BRUCE CONNER

BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL brings together seven of Conner’s most iconic films in the Marciano Art Foundation’s Theater Gallery, projected in an alternating sequence on four different screens. On view will be a number of Conner’s pioneering works using the assemblage technique of cutting up and reediting found footage, such as the groundbreaking A MOVIE (1958), which brings together clips of Western serials, soft-core “stag” films, newsreels of car crashes, the usually unseen leaders that precede films, and so on, or his now legendary masterpiece CROSSROADS__(1976), for which he reedited documentary footage of the Operation Crossroads underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Throughout these works, Conner offers a meditation on both the power of images in consumer culture and the hubristic and violent nature of the human condition in general and postwar American economic and military hegemony in particular. Music, and the intimate connection of sound and image, makes its presence particularly felt in all of the works seen here, whether through Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 composition “Pines of Rome” in A MOVIE, the haunting score by the minimalist composers Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley in CROSSROADS, or the songs by Toni Basil, The Beatles, DEVO, David Byrne and Brian Eno, and Ray Charles that form the auditory backbones of Conner’s films BREAKAWAY, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, MONGOLOID, AMERICA IS WAITING, and THREE SCREEN RAY.

This survey of Conner’s radically innovative, lifelong cinematic output both explores the structural limits of the medium of film and highlights his poetic and biting cultural critique of the dark side of the American Dream.

_BRUCE CONNER / RECORDING ANGEL _is organized by independent curator Douglas Fogle for the Marciano Art Foundation. Thank you to Michelle Silva, Toni Basil, and Patrick Gleeson. Special thanks to Michael Kohn at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, for his contribution to the restoration of Bruce Conner’s films.