BRUCE CONNER

Conner moved from Kansas to San Francisco in 1957 and quickly became a key member of the city’s countercultural art, music, and film movements. Following his foundational 1958 found footage film A MOVIE, 1961’s COSMIC RAY combined found material with his own footage of Bay Area artist Beth Pewther dancing, painter Joan Brown in costume, and a fireworks display. Meticulously spliced to a live recording of Ray Charles’ hit rhythm and blues song, What’d I Say (1959), the film is an explosive homage to the blind musician. In 1965, Conner reformatted the single projection into a silent, three-screen installation titled EVE-RAY-FOREVER, opening the possibility for mutability and dynamism within his own body of work.

While digitally restoring the 8mm film stock of EVE-RAY-FORVER in the 2000s, Conner discovered the potential of digital editing to expand upon the mechanical and physical properties of celluloid film. In collaboration with editor Michelle Silva, he took a detour away from the restoration and created an entirely new iteration of the original footage in THREE SCREEN RAY. The centerpiece of the three-part installation is COSMIC RAY, flanked by two symmetrical panels with footage that floats in and out of sync. Images excised from television advertisements, cartoons, and war documentation are interwoven with Pewther joyfully dancing in a mesmerizing assault on continuity and conformity, authoritarianism and desire. One of his final films, THREE SCREEN RAY is a summation of Conner’s career-long experimentation with the endless possibility of film.

Following the triumph of THREE SCREEN RAY, Conner revisited and reconstructed multiple of his films from the 1960s, mining his own archive using the methods he had originated with found footage. To Conner, “the work is never finished, period. It’s always changing, through time and how people experience it.”[1]

[1] Bruce Conner in Bruce Conner: The 70s, exh. cat. (Nuremberg: Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2011), p. 92.