Joseph Cornell’s ‘Museum’ (1949)

Photo by John Kannenberg, taken at the Royal Academy of Arts, London’s exhibition Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust (2015).

One of Joseph Cornell’s many box constructions, 1949’s ‘Museum’ is a conceptual museum of sounds. The museum box contains a series of small cylindrical containers holding objects. The museum’s visitors were meant to shake each container and try to guess what was inside based on the sound it made. One of the containers, which was empty, was noted as containing ‘silence’.