Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood
ACMI Cinemas
Now until 25th April, 2010
“This is it.”
- Frank Booth, Blue Velvet
A fierce and furious molotov of motion and agitation, Dennis Hopper is a definitive illustration of a man who could never sit still for more than 2½ seconds. Born in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1936, Hopper’s career has blown holes in the globe via a wild arc of work, involving movies, photography and the world of contemporary modern art.
Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood cunningly captures this collision of interests and outlets into one exciting entity in order to create a ball-tearing, knuckle-dusting look at Hopper’s life spent riding the rails between high life and sobriety. The exhibition at the ACMI is the only one of its kind currently on display in Australia.
Containing both his own abstract expressionist creations and feverishly collected works by artists such as Andy Warhol and Wallace Berman, the journey through the exhibition creates the impression of a phrenologist’s chart of the head of Dennis Hopper. Each painted panel, pictorial portrait and celluloid frame offers elements of brute force, surrealistic vitality, confrontational nature and bruising, jazzy daring. Yet planted amongst this snarling mobocracy is a surprisingly subtle and delicate side – the kind that places great stock in solitude, companionship, strength, resilience, determination, and definitely change and rebirth.
Whichever direction you slide there are images of Hopper looming and leering back at you. Young, old, grizzled, crazy and suave – a caipirinha of screeching, jabbering, swooping and pinballing hyper action.
These self portraits and candids are joined by Hopper’s own photography, many of which depict earnest moments in the history of the United States of America. Yawed and fuzzy black and white images of JFK’s funeral on TV, slick and provoking snapshots of the streets and billboards of L.A., and young and old lions such as actor Paul Newman, musician James Brown and civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King.
As you’d expect, cinematic visual vistas make up a significant amount of the exhibition, each one graphically showing Hopper’s various famous roles and guises. Characters such as the free-wheeling Billy in Easy Rider, the sadistic, amyl nitrate-inhaler Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, and the unnamed stray dog photographer in Apocalypse Now.
These performances are aligned with carefully selected segments from three of Hopper’s self directed features: Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) and Colors (1988). In addition, the ACMI has also taken the trouble to include Hopper’s fun-poking and self depreciating Ford Cougar adverts, and the surreal and strange Nike NFL TV spots. Most importantly, Hopper’s 1983 experiment with a Russian dynamite chair at the Big H speedway track in Houston, Texas, is given a chance to grandstand the masses.
“After destruction, how do you rise from the ashes? And how far do you go?”
- Dennis Hopper
After completing rehab for drug and alcohol abuse in the early 1980s, Hopper left his personal wilderness and made a homecoming to his long held love for artistic creation. This rebirth is represented through his fascination with gangland L.A., and the graffiti, climate and music attached to it. His series of pieces titled ‘one of four joiners’ is a particular stand-out moment. As is the previously mentioned motion picture, Colors, starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.
In some ways Hopper’s collection and body of work is 100% Americana and a summation of the wham-bam motion of the fiendish world we inhabit. An odyssey through the sun-rays and shell holes that life weaves and pock-marks into your skin. Spending time drifting among the back alleys and labyrinths of Hopper’s mind for an hour or two makes you see and appreciate the flip side to his usual public perception. A destruction and rise from the ashes, if you will.
Dennnis Hopper and the New Hollywood runs until Sunday 25 April 2010
