Dennis Hopper is full of insight
The actor’s ‘Lost Album’ at Michael Kohn is peppered with photos that sing.
“I shoot a lot of crap,” Dennis Hopper once said of his photographs, most of which date from the early to mid-1960s, the period when the difficult actor, often unemployed, most avidly wielded a still camera.
Ample evidence is offered in an exhibition of unearthed pictures that apparently have not been seen in the U.S. for nearly 50 years. (Hopper died in 2010, and the work was shown in London in 2014.) Yet, it also shows why Hopper’s photographs are worth looking at.
Sorting through the more than 375 images in “Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album” at Michael Kohn
Gallery, mundane if sometimes useful documents of their time and place are peppered with photographs that sing.
Photographs are clustered by subject and theme — portraits of artists, biker gangs, bullfights, a homeless man with a baby carriage foraging by the side of a road, hippies and Holy Rollers. Artists typically engage Hopper’s camera most directly, unsurprisingly conscious of the power of images.
Surprises do emerge, such as the latent homoeroticism of roughhousing Hells Angels. Numerous pictures of battered and paint-peeling urban walls shout “serious” abstraction, but they’re wholly derivative of 1950s photographs by Aaron Siskind and others. Scanning the dross adds dramatic punch to the best works, which flare into consciousness as little cinematic bursts of powerful insight.
Take a group of pictures shot during the 1965 Freedom March from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, culminating in a remarkable photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Or, rather, in a photograph centered on a bristling jumble of microphones, which virtually leap across the frame toward the great civil rights leader and orator.
King is shunted to one side, as if cornered by a mass media hungry to hear and broadcast his words — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — as well as to devour him.
Hopper, by then a significant Hollywood celebrity and an intimate of such pop artists as Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol, understood the double-edged media dynamic.
In another, a man weighs himself on a big sidewalk scale, the kind that used to be common outside smalltown pharmacies.
A blaring advertising banner in an adjacent store window proclaims, “We give Blue Chip stamps.” The silent juxtaposition of scale and blue chip wryly identifies weightiness with quality.
Black-and-white, uncropped, printed full-frame and casually mounted on cardboard, the photographs were shown in 1970 at the Fort Worth Art Center, forerunner to today’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then directed by Henry T. Hopkins, former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Taken with a 28-millimeter Nikon, they were discovered in storage after Hopper’s death.
The work is shown in a comparable manner at Kohn. If you saw the blandly overblown 2010 Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which featured lots of bad paintings and sculptures draped in celebrity gauze, don’t let it deter you from visiting this far more revealing show.
MOCA’s bloated offering struck me as suggesting that, artistically, Hopper was an incisive if short-lived photo-documentarian. This show does too, but more deeply so.
Michael Kohn Gallery, 1227 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. Through Sept. 1; closed Sundays and Mondays. (323) 461-3311, www .kohngallery.com
Deft hands mold these messages
In Ben Jackel’s large exhibition of recent work at L.A. Louver, one sculpture starts with a bearded battle ax — the kind used in ancient Norse warfare, on a medieval executioner’s block or now in conventional woodworking. Then, he doubled the form.
Two monumental hooked blades, each 5 feet high and 5 feet wide, stand upright side by side. Jackel carved them from wood. Their irregular surfaces have been rubbed with a dark graphite that emphasizes the brusque chop-marks on the rough-hewn Douglas fir, now glinting in the light.
The formal repetition of the two establishes a conceptual dichotomy, while the scale asserts its gravity. The weapon embodies the type of hand tool with which the sculpture was made, enlarging it to epic size. The ax stands as an implement of death and an instrument of art — of destruction and creation in equal measure.
That it’s sculpture declares where the artist’s unequivocal commitments lie. Jackel’s is a political art of a subtle and sophisticated sort.
Except for three sleek, suspended sculptures of stealth bombers, the show’s other 22 works are stoneware — dense, opaque and visually heavy. Because fired clay is also breakable, hefty sculptures of cannons, armor and a foothold bear trap are as materially contradictory as the ax head. They’re fearsome yet fragile.
They are also exquisitely rendered, perhaps none more than a helmet with night-vision goggles.
It’s rubbed with beeswax, as are many of the other dusky stoneware pieces, which yields a soft, light-diffusing, visually tactile surface. Together with a fullsize gas mask, as well as three medieval helmets with thin slits for the eyes, through which almost nothing could be seen by a warrior encased inside, the sculptures are concise, carefully crafted essays on militaristic blindness.
Eight bulky models for muzzle-loaded cannons include the famous 100-ton guns that the British mounted in the 1880s at the Rock of Gibraltar at the Mediterranean gate. The gigantic weapons were manufactured in response to the complex geopolitics of the day — notably, the opening of the Suez Canal, which reconfigured relations between Europe and the Middle East.
Sound familiar? Their significance for today is hard to miss. Nearby, stoneware models of a lifeboat, Ernest Hemingway’s fishing vessel and Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery, laden with black powder to safeguard the boats’ exploratory movements, climb a white wall. All seem destined to sink.
The show’s tour de force is an oversize bust of Teddy Roosevelt, apparently adapted from a famous laughing photograph of the equally larger-than-life president. In Jackel’s deft hands, his toothy demeanor has been altered to be more conflicted — laughing, shrieking, crying or perhaps all three at once.
Think Francis Bacon’s paintings of screaming popes grafted onto the archetypal ex-Republican, whose byword was “Bully!” and whose perplexing politics incorporated both progressive and nationalist values. The astonishing bust is an authoritative image of executive chaos — and clearly less about the past than the present.
The imposing bust is preparation for the forbidding, 7-foot monolith that stands in splendid isolation in the center of a small adjacent gallery. Modeled on an ugly black-glass skyscraper on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, the one that the current president calls home and where he recently delivered shocking comments on white supremacists, it is titled “Dark Tower” — like the magnum opus of horror master Stephen King.
Not subtle, but apt.
L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; through Sept. 1; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 822-4955, www .lalouver.com
Giving power to immigrant story
The subject of film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new 6½-minute movie is trauma — the trauma experienced by refugees and immigrants crossing the treacherous deserts of the American Southwest.
As the centerpiece of “Carne y Arena (Virtually present, Physically invisible),” a three-part installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art designed to be experienced by one visitor at a time, the movie employs sophisticated virtual reality technology. Certainly remarkable, the technology is the draw. But it’s also problematic, wedged between a viewer and the empathy Iñárritu plainly wants to heighten.
Part one of “Carne y Arena” (Flesh and Sand) is an ice-cold waiting room lined with metal benches. Battered shoes are strewn about. Signs instruct an audience member to remove his own shoes and socks, store them in a nearby locker and wait for a buzzer to sound. When it does, you leave the frosty detention chamber and pass through the door into Part 2.
There, technicians wait inside a large, empty room with a floor covered in a thick layer of packed sand. They outfit a visitor with virtual reality goggles and a heavy backpack, and instruct on how the gear works. The movie opens on a lovely desert landscape at dawn.
Digital migrants soon appear. Suddenly, the landscape is engulfed by a dust storm kicked up by a whirring helicopter. Border patrol agents noisily arrive in vans. The scattering migrants, their deportment ranging from terrified to dejected or dazed, are rounded up. The scene is one continuous take, and a viewer moving about chooses his own points of view.
When the scene of apprehension ends, you remove the VR gear and exit into a long hallway. Video screens embedded in the wall feature close-up portraits of immigrants whose ghastly stories inspired Iñárritu’s project. Among the most moving testimonies is one from a careworn patrol agent whose anguished memories of his former job haunt him.
This potent third section redeems the first two, where closely observed but banal manipulation functions at best as the later testimonials’ set-up. Neither the stage set of a chilled detention chamber nor the digitally impressive VR technology puts you into the grim action, except in a superficial way.
The incredible VR illusions can’t escape the bondage of the clumsy gear a visitor wears to see them. (I felt at times like that skunk in the viral video, the one with its head stuck in a soda can.) The third section is empathic because it requires taking an imaginative leap, framed by the unambiguous context that the first two lack.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Playing indefinitely. (323) 857-6000, www .lacma.org