Parallel Lines: The Artistic Life of Dennis Hopper

This is a re-edited excerpt from Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper, first published by Amsterdam University Press (2016).

One of Dennis Hopper’s last film appearances was in Belgian artist Nicolas Provost’s 22-minute short film Stardust (2010). The film featured Las Vegas cityscapes, busy street scenes, members of the public, and celebrities being filmed unawares using a high-resolution digital camera. Provost then edited the footage to create a loose narrative using snippets of dialogue from old Hollywood films. Provost filmed Hopper from a distance innocently talking in a McDonald’s restaurant with fellow actor Danny Trejo. Their unheard dialogue is replaced with cliché gangster talk. Provost also captured Jack Nicholson leering at some girls as they passed by a Las Vegas nightclub. It is fitting that one of Hopper’s last appearances committed to film would be in an artistic context. Running parallel to his late-career exile from mainstream film and reliance on straight-to-DVD movies, Hopper faced a resurgence of interest in his output as a painter, conceptual artist, and photographer. 

It is a fascinating paradox, in that Hopper’s artistic expression in photography, painting, and sculpture is acknowledged as uncompromisingly passionate and raw, yet much of his later film work would appear, at least on the surface, to be the complete opposite. The films from Hopper’s last decade as an actor such as 10th & Wolf, The Crow: Wicked Prayer, Hoboken Hollow, Held for Ransom, and House of 9 might have held interesting concepts, but fell below the standards and have ultimately been forgotten. 

The resurgence of interest in Hopper as an artist accumulated in a 2009 touring exhibition of his collected artworks entitled Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood that went on display at The Cinémathèque Française in Paris. The exhibition featured photographs, abstract paintings, conceptual art, sculptures, found pieces, and screenings of his more revered film work. The exhibition moved on to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. A coffee table book of the same name highlighting Hopper’s own artwork, art collection, interviews, and musings on art and film was produced in conjunction with the exhibitions. After his death in 2010, rediscovered photos filled numerous expensive tomes. Most notably Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967 and Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album, which again coincided with a touring exhibition of photos and prints found tucked away in a drawer. The more recently released monograph Dennis Hopper: Drugstore Camera was a collection of improvised shots using cheap store-bought Instamatic cameras that clearly illustrated Hopper’s eye for candid photography. A collection of Polaroids unearthed from his directing gig on the 1988 gang film Colors was collected and issued as Dennis Hopper: Colors. The Polaroids. More is said to be on the way. Hopper presented the 2007 British Turner Prize to artist Mark Wallinger for his exhibition State Britain, a sincere recognition of his status as an art connoisseur. 

Hopper was first introduced to contemporary art by frequenting newly established galleries and art studios that were popping up in Los Angeles and New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, Hopper was soaking up the creativity around him, taking photographs of the artists and gallery shows with his trusty Nikon camera. He was also producing expressionist-style art. Hopper took inspiration from everywhere: he observed art in everything and soaked up influence and inspiration. His work covered almost every movement and genre, from abstract painting, pop art, installation, and found pieces to sculpture. As with his film work, where Hopper would adapt his own style and manner to suit the type of film or character he was playing, in art, he also shifted his approach to create a personalized concept of any given artistic genre. 

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If, indeed, we know of this hidden facet of Hopper’s life, we tend to perceive his film and artwork as two separate entities. For us, the line that divides film and canvas never blurs. Even his directorial work in Easy Rider and The Last Movie can be viewed as having artistic intent, but as a whole, an audience will always observe it as a form of media designed to entertain, not necessarily to educate or inform us. This is not how Hopper perceived his own art or film work. Art historian Rudi Fuchs suggests that Hopper’s acting and directing “activities are inextricably linked with that same artistry at the actual center of his existence.”

Hopper’s films should be seen as an expression of artistic intent. He saw the two mediums as being able to achieve the same thing. Film directing or film acting, in Hopper’s mind, were equal to painting, taking photographs, or creating a sculpture. Even collecting artistic works was a creative act and a way for the piece to continue its journey to thrive and redefine itself under his brief ownership. In a short documentary produced by EarDog Productions, in which Hopper guides the filmmakers around his studio space, he explains that at “best, what you can do with collecting is to make sure you take care of the pieces, because you are really just a custodian of them, and hopefully, they will live on beyond your lifetime.” He goes on to explain his philosophy toward collecting as “not buying bankable names, but buying people who I believe are contributing something to my artistic life.”

The young Hopper considered himself an empty paint can, his influences from film, art, and literature filling him until his own creativity inevitably spilled out. He considered art his lifeblood. Much like his influences in acting and directing, Hopper took inspiration for his own art from the many forms of art he saw as a gallery bum in the early 1960s. 

Hopper’s involvement with the emerging gallery scene in Los Angeles and his friendships with exciting artists of the day, such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and the numerous contributing artists of the L.A. Ferus Gallery, saw Hopper inundated with influences when it came to creating himself. Writer Howard Hampton best describes Dennis Hopper’s photographic works as an “unfolding narrative of the 1960s at the intersection of Pop Art and Hollywood” and as “virtual stills from the greatest unmade film of the 1960s.”

Hopper’s photographic work from the 1960s is a document of the era, an exposé of the lives of American people living in a turbulent yet hopeful decade. Hopper documented youth with photos of his fresh-faced New Hollywood clique, illustrating a vibrant American society. His work takes in the glitz and glamour of the people who populated the movement with improvisational portraits of his contemporaries in film and art: Paul Newman, Dean Stockwell, and Jane Fonda, as well as his artistic acquaintances Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and David Hockney. He also took photos of the musicians and bands important to the decade’s cultural upheaval: The Byrds, Brain Jones from The Rolling Stones, Ike, and Tina Turner. 

Hopper documented a revolution in the civil rights marches that brought a new era of political participation by marginalized groups. For example, his photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing an audience of civil rights activists in 1963 has become an iconic image of the movement. Talking into a tangle of microphones, King appears sidelined into the edge of the photograph’s frame. Hopper centers the microphones within the frame of the picture, which could be a signifier that the message delivered is more important than the person delivering the words. The ideals and expectations of those King addressed were a shared concern. King fluently communicated these ideas to the people, but the movement began before Martin Luther King Jr. and continued to gain momentum after his death. Much like his fast and vibrant directorial work, his photographs—though predominantly black and white in this medium—capture movement, emotion, and an expression that some important momentum is gathering unseen and outside the frame. Hopper was always attempting to make socially conscious comments. 

Hopper’s documenting of the Civil Rights Movement gave an important and honest portrayal of the hopes and dreams of a socially underprivileged part of the American population. One-piece entitled Selma, Alabama (Full Employment) (1965) illustrates the determination of the young African-American community to gain equal rights and opportunities in the future of America. The young man standing center frame shoots the camera a glare of determination and a belief in what he wishes to achieve for himself and others. Behind the young man, a young woman casually hoists an American flag over her shoulder, a symbol of patriotism, belief, and pride in a country that still had a lot to achieve in terms of equality and fairness.

Considering the social and political context of his work, it should come as no surprise that Hopper documented one of the most seismic events in American history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A piece entitled Kennedy Funeral on Television (1963) shows eight grainy still-frame close-up shots from the state procession of President Kennedy that was televised to the nation. The piece conjures up the grief of the national conscience, yet it also points toward hope and courage in the face of despair, an act of bringing a nation together under the banner of loss and anguish. Frames six and eight, when the American flag is draped over the coffin that carries the dead president, instantly evoke pride and audacity within the viewer and remind us that a hero to the American people lies under the flag, potentially a martyr of the American Dream. However, a certain distance is suggested within the piece. By witnessing the event on television (as many would have done), Hopper is perhaps commenting on the detachment and coldness of television and modern culture. The first photo shows the television at a distance. Kennedy’s iconic image, taken from archival footage of when he was alive, lights up on the screen. In the next shot, we are up close to the television screen, as if the funeral was just something that happened to be on or something stumbled upon while aimlessly flicking channels in a motel room. Hopper also used the same technique of photographing images for the televised moon landing, another national event witnessed by many via television. 

Double Standard (1964) is one of Hopper’s more famous photographic works. Double Standard emerges as an unsentimental comment on post-war American society. Situated in the middle of the frame is a Standard Oil gas station with two signs side by side reading “Standard.” A billboard above the station reads, “Smart Women cook with gas in balanced power homes,” a materialistic advertisement aimed at the domesticated woman of America. This image was taken prior to the full escalation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and at a time when people still believed the war was a reasonably just cause. America was excelling in terms of business, capitalism, and materialism, and socially, the country was addressing the issue of civil rights with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A sense of optimism prevailed, which can be witnessed in Double Standard. The photo is framed by a cemented road and a dark foreboding sky that almost matches in colour, lighting up the scene ahead and framing the image within. In the rear-view mirror, we see a line of cars, which on closer inspection, appear to have no drivers at the wheel. There is an absence of people in the shot, although they are present in terms of being there (in cars, inside the gas station), apart from a sole figure who stands alone on the sidewalk in between the two roads, looking like he’s waiting for someone or is just lost. It is an exceptional, seemingly impromptu photograph that conjures up a defining image of early 1960s America. It is also, in retrospect, recognizably a Dennis Hopper photograph. With an added dash of colour, it resembles the last few moments of Easy Rider in which Billy and Wyatt ramble through an industrialized landscape, the first time in the film that we see a truly modern environment. 

However, what is most apparent in this photo are the two roads heading off in opposite directions and into an unknown distance, two very different directions to be taken. In his own career, Hopper also walked two very different roads. One is the creative, passionate, and independent artist, the person responsible for creating such work as Double Standard, Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue—works of artistic integrity. The other road Hopper took led to compromise and to movies such as Super Mario Bros. With a few exceptions, a distinct lack of integrity was persistent in the last decade of his film career. With the onset of his directorial career in 1969, Hopper abandoned photography for the next twenty years. For us, the audience, this represents a huge gap in his artistic life, and an unfortunate lack, at least for the spectator, of documentation for the escalating madness that would befall him (and America) from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. When he finally returned to the medium in the late 1980s, his principles, approach, and technique had changed, and so had the technology. In the 1960s, Hopper documented his surroundings, the people, the changing landscape of popular culture, and public life in spontaneous, bold, black-and-white photographic film. His new method seemed to drop the social and political commentary and focused more on the personal. 

A self-portrait from 1997 titled Within a man of light, there is only light, within a man of darkness, there is only darkness shows two dark images of Hopper silhouetted against a bright white background. In the first portrait, the interior of Hopper’s silhouette is a bright lens flare that emerges from the head and trails down the front of the figure. In the second portrait, the interior of the figure is completely black. This is a compelling work of experimental photography, and given Hopper’s own personal history, it could be a comment on his own past and internal demons. The “man of light,” which we assume is the clean, sober, and sane Hopper, attracts the eye of the observer, whilst the “man of darkness” lingers to the side, evoking a sinister presence or an echo of a darker interior self or past. Although Hopper had survived a great deal of personal trauma, including drug and alcohol addiction, career disintegration, several failed marriages, and broken friendships, he had come out the other side stronger and more determined. What Hopper appears to be letting the spectator understand is that even though he recovered, darkness and a sense of guilt still lingered.

Whereas in the 1960s, Hopper would use his camera as a tool to capture a spontaneous moment, his later photographic works rely on set-up and composition. Comparing his spur-of-the-moment photograph of 1960s stars Andy Warhol, James Brown, and Jane Fonda with his 2006 portraits of Robert Downey Jr, Michael Madsen, Charlie Sheen, and Jon Voight, there is an impression of composure from the subjects, the knowledge that they are having their picture taken. After a twenty-year hiatus, Hopper’s use of this medium perhaps became something more akin to a leisure pursuit. This certainly seems likely in his decision to photograph a porn shoot for the American pornographic magazine Hustler in the late 1980s for a series called “Celebrity Porn.” During the production of the straight-to-DVD noir thriller Out of Season (2004), Hopper used the unique shooting location of Romania to experiment with digital photography. The outcome of this was the slim monograph Bucharest Nights. The digital stills collected in Bucharest Nights capture ethereal spontaneity, but the focus here is on experimentation and even voyeurism. 

The theme of reality and illusion has become regarded as a staple of Hopper’s work, not only in art but also in film. The Last Movie (1971), for example, is a testament to what we perceive as a reality or an illusion. The act of filmmaking is a creation of illusion and spectacle, and Hopper playfully confuses the audience into what they should comprehend. In his artwork, Hopper mixed mediums in a chaotic fashion, a fusion of styles and abstract forms often gathering in one piece. Hopper’s earliest pieces resemble the abstract expressionism that was infiltrating the art scene of the time. Unfortunately, most of Hopper’s earliest pieces were lost when a fire ripped through his Los Angeles home, destroying most of his work. Only one piece survives from that time, an untitled abstract oil painting, which was on display in an LA gallery at the time. Although a brilliantly textured piece, it is clear that Hopper was experimenting with form and would go on to produce more daring work in the years ahead. The Pop Art movement, the mixed media collage, as well as the found piece heavily influenced Hopper’s artwork in the early to mid-1960s. Two examples of the found piece are his Mobil Man and Salsa Man. Originally used as roadside advertisements for a Mobil garage and a Spanish Mexican restaurant, the 26-foot-tall fiberglass statues have been taken out of their original context to become something more profound: a comment on consumerism and overindulgent advertising culture. Another found piece which echoes Andy Warhol’s own pop artwork is Coca Cola Sign (1961), a tin sign possibly used as a store window display, with four cola bottles and thermometers showing the suggested serving temperature. It is interesting to see that Hopper seems to find his found art in product advertising. It could be argued that this was Hopper’s intention with these found pieces, a comment on puerile marketing tactics that were being used by every industry in America at the time, including the film industry that Hopper was working within. In 1963, Hopper collaborated with his artistic mentor Marcel Duchamp (the influential artist who produced the found piece Fountain, a men’s urinal taken out of the bathroom and placed in a gallery setting) to create the found piece Hotel Green (Entrance), a door sign to a hotel entrance that points guests toward the entrance. The hand pointing toward the right perhaps illustrates Duchamp’s theory that “the artist of the future will merely point his finger and say it’s art—and it will be art.” In this case, Hopper takes the finger-pointing literally. 

Hopper entered something of a dry spell during the 1970s; the disappointment with being shunned from Hollywood a second time after The Last Movie and his drink and drug misuse kept him somewhat preoccupied. He “collaborated” with Andy Warhol on one of his Chairman Mao pieces, although the joint effort was prompted by an act of paranoia and violence as opposed to an artistic endeavour. The screen-print image of Chinese communist leader Chairman Mao, with Warhol’s distinctive high contrast colouring was shot at twice by a spooked, and one might assume, intoxicated Hopper in 1972. Warhol circled the bullet holes and labelled them “Warning Shot” to the bullet that hit just above Mao’s shoulder and “Bullet Hole” for the shot that hit the eye. Afterward, he proclaimed the piece an artistic collaboration between the two of them.

By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Hopper’s excessive use of drugs and drink had reached a critical point. Unable to command a reputable career in film, his roles were mostly embodiments of his own outrageous persona seen in Mad Dog Morgan (1976) and White Star (1984). This persona was caught on camera during a career retrospective at the Rice Media Centre in Houston, Texas, in 1984. An inebriated Hopper readies the audience for what will be an art happening, a death-defying stunt called The Russian Suicide Chair. Spectators were bussed to a nearby speedway and watched with bated breath as Hopper surrounded himself with live dynamite and simultaneously ignited the sticks to create a vortex that shielded him from the violent explosion. One misplaced stick would have blown him to pieces. This moment was, in turn, an artistic resurrection (possibly triggered by the near-death experience). After a decade of producing little to no artistic works, Hopper began experimenting with paint again. The untitled works produced between 1982 and 1983 are darker in tone and expel many pop art influences to concentrate on the expressionist. In terms of Hopper’s state of mind, the abstracts speak volumes. An acrylic entitled X-Xerox (1982) exposes a statement of depression, like a damaged and cracking film reel. The paintings produced in 1982 to 1983 show a private expression of creativity, a testing of the waters, and a regaining of confidence in the field. When his film comeback occurred in 1986, Hopper’s state of mind and his artwork were revived with a sense of positivity and freedom. 

The Morocco series of paintings, which date from 1994, are bold and colourful. Reds, oranges, and blues with dashes of white and black reflect a very different mood from anything Hopper had produced previously. They also suitably reflect Hopper’s ease with a paintbrush. The works appear effortless, composed and full of life. In comparison, the series of works produced later, entitled Florence (1996) and Amsterdam (1998-1999), are more subdued, paler, and seem less vital. Nevertheless, these works still show Hopper to be an inspired artist, working within an abstract medium he clearly felt comfortable with. 

In Hopper’s earlier directorial film work, he was often perceived as uncompromising. The looseness and even the content of Easy Rider were at odds with the current film market of the time, while The Last Movie was so far removed from the mainstream that it was barely understood by critics and audiences. Out of the Blue was as disturbing and nihilistic as any of the post-punk films of the early 1980s. Colors towed the mainstream line, but the film’s downbeat tone, drug referencing, violent gang warfare, and use of hip-hop on the soundtrack meant that the film maintained a strong critical voice, again at odds with mainstream cinema at the time. When compromises began to occur in his later film work, he withdrew his name from the product, as witnessed in his film Catchfire. Hopper attempted to bridge the gap between mainstream film and his dedication to art and artists by incorporating artistic elements within the movies he directed. On some level, they were mostly successful, certainly visually, as witnessed in Easy Rider and The Last Movie’s editing techniques influenced by European arthouse cinema and experimental film. 

Hopper produced impressive art, photographs, and sculptures, and for this, he is effectively faultless and universally recognized in artistic circles for his output. However, his film work is a different matter altogether. The faults appear on a regular basis, especially as his career progressed—or dwindled—into the 2000s. What Hopper’s film work shows is that, unlike other art forms, a film can be considered abysmal and still find a small and somewhat appreciative audience. Bad photographs, bad art, and bad sculpture are seldom tolerated in art circles; they simply become a novelty or are reduced to ridicule. Of course, art is down to personal preference and interpretation. 

When a spectator observes a form of art, they garner pleasure and appreciation from it. The audience recognizes it as being a superior, important piece of art or, depending on our interpretation, we reject it altogether. This is not the case with film. An audience can view a bad film and still find redeeming qualities or, most often, some moments of hilarity. This is something that rarely happens in other artistic mediums. It is certainly something that Dennis Hopper never chose to explore in his artworks and photography. Dennis Hopper made great art, but he did not always make great movies. It is a shame that the aspect of Dennis Hopper’s career that he is most known for is where he is least appreciated. His artistic works have rarely, if ever, received the same critical mauling, or praise, that his film work has.