Abstract
Joseph Cornell’s box assemblages have proven difficult for art historians and gallerists to categorize. Being neither painting, sculpture, nor precisely collage, their unique position within the history of twentieth-century American art highlights the disruptive materialist strategies the artist employed in forming his objects in the 1940s. This article discusses three related strategies derived from material culture that the assemblages subvert by deviating from the established pathways of particular object categories: the inauthentic object, the souvenir, and the biographical object. These related strategies helped the artist to negotiate his relationship with the city of New York and its immersive consumer culture, and mediate the anxieties recalled in his diaries regarding eternity and the infinite expanse of space. Finally, the article contends that these deviations represent the source of the works’ spiritual and social resonance.
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