Where is the Future now?

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family, along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by those two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains repressive and offers nothing but pseudo-gratifications. Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.

- Society of the Spectacle, chapter 3, 59

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Referencing Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell’s boxes, so particularly arranged, tap our mind’s insistence on putting two and two together to create narratives even where none exist. Some correspondences are easily deciphered, but the boxes’ power and pleasure lie in how they never fully give up their mysteries.



Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.



He uses the form of the box to almost frame a story, or a contained landscape. The box is often compartmentalised to fragment the narrative, to take you from object to object and construct a whole. You may needn't have to understand the symbology of it. It still has the power to speak to you. In essence i see them as story telling devices. 

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