Dennis Hopper at MOCA LA

 

What happens when you move to Los Angeles as an 18 year-old and someone named James Dean introduces you to the Los Angeles art scene? You have a good chance of becoming an artist, and that’s what happened to Dennis Hopper. Best known as Hollywood’s bad boy, the actor and director from Kansas was one of the most important representatives of the Los Angeles avant-garde from the 1950s until he passed away in May.
 

Between ‘55 and ‘56, Hopper gained stardom as an actor, appearing in successful movies such as Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, both featuring James Dean. Coincidentally, Richard Hamilton was painting Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, initiating in London what would be become the new era of Pop Art and making the 1950s the ideal time to join the art world.

As soon I entered Hopper’s exhibition at The Geffen at MOCA, in the heart of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, two gigantic Pop Art artworks grabbed my attention, and I immediately forgot whatever I was thinking about before entering the museum: La Salsa Man and Mobil Man, two statues circa 2000. These 30 foot tall sculptures clearly show how Marcel Duchamp’s philosophy was deeply-rooted in his consciousness: in fact, they are a sort of homage to the concept of “ready-made,” as they are reproductions of sculptures he saw on the streets of LA.



La Salsa Man

The second thing I noticed was how Hopper struggled to find a way to represent himself on canvas.  Drawing from studies from Polaroids and video,  he perceived himself as a young fascinating movie star in Self Portrait (1966). Another self-portrait portrays Hopper as a goofy human-sized cowboy statue, with background made of plastic and fake cacti. Within a Man of Light, There Is Only Light; Within a Man of Darkness, There is Only Darkness is an impressive and creepy double self-portrait that somehow resembles the surrealistic touch of Magritte. These are followed by the video, Life After Death on Canvas, a projection of him performing a disturbing self-explosion, which represents his self-destructive drug habit during the 70s.



Within a Man of Light, There Is Only Light; Within a Man of Darkness, There is Only Darkness, courtesy of dianepernet.typepad.com

Back to history. In 1961, a fire in Bel Air destroyed all of Hopper’s paintings from his very first period: after that he began focusing more heavily on photography, perhaps because negatives can be carefully stored for future reprinting. This led to some of the most recognizable works of his career, such as the Biker Couple. Originally a photograph taken in 1961, Biker Couple was turned into a black and white painting on metal 40 years later. During his last years of activity, Hopper converted many of the photographs of his friends and heroes from the 1960s into paintings. His use of old artworks to create new and different ones is another reference to the genius of Duchamp: they both explored the idea of the piece of arts’ endless lifetime. The artist can make something that can always be revisited, re-made or changed, by himself or by someone else, even after decades or centuries. Although it’s not that plain at the first glance, there is a conceptual connection between Hoppers’ works and the incredible story of the eccentric french artist’s Large Glass or L.H.O.O.Q., the cheeky Duchamp’s Mona Lisa reinterpretation. Therefore, the wall-sized close-ups paintings of Andy Warhol, Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein can be considered a sort of homage to an artist that truly inspired the whole Pop Art movement.


Bikers Couple, courtesy of taschen.com

Photography is a big part of this show: almost all of Hopper’s pictures from the 60s are installed in the middle of the huge warehouse that hosts the Geffen at MOCA exhibition. The feeling is a bit like hanging out at Andy’s Factory with the enfant terribles of the New York art scene. A picture shows Oldenburg stamping the tongue of a laughing Rauschenberg; a sequence of photos shows a giant bottle of Coke laying in a bathroom and a floating clown in a living room; weird happenings, wild parties and crazy people that made history. That bright artistic period is immortalized in these frames.

During the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium, Hopper began exploring new territories. His travels to Morocco and Mexico to discover different cultural universes inspired his production of murals. This had a relevant impact on his late artistic production, when he started to investigate the “rural” soul of the American suburban areas, with works like Untitled #4: a huge free-standing fence covered behind a metallic net with a used tire laying underneath. The reinterpretation of mural art is reflected in a series of graffiti, exposed together with violent back and white scenes of documentaries and stills from his film Colors. Hopper’s graffiti production is a mix between his experiences abroad and the beloved LA peripheries, where he used to see mural paintings that he described as “Rothko kind of images that become these colors on colors on colors.”

This exhibition, held from July 11 to September 26, definitely deserves a look. Hopper contributed to the planning of his retrospective up until his final days, reinterpreting that crazy thing called Pop Art.

In these days, walking through the streets of Downtown Los Angeles, looking at the banners and at all the people going in and out of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, it’s possible to feel the presence of Dennis Hopper and his huge impact on American culture. We remember him as the rebel sex-symbol from Easy Rider, and as the old, skinny and waken man that appeared with the lifetime friend Jack Nicholson on Hollywood Blvd in March of 2010 for his Walk of Fame Star ceremony, just a couple of months before he died of prostate cancer.

By Guido Ghedin