"The glass front divides Cornell's world from ours. Yet at the same time we can enter it without difficulty." -- John Coplans

Filling the Boxes of Joseph Cornell: 8 minutes The Cornell box and the television-as-object share this characteristic; the television's glass front divides us from its world of illusion, but we have no difficulty entering that world. We look at things that glow. Pure, emitted light is mesmerizing, whether it comes from a campfire, a vending machine, or a color TV. And like the Cornell box, television images are a seductive assembly of disparate, packaged elements. In "Filling the Boxes of Joseph Cornell," the strength of the television illusion is compared to a Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) ritual of painting the eyes on a statue of Buddha, an act that symbolically endows the statue with life. TV commercials symbolically bring their products to life, and while television enables this condition, the institution behind the exploitation-the advertising industry-is pointed to as the culprit. By exposing advertising slight-of-hand, the illusion is brought to light. Oil rubbed into raw beef makes it look more "appetizing." Alka-Seltzer dropped into a beer makes it bubble and foam. Ultimately, "Filling the Boxes of Joseph Cornell" is about the distinctly Western fear of the notion of "empty," the conflicted use of the television medium for both commercial exploitation and aesthetic expression, and the distinctly Eastern-influenced idea that the visual substratum (and the allure) of the television illusion is, simply, light and color.