Overexposed but Underdeveloped

Abstract

Hopper: Double Standard The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles July 11-September 26, 2010 Dennis Hopper: Double Standard,'' at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, is a loving tribute to the influential celebrity/artist/filmmaker/actor who died from prostate cancer on May 29, 2010. Curated by his friend Julian Schnabel, the exhibition was organized in six months, in the hope that Hopper would survive to see the opening--which he did not. Hopper was an enigmatic figure, who reinvented himself into various personas over his prolific and fascinating life. He was a dilettante in the most generous sense of the word--one who loved art and artists and threw himself into the creative process, yet his artistic output is mostly mediocre. Some of his early photographs are wonderful, although his paintings and sculptures are merely derivative of the styles and movements he loved. The organization of the artworks in the exhibition reflects Schnabel's biases, and not the importance of the works. There is no aesthetic or intellectual logic behind their placement and Schnabel acknowledges this shortcoming by saying he placed the works according to their temperature. Presumably, he is referring to his personal taste as to how the artworks relate, but the exhibition crowds the black-and-white photographs, giving too much prominence to Hopper's terrible mixed-media paintings and simple abstract color photographs. The huge billboard-sized paintings, made from black-and-white photographic images, would be effective as actual billboards, but in a museum they take up too much space, looking like decorations rather than fine art. The same is true of his huge sculptures of a waiter in a Mexican restaurant and a Mobile gas station attendant. Hopper's vision slides into kitsch too often to be taken seriously. It is easy to imitate Andy Warhol's factory impulse to point things out and fabricate them, but very difficult to achieve similar depth. Likewise, Hopper's ready-mades are more mid-century collectibles than art. He was obviously influenced by the seminal 1963 Marcel Duchamp exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. In the center of the exhibition is a room full of a few hundred black-and-white photographs hung thematically in salon style, an arrangement that dilutes their individual power. Some are not more than documentation, such as the image of Dr. Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. A seminal moment in the Civil Rights movement to be sure, but its inclusion suggests the artist's biography over his artistic legacy. Likewise, Hopper's pictures of a bullfight are nothing special. …