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Dennis Hopper

Life After on Canvas, 1983

Triptych of digitized ink prints on canvas with 16mm film projection, 1 min 13 sec
Dimensions variable

Dennis Hopper, best known as Hollywood’s bad boy actor and director, has been a member of the Los Angeles Avant-garde since the 1950s. His black and white photographic chronicles of the American art world from 1961-67 have been widely presented; but lesser so his later work in painting, assemblage and installation. Life After on Canvas is the documentation of a cataclysmic self-explosion with a Russian Death-Chair, a performance with a cathartic effect that would symbolize the end of an era of self-destructive drug-intake as well as the experimental psychedelic expression in Hopper’s life: “I just go crazy for a couple of weeks using a lot of cocaine, and I do all these paintings, and I go down to Houston. Walter (Hopps, director of the Rice Media Center in Houston, TX) gets me a gallery to show ‘em in, at the same time I’m showing my photographs at Rice University, the de Menils have a place there. And then I blow myself up at the Big H Speedway: I put twenty sticks of dynamite around myself in this race car arena, and I blow myself up, and the dynamite won’t blow in on itself, and I do this performance, and then I announce that I have now started painting again. So the last work I do is Bomb Drop in 1968 and the 15 years later I blow myself up to announce my return to the artworld and start painting again… Okay, and then from there I’m locked up, I’m incarcerated and I go through a bunch of shit and crap and so, and finally I get sober and I go through a year or so, whatever.” (Dennis Hopper)

*1936 Dodge City, USA, ✝ 2010