HIP HOPPER: Profile of Dennis Hopper
ARTnews, September 1997

"This is a thrilling moment in my life," says Dennis Hopper, taking a moment out as he directs the installation of a retrospective exhibition of his work at Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica. "I have a wonderful opportunity to fall on my ass." At 61, an international celebrity for his distinguished forty-year career in motion pictures whose work as a writer-director in Easy Rider, 1969 spoke out for an entire generation, he is enjoying a rising tide of new recognition in the art world. "It's a beginning," he adds with relish. "The story is beginning to be good. I like the idea that there's a story here, and I can see the trajectory."

The trajectory, in the coming month alone, leads Hopper from Los Angeles to France for the installation of a solo exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Cahors, and on to Louisiana, Denmark, for the opening of "Sunshine & Noir: Art in Los Angeles, 1960-1997" in which he is a participating artist; thence to Venice, Italy, for a spell of painting in the studio his friend Julian Schnabel has rented for the month of June, and to Kassel, Germany for the installation of yet another solo show at Documenta time before he returns to Los Angeles for a promised appearance at a concert by the rock band, U2. He is looking forward, too, to yet another high point in the story, a full-scale retrospective at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh scheduled for 1998.

"I want my life to be more joyous," says Hopper, whose popular demand as the movie villain of choice does not seem to slow down his creative juices as a painter and photographer. "One comes to the conclusion that one's a compulsive creator, and I'm feeling more comfortable with that. But there's a problem being an actor: actors aren't taken seriously when they make art. For a while I was thinking of changing my name. There has never been an actor showing in the arena in which I'm showing now."

The current mini-retrospective cuts a path through Hopper's career from 1950's abstract expressionist painting through his graffiti paintings and wall photographs of the 1980s and 1990s. "I love photography because it's flat on," he says of the recent works that line the gallery, large-scale, minutely-detailed pictures of wall surfaces in Europe and North Africa. "It has no depth of field, like a painting's surface. But my work is getting a little more minimal. Painting is more sensory, a different kind of thing. It's more like acting, getting into a mood and trying to express it." Even the graffiti and the peeling posters that featured in earlier photographs, he says, have less appeal for him now: "What interests me more than anything is photographing the paint on the wall. I love the irony of reproducing paint through a photograph."

Hopper looks back with affection and pride on his long-standing association with the art world. "I studied with a watercolorist in Dodge City, Kansas," he recalls, "where we lived when my father came back from the war. Then I took some art classes at the Nelson Atkins Musuem for underpriviledged kids." While he was there, he remembers wryly, "Thomas Hart Benton came in as a guest teacher. He looked at my set piece with the barn and the trees and said, 'Kid, you've got to get tight and paint loose.'"

When Hopper was thirteen, the family relocated from the midwest to San Diego. "I was incorrigible," he confesses with pride. "I got kicked out of speech and civil studies. But as a make-up, I did an art correspondence course with Berkeley. Then at seventeen, I got involved with the La Jolla Playhouse, driving the truck, cleaning up, and so on, and met Vincent Price. When I came to Hollywood at eighteen, Vincent invited me over, and I saw the first abstract expressionist paintings I'd ever seen: he had Diebenkorn, Pollock, Kline, some Emerson Woelffers. It was a revelation. He gave me a little painting and said, 'I think you'll be a collector one of these days."

In the mid 1950s Hopper was already hanging around the art scene, beginning to record it in the pictures with which he was to achieve his first recognition as an artists in his own right. "Others were beach bums," he says. "I was a gallery bum, associating with Walter Hopps, Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, who was busted for pornography, the whole Ferus Gallery crowd." Fascinated with art and artists even as he was beginning his movie career with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, he still felt like an outsider in both fields: "I was never really accepted," he says. "They used to call me 'the tourist' because I always had the camera hanging round my neck."

By the early 1960s, he was already fulfilling Vincent Price's prediction. "I bought Andy Warhol's first soup can painting," he recalls, "from John Weber, who was then director of Virginia Dwan Gallery in Westwood." At the time of the landmark Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, he was familiar with the whole gathering of national names who turned out to honor the master: Johns, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Warhol... To acquire a Duchamp for his collection, says Hopper with a chuckle, "I stole a sign from The Green Hotel and had him sign it. It was his last readymade."

The sign still occupies pride of place in the sprawling collection that overflows Hopper's huge studio-residence in Venice. Designed for him by architect Brian Murphy, the quasi-industrial structure now incorporates as Hopper's business office an earlier Frank Gehry studio building on the adjacent lot. The lower part, used mostly for storage, has the high-ceilinged, utilitarian feel of a sound stage. Above it, as if in suspension, a maze of work and living areas is connected by catwalk-like passages that lead from space to space, each one crammed from floor to ceiling with art. Kenny Scharfs jostle for space with assemblages by Bruce Conner and George Herms, paintings by Peter Schuyff and David Salle, a drawing by John Cage. A big painting by Julian Schnabel hangs in the central living area. "It's incredible, that picture," says Hopper, settling back after a quick tour. "There's not a fault in it, it just moves, every day it stays fresh."

"This isn't even half the collection," he continues ruefully. "I have to keep a lot of it in storage." Still, the assemblage of art on his walls feels more like the story of close, often long-lasting friendships and mutual admiration than a "collection" in the traditional sense, and a number of pieces come to him through gift or trade. "I collect something I wish I'd been able to make myself," he says. "I go to the galleries if I'm in New York and I have the time. But I'm off on location most of the time, in some trailer somewhere. I live a gypsy life, moving from one film family to the next. So art is something I felt I could focus on and follow. It seemed like a simple history. You know who your grandfather and your father are. For me, that's Duchamp and Pollock. That's where I came into it, trying to find my own way."

That sense of family works in other ways, too, for Hopper relishes collaboration with other creative minds. "I recently did a 2-man show at Tony Shafrazi with Ed Ruscha," he mentions, "and one with Burroughs, and another with Bruce Conner. It was really thrilling, being with Ed and Bruce." It was in Conner's film Luke, 1967, that Hopper collaborated in one of his first artist-directed films. "Bruce invented so much in film," he recalls. "That movie tore my head off. He's an incredible editor. To my mind, as an artist, he's equal in importance with Rauschenberg." Andy Warhol, by contrast (Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of, 1963, "just set up the camera and walked off. With Schnabel (Basquiat, 1996), it was as if he had directed movies for forty years. He's always the authority on everything. But you could watch him listening before he made decisions in this film. It was a good experience working with him. Julian's a lot like Francis Ford Coppola, they're both operatic personalities, very gregarious, very open. But he works out of a painful place, and he takes it to the edge. David Salle (Search and Destroy, 1995) was much more intellectual and quiet, more tense. I thought that film was still stuck in a play, too wordy. But he'll go on to make a good movie."

Hopper is not one to play down the medium in which he makes his living. "Making films," he says, "is the real art form of the 20th century. It may not have been used to its full potential, but it encompasses all the arts -- dance, music, architecture, language, acting… I think of it all as one thing. In the beginning, I tried to isolate them from each other, but now I'm trying to incorporate them. But in movies, I'm always interpreting someone else's work. Even as a director, there are so many different departments and people that you have to work with. As an artist, it's one on one, a much more immediate and creative process. The dialectics never cease to puzzle me."

Even in his early acting days, Hopper, recalls, art was important to him. "When I was studying at Lee Strassberg's, I used to go to MoMA every day to look at Cezanne and Matisse, go through the whole collection. I was born visual, and started seeing really early on. It had to do with Kansas, that horizon line. With nothing to look at, I had to become visually creative." He attributes his fascination with walls to a similar impulse: "Los Angeles is visually one of the uglier places in the world," he argues, "built to last until the next earthquake. So I started looking at walls, and the walls started really becoming my life, talking to me about dying, decay, forms of indifference. They became Duchamp, became the accident. They became that dangerous word beauty. I paid attention to the human scratches, and they became like life to me. Like John Cage, I was very much into the aesthetic of chance."

In his current exhibition, the installation Triangle (Video Triptych), 1997, along with two-dimensional works like Cemetery, 1997 - a digital imaging reprise of the famous acid scene from Easy Rider - find Hopper working to consolidate his achievements in film. "It's becoming easier for me now to pull from the films," he says. "These new media allow me to revisit the films, going on Duchamp's theory that the artist of the future will simply point his finger and say, That's art." Hopper's fascination with chance and the intellectual challenge of visual art, however, is balanced by a deep belief in its expressive nature. "A lot of art comes out of misery, pain, and sadness," he suggests. "James Dean was an expressionist, he expressed himself physically, like a dancer. It was incredible, to watch him move around the set."

Dean was a pivotal influence for Hopper. "I thought he was the greatest actor in the world," he says. "One day I took him aside and asked him, 'How can you teach me?' 'Why do you want to be an actor?' asked Dean. 'Because I hate my mother and father so much, and I want to be important.' And James Dean said: 'Me, too.' In acting," Hopper recalls learning, in part from Dean, "you have to remember that there are no safety nets, you live in the moment, you do things, and don't show them. You drink the drink, you smoke the cigarette. It's a moment to moment reality level. Lee Strassberg taught me about sense memories, emotional memories. The senses control the brain. So how do you trick your subconscious? You get rid of all the tension areas, go back, try to recall every sense, and one sense will bring it all back."

The drive to make art, Hopper believes, "comes out of a lonely, sad place. It's a way of looking for acceptance, which is almost impossible to find. Acting comes out of that place, too. Most artists are introverted rather than extroverts, painfully shy, many of them try to cover it up." Of the bad guy image, he says, "Bad guys are bad because of what they do. But everyone starts out as a baby. Shooting somebody is a bad number, but it doesn't mean the character has to be snarling all over you. Playing a villain you should get good laughs, and not at the expense of the character. I enjoy playing them because they're more interesting to play."

Is there an element of danger that he needs to keep the edge on his work? Life After on Canvas, 1983-1997, documents the performance at Rice University inTexas in which he surrounded himself with dynamite and ignited it. "Danger," he says, "is being a kid, racing cars or motorcycles. But also being in movies. I like the idea of being able to live inside an explosion because you're in a vacuum, you can imagine what it would be like to be the earth becoming a solar system, or a pocket on the sun itself where an intelligence might live inside that explosive environment. Being the focus of attention is a negative thing in my mind, but also in a way a positive, the element of exposure."

In all artistic efforts, Hopper believes, "You have to want to express something, to create something that lives beyond you own lifetime. It's a pretty lonely concept, an object you're leaving after you're dead." Of all his creative work, then, what would he himself most want to be remembered by? "I've had my moments in all the areas of art," he concedes, after a few moments of reflection. "There have been moments of clarity: the acid trip in Easy Rider was very intense, the photograph of the biker couple..." He pauses again. "But I hope I'll be remembered by something I'm still going to do."