What is an artwork that no one can see? That’s the question French conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth asked himself ten years ago after finding out about an obscure artwork by Ed Ruscha—a fake rock placed somewhere in the Mojave desert at the end of the seventies and apparently left there. Ruscha was filmed making and depositing the piece, named “Rocky II” (after the Sylvester Stallone movie) for a 1980 BBC documentary—the only definitive proof that it ever even existed. Bismuth was so captivated by this idea that he determined to find Rocky II, and make a documentary about his search—Bismuth describes it as a “fake fiction.”

Via The Guardian:

The closer he got to Ruscha, the more he was “met with a weird silence.” Eventually, he realised he would have to confront the artist himself. So, posing as a journalist with a camera crew in tow, he attended the press conference for the Ruscha retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2009. There he “aggressively” posed the question: “Where is Rocky number two?” Footage of Ruscha’s reaction, clearly caught off guard but amused, opens Bismuth’s film. While acknowledging the artwork’s existence, he declined to reveal its location, wishing Bismuth “good luck” in his search.

 

 
Being the man who devised the original storyline for the Michel Gondry film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay—Bismuth didn’t go about making his film in the most straight-forward way, applying the same Möbius strip logic in his search. Bismuth hired an ex-LAPD homicide detective, turned P.I., named Michael Scott to hunt for the piece and two Hollywood screenwriters – D.V. DeVincentis (writer of cult movie Grosse Point Blank and Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity) and Anthony Peckham (Clint Eastwood’s Invictus and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes) – to write a short film about the rock. The idea being, Bismuth says, that both are essentially engaged in the same process:

“The private investigator, in order to find the truth, will develop some crazy theories that turn out to be, in the end, totally fictional. And the screenwriter, in order to create fiction, has to start from real fact. I thought it was interesting the way they go in opposite directions and probably cross in the middle.”

Although 90% complete, the project has launched a crowdfunding site to fund the filming of the short scripted by DeVincentis and Peckham that takes the form of an interactive treasure hunt for Rocky II.
 

 
Dennis Hopper was thirteen when he first sniffed gasoline and watched the clouds turn into clowns and goblins. There was little else to do in Dodge City, where he had been born and raised. Catch lightning bugs, fly his kite, burn newspapers, swim. Hopper was, by his own words, “desperate.” A sensitive child without the stimulation to keep his fevered imagination in check.

Hopper went to movies and watched Abbott and Costello and Errol Flynn. He got home and got high on gasoline fumes and became Abbott and Costello meets Errol Flynn, and wrecked his grandfather’s truck with a baseball bat. It was a hint of what was to come.

Signed to Warner Bros at eighteen, Hopper identified with Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, but found he was expected to conform to the studio’s whims. He was too full of himself, too high on being Brando, Dean and Clift to conform—“I’m a fucking genius, man,” he told anyone who listened. His fuck you attitude saw him picked on and bullied and by old time studio director Henry Hathaway, who had him black-balled from Hollywood.

Over the next few years, Hopper did little work. He picked-up a camera and channeled his talent iby documenting the social and cultural changes happening across America during the 1950s and 1960s. He became a “gallery bum”. Where others went to the beach, Hopper hung around art galleries looking for inspiration.

He met and became friends with the young artists whose works were exhibited—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha—and he started to collect—but it wasn’t about the money.

“My idea of collecting is not going and buying bankable names, but buying people that I believe are really contributing something to my artistic life.”

This short film takes us inside the late actor’s home-studio, where he gives a quick tour around his collection of Modern Art works, from Julian Schnabel, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Ed Ruscha.

Produced and directed by Kimberly M. Wang.