06/25/04

LC040625

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A side of Dennis Hopper you won't see on the big screen.

Dennis Hopper>> And I started doing assemblages with the photographs. I stopped painting. I started using objects in photographing. I call them abstract reality because they're only abstract because I've abstracted them.

Val>> And then how the Los Angeles archdiocese is carrying on the tradition of great art inspired by faith. Plus a Los Angeles treasure you can only see at night, the city's glowing collection of neon signs.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Some of our favorite stories over the years have come from the world of art and local history and we thought we would share three of our most memorable ones. The first is a profile that reveals a hidden side of a popular film star, Dennis Hopper. He's been a presence in Hollywood since the 1950's when he appeared in "Rebel Without a Cause". But in some ways, his painting and photography are more important to him than the fame he's won as an actor, as you'll see in this profile of Dennis Hopper, the artist.

Patt Morrison>> From the very first, he was in Hollywood, but not of it. The guy on the outside, the rebel, the subversive, a fellow in a fringed jacket working at the fringes of the movie establishment. The man the world saw only as an actor saw himself as something more. A man of parts, an all-around artist of many media, all of them visual.

Dennis Hopper>> Being an artist, to me, is a state of mind. It's not something that you can really think about. It's part of you. It's just the way you stay alive. It's your juice that keeps you moving, you know? I look at everything. I mean, for years, I've been looking for that picture, that thing, that object, so everywhere I go, I'm looking for something. I see a lot of things that I think in my mind, "Boy, that would really be a great photograph, that would really be a great scene in a movie, that would really be a great painting." You know, on and on, all day long.

Patt Morrison>> The brush, the pen, the lens, any of them, all of them figure into the ways that Dennis Hopper sees the world and they have from his earliest days. Even as a child in Dodge City, Kansas, he exhibited an interest, a talent, a flair for the visual arts. When his family picked up and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, the young Hopper took advantage of the cultural offerings of a larger city to study at the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery.

In 1950, when Hopper was fourteen, the family came west to San Diego, the entry point for Hopper's own incarnation of the California dream. At the La Jolla Playhouse, the student who performed "Hamlet" in eighth grade, the boy named most likely to succeed by his high school classmates, worked as an apprentice. It was there that he met the actor, Vincent Price. Price was already an eager collector of contemporary artists whose names were not yet household words, painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

Dennis Hopper>> That's where I first saw my first abstract expressionist paintings. Even though I'd been doing abstract expressionist paintings before, I'd never really seen any. This was like 1954. I was shocked and relieved all at once because I never really considered anything I was doing anything more than like sort of something strange, you know? But then it sort of said it was okay, but it was okay how? (laughter) I wasn't quite sure.

Patt Morrison>> It was inevitable that Hopper would make his way to Los Angeles where two different forms of artistry claimed his time and his attention: acting and photography. He fell in with a group of young artists who would in time be internationally renowned: Ed Rouche, Ed Keinholz, Wallace Berman, George Herms, John Altoon, Robert Irwin. Hopper listened and he watched and he learned.

Dennis Hopper>> I took photographs from 1961 to 1967, black and white photographs, and they're all full frame. I didn't crop them because I was going to direct movies and I wanted to make sure that I learned how to compose without thinking I could crop because you can't crop a movie film, so I wanted to learn how to do composition. Part of me said, well, you know, maybe the only important thing you're ever going to do is take these still photographs, so you should have some sort of historical-like point of view about all this. I'll photograph the ones that I think are going to become famous. My picks, you know?

Patt Morrison>> It was a seminal time in Los Angeles artistic history and not only because, for so many decades, the city had been thin in the visual arts department. In that free-thinking, free-range climate, everything seemed possible and the artists reveled in the wide open vitality of the place and the times.

Dennis Hopper>> Well, there was a moment in the 1960's when La Cienega was shut down and all the galleries were in La Cienega. Monday nights was art night. It seemed very sophisticated and very heady, but it was really the beginnings of an art scene in Los Angeles. Our history really begins in the 1950's.

Patt Morrison>> As the poet Wordsworth wrote of another kind of revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." The young Dennis Hopper found that, like the times, the arts too were a'changin'.

Dennis Hopper>> At this time, everybody was talking about a return to reality. We were into third generation abstract expressionism and they said, "Where's the return to reality?" Then I saw a couple of pictures of Warhol soup cans and big comic book characters by Liechtenstein and I went, "Wow". I said, "Now, that's a return to reality. The artist of the future will merely be a person that points his finger and says it's art and it'll be art."

I started doing assemblages with the photographs. I stopped painting and started using objects in photographing. The photographs that I like are all found objects or all un-cropped, full-frame abstract. I call them abstract reality because they're only abstract because I've abstracted them.

Patt Morrison>> In 1967, Hopper left Los Angeles to direct and star in the classic and influential film, "Easy Rider". Its success propelled him deep into the world of moviemaking and it was not until 1983 that a museum exhibition of his works persuaded him to put down the movie camera and once again pick up the artist's oldest tool, the paintbrush.

Dennis Hopper>> To emphasize that I had gone back to painting, I decided on a trick that I'd seen when I was a kid at a rodeo in Dodge City, Kansas, the human stick of dynamite, where I proceeded to blow myself up.

[Film Clip]

Then when I directed "Colors", I did a series of paintings. In Los Angeles, you have the graffiti, the taggers, and then the city comes along and paints it out. Then they become these Rothko-like images where the graffiti's gone and now there's some paint that doesn't match the paint behind it and the squares and the rectangles and these forms. Then the kids come again and spray and then they paint it another color and it becomes this interaction. So those became the basis of allowing me to become an abstract expressionist again.

Patt Morrison>> In the years since, his works have hung on gallery walls alongside those of Frank Stella, David Hockney, Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe. Today Dennis Hopper can give free rein to his artistic impulses with camera or with canvas.

Dennis Hopper>> Robert Graham, who is somebody that I really admire and is a good friend, is married to Anjelica Huston, lives right down the street, was at dinner the other night. He said to me, "Why in the world are you into fine art? Do you realize that, with "Easy Rider", you changed more peoples' lives than Jackson Pollock will ever change, so why in the world would you want to leave the motion picture area and go into such a limited, limited area that has such a limited amount of people that even go to see it or have knowledge about it?" I don't have an answer to that, but maybe that's why I find it so interesting.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val>> Neon is nothing more than certain gases inside a glass tube and yet its discovery revolutionized advertising and gave Los Angeles a whole new character. But as Saul Gonzalez tells us, for a while, neon was out of fashion, but it's now making a comeback in the form of art.

Saul Gonzalez>> As night falls on the City of Angels, a new world emerges, a geography of light. And in this dreamland of luminescence, no light burns as seductively as neon.

>> It's a very romantic nightlife city excitement kind of thing.

>> There's a mystery about it. People aren't quite sure what it is, even though it surrounds us.

>> You're dealing with plasma and what you're seeing in a neon discharge tube is this plasma.

Saul Gonzalez>> After dark, you can think of Los Angeles as one vast neon night gallery. The lights glow, luring passersby to amusement, shelter and sin.

>> It's a marriage. Neon is a marriage of art and commerce, really. There's art involved in making the signs and many of the signs themselves are there to sell something.

Saul Gonzalez>> Each sign is a one-of-a-kind handcrafted sculpture in light.

>> For one thing, neon has a much warmer glow than the vacuum-sealed plastic signs that we see now. Also, you must remember about neon that some artist made every neon sign you see. Those glass tubes are heated and bent and filled and it's actually a combination of gases which makes different colors. So there's an interaction of humans in those signs that really isn't in the plastic signs. They're mass-produced. Neon is produced by individual artists. It's an art form and there are not very many people left who can do it.

Saul Gonzalez>> There is one place in Los Angeles that honors neon as high art. The Los Angeles Museum of Neon, or MONA.

>> The Museum of Neon Art is an organization that documents, preserves and exhibits electric arts, primarily neon and kinetic art and vintage signage.

[Film Clip]

>> My fascination with neon comes from my fascination with technology. It's a technology that I can get my hands on and work with. A neon light is basically a tube with an electrode on each end. The tube has been evacuated, or all the air has been taken out of it. All that air has been replaced with a rare gas, either neon gas, or argon gas, krypton gas, helium gas or argon gas, and then that tube's sealed off under a vacuum. Then high voltage, anywhere between 2,000 and 15,000 volts, is put through it and that causes the gas to discharge and to glow. Basically, you have gas color, glass color and phosphor color. By combining and recombining those things, you have a working palette of easily over three hundred colors.

Saul Gonzalez>> First invented in France, neon was introduced to Los Angeles in the 1920's. It was brought here by an automobile dealer who saw the potential of marketing in light.

>> Los Angeles was actually the first place where neon ever existed. The first neon sign in America was at Seventh and Flower and it stopped traffic. There was foot traffic that stopped. There were all kinds of traffic that stopped. People had never seen anything like it.

Saul Gonzalez>> The city fell in love with this light fantastic and soon Los Angeles streets, especially Wilshire Corridor, were bathed in a neon glow.

>> Wilshire was the heart of Los Angeles for years and years. It was the tourist draw to have all these signs up in the sky. It just let people know that this was an exciting city, that this was the new metropolis, that things were happening here, it was the center of Hollywood, big excitement.

Saul Gonzalez>> In a marriage of neon and noir, the marquees of that era conjure up a Los Angeles of saxophone riffs, femme fatales and, of course, Raymond Chandler, who once wrote: "I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights."

Saul Gonzalez>> Yet, in the early 1940's, Los Angeles's neon started going out. The reason wasn't new technologies or changing tastes. It was war.

>> World War II, believe it or not, and the mayor of Los Angeles had all the signs turned off. They were concerned about Los Angeles being bombed. It was not black-out friendly if there were neon signs up in the sky.

Saul Gonzalez>> After the war ended, Los Angeles's neon signs continued to suffer from neglect and disrepair. Light after light sputtered out over the decades until the 1990's when a new city program called lumens started restoring and re-lighting Los Angeles's classic neon signs. With care and attention, these lights from the golden age of Los Angeles neon could shine well into the twenty-first century.

>> Well, if it's done right, it should live, say, forty years. But transformers would probably have to be replaced and, being that it's glass, it is fragile. But if everything's done right, it should last a good forty years and then it can be re-pumped and live another forty years.

Saul Gonzalez>> The neon lights that illuminated Raymond Chandler's City of Angels could still add mystery and romance to tens of thousands of Los Angeles nights to come.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels has become one of the crown jewels of Los Angeles's skyline, but the new cathedral has more to offer art lovers than just dramatic architecture. Its doors, fountains, tapestries and sculptures were created by artists who survived intense competition. The pastor of the cathedral, Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik, gave us a tour of a few of these inspired works.

Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik>> If you notice, the cathedral is set here on the hill. It's on the top of a hill overlooking the 101 Freeway and the cathedral is meant to be a statement not only for those who pass by on the freeway, but for those who live in the downtown community that this is the spiritual center of our city. What we tried to do with this particular structure as it was designed by our architect, Jose Rafael Moneo from Madrid, was build a church that not only was part of the downtown setting, but also an architectural statement.

The architecture and the art become a focus and a point of inspiration for people so that, when people come in, they not only are moved by art and architecture, but hopefully -- I think very often in our lives, we're troubled because we lack any sense of beauty. God is defined as beauty, so we have worked very hard to make expressions of god very commonplace in this cathedral through very simple art forms and through elements of the earth that have been created as art forms to express and manifest god in some way.

One of the things we wanted to make sure was that this cathedral would not just model some building of the past. It's a building, again, for not only today but also for the twenty-first century. This building has been designed to last some five hundred years. I think the color is magnificent compared to some of the earlier cathedrals that were built in gray stone. One of the wonderful features of this building was the opportunity to create a color that was very reminiscent of the California missions.

Again, of course, you have to incorporate the building into the entire sense of this complex. There are very few cathedrals in this country that have a magnificent two and a half acre plaza as a gathering space. When people come here, they are meant to make a pilgrimage. They are meant to make a journey, and we'll see that as we go into the cathedral itself.

These are the great bronze doors designed by Robert Graham. Robert Graham is an international renowned bronze artist. These doors have been almost four to five years in the making. They are thirty by thirty feet, they weigh twenty-five tons, and they open on an hydraulic system. There are various images on the doors of Our Lady as she was brought to the new world by various immigrant groups.

The image of Our Lady that is above is a new image that Robert Graham has designed. If you notice very closely, she has various features of all of our wonderful cultural groups here in Southern California. She's not in a veil, she's not in crown jewels. The heart of Mary as the mother of God really comes from a spirit from within, so that is how she is placed above these doors with the open arms welcoming everybody to their cathedral.

As we stand within the interior of the cathedral, one of the great features you notice is that there is a lot of natural light that pours into this building and that is the sense of light that we celebrate here. We live in Southern California where, in our tradition, we can say that God is light. That's very scriptural, so we wanted a cathedral that was filled with light.

Almost ninety percent of our artists were all Southern Californian. We have great artists here in this community and, while we had artists from around the world send us their portfolios, the art committee headed by Father Richard Vosco from Albany, New York, who is a great artist and liturgist, we ended up with ninety percent all doing works of art for this cathedral and they live locally. One of the important elements was that each of the artists had to work very closely with the architect to make sure that the art and architecture would blend together and there would be a harmony created between art and architecture in this building.

The angels that you see on the walls were designed by Max de Moss of Hemet. He also designed the tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. Each of the angels is alive. They're very animated and, if you get close-up features of their faces, you will see that each angel is different. The Cardinal's cathedra was designed by Jefferson Torterelli and it includes woods from all five continents representing all of the cultural groups who are here in Los Angeles.

The organ was designed by Dobson Organ Company in Lake City, Iowa. They actually used some of the old organ pipes from St. Vibiana's. I believe it was a 1923 organ, so we used many of those pipes and then some of the largest pipes had to be designed by Dobson and also by a company in Germany. It now has 6,019 pipes.

The tapestries designed by John Nava were his inspiration to create images on the walls in a textile form. The theology behind the communion of saints is that we have 125 of the blessed and the holy men and women, the saints of the church. These are the communion of saints tapestries, to our knowledge, one of the largest collection of religious tapestries in the world, including the one in the baptistery of John the Baptist.

The tapestry on the back wall is very muted and the instruction actually given to John Nava was to create a tapestry that was reminiscent of the Book of Revelations, the church here and now. It represents Los Angeles as the place where God will dwell among mortals here on earth.

The basic theme is one of welcome, that everybody would be welcome here. Just to the left of the doors here is the cornerstone and it says "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples". Every Sunday, the archdiocese of Los Angeles celebrates the Eucharist in forty-two languages. There's nowhere in the world where that occurs. So with all of our artists and with our architect, we really have constantly reminded them about the importance of the multi-cultural diversity that we will celebrate here every Sunday.

Val>> The cathedral is open to people of all faiths who want to see the art and architecture. For more information, you can visit their website at olacathedral.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

Philip Bruce>> Next time on Life and Times, sending tax dollars to religious groups. Is it sound policy or just politics?

>> All of America knows that whomever is in office or power panders to their constituencies. That's the truth, and right now we know that the current administration panders to the religious right.

Philip Bruce>> That's next time on Life and Times.