Anthropological Aesthetics and Practices in the work of Joseph Cornell

As evidenced by this panel, art history and anthropology have a long and intertwined history. Both disciplines are institutionalized in the academy and formalized there at the turn of the twentieth century; both disciplines hinge on representation, description, and interpretation (often but not exclusively of visual material). This paper examines the historical roots of the confluence and divergence of anthropology and art history using the case study of Joseph Cornell. In his working process, Cornell roamed New York City looking for material that he catalogued and stored for his boxes in a process that is akin to anthropological fieldwork. As sites of memory and representation, I argue that his boxes transmogrify ephemera and found objects—the stuff of anthropological data collection. In addition to his boxes, Cornell’s vast archive of found and collected objects resembles working archives and visual storage found in the American Museum of Natural History. Cornell’s visual practice, however, cannot be simply interpreted as an analog to fieldwork—his ineffable boxes function on multiple levels of signification, leaving a wide latitude for multiple interpretations and lineages that extend back into the past and ahead into our present moment.