Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women's stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces.
Erotically charged and tinged with echoes of both the Surrealist tradition and of San Francisco's Victorian past, these works established Conner as a leading figure within the international assemblage "movement."
Generally, these works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism.
[9] He skillfully re-edited that footage, set the visuals to a recording of Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome, and created an entertaining and thought-provoking 12-minute film, that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition.
[10][11] Its members included Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure (with whom Conner attended school in Wichita), Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess Collins, Carlos Villa and George Herms.
A work of Conner's titled Child—a small human figure sculpted in black wax, mouth agape as if in pain and partially wrapped in nylon stockings, seated in—and partly tied by the stockings to—a small, old wooden child's high chair—literally made headlines when displayed at San Francisco's De Young Museum in December 1959 and January 1960.
He was an active force in the San Francisco counterculture of the mid-1960s as a collaborator in Liquid light shows at the legendary Family Dog Productions at the Avalon Ballroom.
These include Ten Second Film (1965), an advertisement for the New York Film Festival that was rejected as being "too fast;" Breakaway (1966), featuring music sung by and danced to by Toni Basil; The White Rose (1967), documenting the removal of fellow artist Jay DeFeo's magnum opus from her San Francisco apartment, with Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain as the soundtrack; and Looking for Mushrooms (1967), a three-minute color wild ride with the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" as the soundtrack.
In 1999, to accompany a traveling exhibition, a major monograph of his work was published by the Walker Art Center, titled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II.
The exhibition, which featured specially built in-gallery screening rooms for Conner's films as well as selected assemblages, felt-tip pen and inkblot drawings, engraving collages, photograms, and conceptual pieces, was seen at the Walker, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, the de Young in San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
He also used computer-based graphics programs to translate older engraving collages into large-sized woven tapestries, and made paper-based prints in that way as well.
[24] Conner also in late 2007 directed and approved an outdoor installation of a large painting, resulting in what one observer suggested is a final work-in-progress.
"[28] Conner's works are often metamedia in nature, offering commentary and critique on the media — especially television and its advertisements — and its effect on American culture and society.
Bruce Jenkins wrote that Report "perfectly captures Conner's anger over the commercialization of Kennedy's death" while also examining the media's mythic construction of JFK and Jackie — a hunger for images that "guaranteed that they would be transformed into idols, myths, Gods.
"[29] Conner's collaborations with musicians include Devo (Mongoloid), Terry Riley (Looking for Mushrooms (long version) and Easter Morning), Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley (Crossroads), Brian Eno and David Byrne (America is Waiting, Mea Culpa) and three more films with Gleeson (Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, Television Assassination, and Luke).
"[3] Poet and critic John Yau, writing in Hyperallergic, suggested that Conner "possessed the third or inner eye, meaning he was capable of microscopic and macroscopic vision, of delving into the visceral while attaining a state of illumination.
"[37] J. Hoberman, in the New York Review of Books, focused on Conner’s movies, including Crossroads (1976), assembled from previously classified government footage of the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test, which is shown in its own room in the exhibition.
That film, Hoberman wrote, “seems like an exemplary—and rare—instance of twentieth-century religious art” for which “[t]he word ‘awe-inspiring’ barely communicates the cumulative sense of wonder and dread” experienced while watching it.
[39] He also called it "the best art museum exhibition of 2016, brilliantly unraveling the complex and conflicting personae of the Bay Area’s most important all-around artist".
[40] Critic Kenneth Baker concluded that the "apocalyptic and psychedelic qualities" of Conner's work "play well against the shrill vulgarity, social desperation and economic cruelty of current domestic and world affairs.
[41] Artist Julia Couzens wrote that it was a "staggering exhibition" in which "[t]he viewer walks into a searching, visionary world of masquerades, dark desire, mordant wit and spiritual transcendence.".
[42] Remarking on the exhibition, artist Sarah Hotchkiss called Conner's career "fascinating and enduringly salient" and offered that it was difficult to write about his practice in "both a concise and comprehensive way" because "[t]here's just so much there there.".
