now the room is inside her / And the house and the city and the earth / And the world she was in before // The little box remembers her childhood / And by a great great longing / She becomes a little box again // Now in the little box / You have the whole world in miniature / You can easily put it in a pocket / Easily steal it easily lose it // Take care of the little box.” p. 40 (Vasko Popa, “The Little Box”)
“The work is of wood [continued Viglius], marked with many images and full of little boxes.” p. 53 (“The Memory Theater of Guilio Camillo”)
“He [Camillo] pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation, may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it theater.” p. 53 (“The Memory Theater of Guilio Camillo”)
“As the curtain goes up we see a forest with tall, fantastic trees. It is night. There’s a moon half hidden by the clouds. Blue mist drifts through the trees. The forest is a place in which everything your heart desires and fears lives.” p. 55 (“The Moon is the Sorcerer’s Helper”)
“Many people have already speculated about the relationship between play and the sacred. The light of reverie, let us note, is a dim light. The near darkness of old churches and old movies is that of dreams. Our memories are divine images because memory is not subject to the ordinary laws of time and space… Images surrounded by shadow and silence. Silence is that vast, cosmic church in which we always stand alone. Silence is the only language God speaks.” p. 57 (“These Are Poets Who Service Church Clocks”)
“There are really three kinds of images. first [sic], there are those seen with eyes open in the manner of realists in both art and literature. Then there are images we see with eyes closed. Romantic poets, surrealists, expressionists, and everyday dreamers know them. The images Cornell has in his boxes are, however, of the third kind. They partake of both dream and reality, and of something else that doesn’t have a name. They tempt the viewer in two opposite directions. One is to look and admire the elegance and other visual properties of the composition, and the other is to make up stories about what one sees. In Cornell’s art, the eye and the tongue are a t cross purposes. Neither one by itself is sufficient. It’s that mingling of the two that makes up the third image.” p. 62 (“The Gaze We Knew as a Child”)
“Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of art is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other.” p. 64 (“Totemism”)
To connect with making the little forest boxes: cabinet and box making to photography (Camera Lucida); tactility of the boxes to the index finger as the true instrument of photography (again Camera Lucida); enclosure, framing, proscenium; the present fake and the absent real/index/referent, minimalism and space/presence; multiplicity and sameness in the forest and in the copies; wood as building material and as represented; analog materials, digital output; original copies, displacement of an original; whimsy, play, reverie, nostalgia.
