| Summary: | The article is based on the analysis of materials from the Joseph Cornell fund at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Series 3 and 4 in particular (“Diaries” and “Sources”) reveal Cornell as a possible theorist for “plan b”, in several ways: the marginal, the obsolete, the stories of forgotten individuals and the newspaper scraps with “alternative” accounts on the lives of famous personalities. The sources collected by Cornell bear witness to the same attention for the hidden, eccentric elements of reality, for chance connections and automatic associations (in a way similar to both Breton’s account of the “flea market” and Dalì’s “Paranoiac-critical method”) shown by his artworks. While Cornell’s archival tendency is known, the criteria for his choice and (in many cases) artistic use of materials deserves further attention. Moreover, he way of organizing and collecting sources and annotations makes Cornell a precursor of the phenomenon dubbed by Hal Foster as “Archival Impulse”, as he anticipated the preference of some later artists (such as Tacita Dean) for secondary, unresolved narratives, failed or uncompleted tasks, stories found by mistake and then almost magically freed from their apparent irrelevance.
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