http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/26/dennis-hopper-photograph-moca
Those who accuse Hopper of being an amateur snapper miss the point:
the photographs that will go on show at LA's Museum of Contemporary
Art are an inspired blend of Hollywood gloss and the miraculous everyday
Sean O'Hagan
28 April 2010
Last week Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the Museum of
Contemporary Art (Moca) in Los Angeles, announced that his first
exhibition, scheduled for July, will feature the paintings and
photographs of Dennis Hopper. It will be curated by Hopper's close
friend, the artist and film-maker Julian Schnabel.
Hopper, who will be 74 next month, is a semi-mythic figure both as an
actor and director, but his art and photography are less well-known.
In the blogosphere, the announcement raised questions about art-world
nepotism, as well as the blurring of the boundaries between art and
show business. "This is exactly the sort of PT Barnum extravaganza,
dripping with cronyism, star-fucking and insider dealing, that
Deitch's main detractors feared he would bring to Moca," wrote Steven
Kaplan on post.thing.net. "It feels like an extension of the
titillating, fame-obsessed, outre projects that often dominated his
NY galleries … Schnabel has directed Hopper in his films. Hopper owns
Schnabel paintings. They are 'dear friends'."
Kaplan acknowledges that Hopper's photographs are "noteworthy". In
fact, they are more than that. For most of the 1960s, Hopper was a
Hollywood outsider with a reputation as a troublemaker and a rebel.
He had appeared in Rebel Without a Cause with his close friend James
Dean in 1955, but had subsequently been consigned to one too many
supporting roles. What he really wanted to do was direct films that
flew in the face of Hollywood convention something he achieved, to
a degree, with 1969's Easy Rider, which ushered in a new era of
vibrant independent film-making in America.
From 1961 to 1967, though, Hopper made photographs as if his life
depended on it. In the vividly impressionistic introduction to Out of
the Sixties his first book of photographs, published in 1986
Hopper wrote: "I never made a cent from these photos. They cost me
money but kept me alive … They were the only creative outlet I had
for these years until Easy Rider. I never carried a camera again."
The book is divided into thematic sections: Warhol and the Factory,
1964; Artists and Collectors; Hollywood; Music; Civil Rights March,
Selma to Montgomery; Mexico, the Scene. It tells you where Hopper's
head was at in the 1960s which is to say, all over the place. In
grainy black-and-white, using only natural light, he photographed
Ruscha and Rauschenberg, John Wayne and Dean Martin, James Brown and
the Byrds, Martin Luther King and Timothy Leary, Mexican graveyards
and the Grateful Dead. The closest he came to documentary reportage
are his images from the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
The rest, including his portraits, often look like ornate tableaux
which constantly draw the eye from the subject to the backdrop and
back again. He never cropped his photographs. Somehow they work;
often brilliantly.
Here is Wayne and his sidekick Martin, two celluloid cowboys glimpsed
through the tripod of a film camera, waiting for the "action" to
begin. Here is Ike Turner, sharp as a switchblade, one hand resting
on a piano, while beside him Tina Turner watches while scrubbing a
shirt on a washboard. They seem to be backstage at a fairground or a
circus. It is hard to know what exactly is going on in this
photograph, but the tableau is overloaded with metaphors about
race, show business, roleplay and marriage.
Even in his photographs, then, Hopper deployed a film-maker's eye.
"In a curious way, what seems special about Hopper's photographs now
is that they seem to resemble shots from movies," wrote Walter Hopps,
the iconoclastic American curator, in a short essay for Out of the
Sixties. "Not so much frames from films, but still photographs made
on the sets and locations of imagined films in progress … wonderful ones."
The shot I like best is an intimate one, part-portrait, part-social
history. It is called simply Biker Couple. Like many of Hopper's
portraits, it has been taken up close, so the couple almost fill the
frame. She is relaxed but glamorous, holding a cigarette in one hand
and a glass of beer in the other, her heavily made-up eyes staring
downwards as if lost in thought. He, too, is gazing off out of the
frame as if daydreaming, his torso bare and tattooed, his quiff
immaculately groomed, and possibly high-lighted. They look like
bikers as a Hollywood film-maker might imagine them; but they are
real, and so is the setting.
It is that hinterland between the real and the imagined, the everyday
and the mythic, that Hopper's best images revisits again and again.
One cannot help but wonder how his style would have developed if he
had stayed with photography, even as, with hindsight, we can see that
his feverish mind was less than suited to the patient capturing of
stillness. For all that, though, his photographs do not depend on his
name or his art-world contacts to be considered as contemporary art.
They stand alone as testament to the maverick imagination of Hopper:
actor, director and, fleetingly but brilliantly, photographer.
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