Dennis Hopper has played plenty of strange characters on film, but it took a Las Vegas gallery to give him a split personality.
Godt-Cleary clove its Hopper show into two mutually supporting segments. The Mandalay Place Gallery is largely black-and-white, both in photographs and in Hopper's painted "billboard" blowups of photographs, and the subjects are mostly male. At the new downtown satellite, Godt-Cleary Projects, billboards and photographs are mostly in color and mostly depict women.
You could look upon this as the yin and yang of the actor-artist's character, the male and female sides, perhaps; or maybe the polarities of terse and over-the-top he's navigated in film so effectively. But it makes more sense to read the two parts as extensions of one another, describing a world view at once playful and bitter.
Hopper came of age in the late 1950s and early '60s, as the art world shifted from the soulfulness of abstraction to the knowingness of pop art. An intermediary stage included artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both among Hopper's portraits (and the latter the subject of Godt-Cleary's next adventure). These proto-popsters celebrated the beauty of chance and the unwitting splendor of everyday images. This would morph into commentary upon our commodity-obsessed society, through pop masters like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Hopper's shots of Lichtenstein posing with paintings are awkward, but he more cogently captures Warhol, who leans to align his face with a flower.
Hopper did more than document the art scene. His portraits of key East and West Coast figures have an air of spontaneous collaboration, much like Tom Murray's photographs on offer at the Art of Music Gallery, of a day in 1968 spent with the Beatles. Here the lads frolic on a rooftop; there they sport with a man asleep on a bench; everywhere they play to the camera, antic or pensive. Hopper's subjects are less blithe, perhaps, but no less complicit in the process. Painter Ed Ruscha stations himself by a lettered window reflecting a street scene; Rauschenberg sticks out a stamped tongue.
A spirit of mischief untainted by cynicism marked the period, and part of its impishness involved being boldly creative across disciplines. In this regard, Hopper's art is not the recreational diversion it is for so many stars in other fields, whose pictures litter the Vegas galleryscape. (An exception might be Tony Curtis, whose recent show at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery included the actor's idiosyncratic shadow boxes, à la Joseph Cornell.) Hopper painted and photographed between movies, and ended the decade with his directorial debut, Easy Rider. Although remembered wistfully by many, it is a sour meditation on the death of the '60s.
We might read other works, particularly those at the downtown gallery, as sour meditations, too. Both galleries share a sense of postmodern palimpsest, in the large, grisaille billboards which reproduce in paint Hopper's photographs of shredded wall posters. The billboards themselves are an extra layer of layered images. They suggest not the potentials of infinite information but the tawdry decay of message after message. In that context, Hopper's stylish color photographs of female models in urban spaces might seem excessively mannered. And taken of a piece with his runway shots of models, some departing with buttocks showing, these fashion-mag-edgy prints suggest a complicated fetishism.
But in the context of Hopper's overall work, the large prints of erotically or exotically clad models in unexpected urban spaces take on an aspect of post-pop commentary, whether intended or not. In evoking the peculiar milieu of fashion photography and its sometimes perverse poses of models, Hopper addresses the commercial allure of idealized women. But in "Oaxaca (model and native woman in town square)" (1996), Hopper contrasts the two title figures, not starkly but clearly, as if to remind us of the essential woman in each.
Halving the show, Godt-Cleary asks the viewer to reconcile the two "personalities" of Hopper's least-known role, artist.