Bruce Conner was an experimental filmmaker, sculptor, drawer, and collagist whose practice explored different facets of American modernism, from nuclear warfare to consumer culture. He received his BA from the University of Nebraska in 1955 before studying at the Brooklyn Museum Art School for six months on a Max Beckmann Memorial Scholarship. He then transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder, but eventually dropped out and relocated to San Francisco, where he formed the Rat Bastard Protective Association in the late 1950s.
Read MoreMoving fluidly between the mystical and the morbid, Conner's multimedia practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, ink-blot drawings, and collage, along with his infamous found-object assemblages made up of materials that he salvaged from junk shops and abandoned Victorian houses. His renowned CHILD (1959–1960) assemblage presented a mangled wax figure tied to a child's chair with nylon stockings—a material he returned to throughout his sculptural works—created in homage to Caryl Chessman, whose 12 years on death row awaiting execution for a series of crimes, including assault but not murder, became a symbol for the controversy surrounding capital punishment. More subdued works included small-scale collages and drawings done with felt-tip pens—still relatively new in the 1960s—to create intricate mandala-like patterns.
Conner erred towards the sublime in his series 'Angels' (1973–1975), positioning his body on light-sensitive paper to make photograms. The merging of light and dark in the artist's practice is also captured in his film Crossroads (1976), which features a great white cloud erupting from the sea, taken from various angles, using archival footage of the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test on 25 July 1946. Twenty-three shots selected from the record of over 700 cameras were collated in this film with original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.
Conner combined sound and image in his films, collaborating with musicians throughout his career, including the DEVO orchestra, with whom Conner created the film MONGOLOID (1978), and Toni Basil, with whom he created BREAKAWAY (1966). The latter is a prime example of Conner's quick-cut method, linking varied images in rapid succession. His films were frequently made up of footage salvaged from camera shops or flea markets and assembled in a cacophonous montage derived from varied sources ranging from training films to newsreels.
A large-scale exhibit of Conner's work was mounted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1999. 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II later travelled to Fort Worth, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The artist's first complete retrospective, Bruce Conner: It's All True, opened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016, and later travelled to San Francisco and Madrid. Among many other exhibitions, the artist's work has been shown in Bruce Conner: Forever and Ever, Speed Art Museum, Louisville (2017); The Big Nothing, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2006); and After Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse and Emily Feather, American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington, D.C. (2005).
Biography by Ocula | 2019
