Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box

by Jason Edwards (Editor), Stephanie L. Taylor (Editor)

In spite of widespread fascination with the life and work of American artist Joseph Cornell in both the academy and the gallery, studies of Cornell to date have been circumscribed by a range of critical clichés about the artist being a childlike dreamer, hermetically sealed off from the world, which has prevented his work from being fully understood in all of its complexity and diversity. The book contains more than 50 illustrations of the artist's work—many never before reproduced—and provides 13 ground-breaking new essays on the artist's films, dossiers, pillboxes, magazine work, correspondence, diary entires and more ephemeral writings from internationally reputed scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.

These exciting, provocative, and unusually interdisciplinary essays emerge from a variety of disciplines, including Art History, Philosophy, English and America Studies, Geography, Visual Culture and Film Studies. In 'opening up the box' on Cornell, the artist appears in a range of significant new contexts, alongside European and American Modernists and Surrealists from literature and the visual arts, heavy-weight European and American philosophers, nineteenth-century forebears, and contemporary film-makers.

350 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2007

About the author

Jason[6spaces]Edwards

Reviews

[Jesse]

I haven't read every essay, but a kaleidoscopic-like glimpse into many different facets of Cornell's life and work. Jason Edwards's opening essay "Coming Out as Cornellian" is the best piece of writing I'm aware of that articulates the special place Cornell holds in the queer imagination.