Arts
Window dressings
John McEwen
Of better known American artists none have more titillated the sensibilities of Europeans than Joseph Cornell and Edward Hopper. This is explicable, as is the fact that their names should be linked though their work, on the face of it, is so very different. Cornell, after all, made glass-fronted boxes and filled them with carefully arranged and selected knickknacks, Hopper painted oil on canvas pictures, nevertheless there are connections. The mood of their work is melancholy and both lived decidely private, if not quite hermetic, lives in New York. As a result the Old World has welcomed them for their comforting familiarity, while in America they are regarded as exotics. Both came to the notice of the Avant-Garde when Surrealism was the rage, both were classified as surrealists — Hopper because he painted dreamy people, Cornell because he made dream-boxes — and both denied being any such thing. Cornell (1903-1972) was 20 years younger than Hopper, but essentially their careers spanned the same years, and both were and are revered for their art and ' the dedication of their lives. Now retrospectives of both their achievements have been sent out to conquer the world — their art has not been muCh seen out of America, their reputation in Europe having been taken particularly on trust — and they are revealed, even in a 20th-century panorama, as very minor figures. No more minor, that is, than Algernon Newton or Ben Nicholson, to name two variously .comparable homegrown examples, but very minor nonetheless. Hopper has already come a cropper at the Hayward, Cornell is gently unseated, rather than sent flying arse-over-tit, from the horse of his reputation, in the more discrete, less demanding, setting of the downstairs gallery at the Whitechapel (till 12 April).
The problem with both artists is that their work is banal. Many have testified to the fact that originality is only banality turned on its head, but if everything at root is banal, as the psalmist says, then Hopper and Cornell simply fail to uproot it enough times. This failure is made all the more enervating by their puritan-born, according to their promoters, preoccupation with death, or at least the transitoriness of life.
Art that is immediately appealing is almost certainly banal because its attraction lies invariably in its familiarity. Both the Hop per and Cornell shows turn sour after ten minutes. At first glance the boxes of Cornell are very appealing indeed. They are a bit like Tiffany window displays (Tiffany parti cularly pride themselves on these, but in terms of London Cartier will do) and it is interesting to discover that for most of his full-blown career he worked as a freelance for Vogue and House and Garden, designing layouts and montages for covers, features and advertisements. Such commercial pursuits are very bad for artists, and here again we find a link between Cornell and Hopper. Hopper became a prey to the obvious through working for years as a hack illustrator for pulp magazines. Cornell's eye for the graphic effect is always turning him from the rigours of imagination into the softer ways of good taste. His white on whites are redolent of Mrs Somerset Maugham's boudoir, his use of cork conjures up Proust's study. A lot of French titles are thrown around, like scent. His effects are a kind of beginners' guide to Symbolism: the infinite — space, blue, glass, time — expressed by the intimate — astrological charts, marbles, wine glasses, handless clock-faces. All of this is immediately delectable and palls as quickly. There is no passion, no imaginative imperative, no suggestion of the grit of experience. It is all for effect. Not only that, it is also very repetitive in its imagery, improvisation invariably leading to diffusion. He is best at his most spare (the white on whites, for all their chic, have a certain power of concentration) or humorous (spattered white on blues: a night sky a la Pollock). But on the whole one feels that a Cornell box, divorced of its price tag, would soon end up in the attic from which, via the curiosity shop, it was conjured.
In the upstairs gallery of the Whitechapel (also till 12 April) the work of an English artist, Tony Cragg, just starting out, pro vides a relevant, even mocking, juxtaposition. In this time of stringent economies recycling useless materials is the height of social responsibility. Cornell recycled brieA-brac to profitable artistic effect, though he would probably not have taken such an economic view of his activity, and Tony Cragg very self-consciously does the same with bits of discarded plastic. This flotsam and jetsam is fixed to the wall to form images representative of Britain's present decline into, it would seem from the figure of a storm-trooper, fascism. The best of these is a Union Jack — made up of bits of old blue and red pieces of plastic — because its satire is succinct. The other items — a horizontal Britain, an ironic crown, etc — labour the point. The humour of the idea is quite wide in its ramifications — artistically, for instance, it neatly takes the mickey out of minimal art — but it only bears cracking once. After that it is a play school exercise.
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