It's no secret that I'm probably one of the biggest Dennis Hopper enthusiasts on the planet. On Wednesday I finally went to Tony Shafrazi Gallery to see the Hopper exhibit Signs of the Times. I felt like I was there for 10 minutes, but I stayed for over an hour and a half. Shafrazi's a huge gallery, and most of the wall space is devoted to photos that Hopper took from 1961-67. When you get all the images from the scenes of his amazing experiences (just in the 60's!) into one room-- civil rights marches, Warhol's factory, the beginnings of Pop Art, Taos NM, Hollywood, etc.-- the quintessentially American status of Dennis Hopper's icon-ship becomes manifestly apparent.And then when you go into the long 3-room chamber of film clips, forget about it. They've got clips from virtually every reel of film his face has been exposed on, even the super rare documentary The American Dreamer, in which drugged-out Hopper struggles to edit his best and most honestly experimental work The Last Movie.
So yeah, it was basically just a cavern of awesomeness that I could house up in until the show's end. My Hopper worship just multiplied about 500 times, and I'm happy because this guy doesn't get enough credit for his incredible career and production of art work in multiple genres. His eye's phenomenal, from collecting art to creating it to making the films that take my soul (and many others) and put them into visuals and words that are so heartbreakingly beautiful you just wanna blow yourself up with dynamite! (Yeah, he did that and SURVIVED!)
And survival's what it comes down to for me when I think about Dennis Hopper. He started out as a golden boy actor straight from the farms of Kansas. Hello, American Dream! He made it in Hollywood until he got too creative and sure of his own ideas and was blacklisted from film for rebelling against his director. Then he got creative, played around with Art's elite, roamed the country, made Easy Rider, and fell off the deep end from alcohol and drug abuse. He made a masterpiece that won the Venice Film Festival (THE LAST MOVIE) and went bat-shit crazy in Taos, NM. But he kept film in his life, and film kept him alive. He pushed life to the absolute limits, suffered and destroyed because of that craving for the edge of the abyss, but the most American thing about Hopper is that he came BACK from that. He realized the American Dream is the most major mythic lie (and stubbornly sought goal) in our culture, said fuck it and did his own thing, but then reintegrated himself back in the artistic society on his own terms.
