Crossroads is big but Bombhead is small.
The sentence may sound like an art koan but it’s not. It’s about two things. One is Crossroads, the name of a video that communicates the incredible destructive power of a nuclear explosion and what it means to live in a nuclear age. The second is Bombhead, the name of the exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery where Crossroads appears. But as an exhibition, Bombhead never really matches the impact of Crossroads.
Read MoreA touching show by the late American artist Bruce Conner in an unfinished church is a highlight of the city's burgeoning art scene
Read MoreAffiliated with California’s neosurrealist assemblage scene from the 1950s onwards but a mystic-minded outrider even there, Bruce Conner was determinedly elusive in life. He announced his own death twice, officially renounced art in 1999 and earlier operated under aliases including Emily Feather, BOMBHEAD and the Dennis Hopper One Man Show. Conner was also, as his recent resurrection within the artworld reflects, something of a visionary.
Read MoreIf you missed the recent MOMA survey dedicated to the quicksilver Bay Area artist, who died in 2008, at the age of seventy-four, this show makes a fine introduction. A recently restored version of Conner’s 16-mm. film “Report,” from 1967—on view alongside the ingeniously irritating avant-girlie movie “Marilyn Times Five,” made in 1973—considers how a nation processes trauma, the magnetic appeal of conspiracy theories, and the slippery nature of time.
Read More“It is a Paradise: everyone lives in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included… They say that someone who has once seen a ghost will never be happy again; vice-versa, [one] could never really be unhappy because [one's] thoughts could always return to Naples.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Part residency, part project space, part exhibition space, the restored first floor of the 19th century Casa Ruffo, in the Chiaia district of Naples, will be, above all, a place for artists: a unique physical and mental space for them to alight, work and show.
Read MoreThe Speed Art Museum presents BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER, an exhibition of films and prints by Bruce Conner (1933–2008), an artist known for his innovations in film, assemblage, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and collage. Co-curated by Miranda Lash, Curator of Contemporary Art, and Dean Otto, Curator of Film, BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER is the Speed’s first exhibition collaboration between its Contemporary Art and Film departments.
Read MoreAs 2017 winds down to a close, the Speed Art Museum will send the year out in style with its newest exhibition, BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER. The exhibition — co-curated by the Speed’s curators of contemporary art and film, Miranda Lash and Dean Otto, respectively — covers the works of Bruce Conner, the late artist from McPherson, Kansas, who worked in photography, sculpture, printmaking, as well as film, and was known as the “father of the music video.” It marks the first collaboration between the Museum’s contemporary art and film departments.
Read MoreConner, Shaw, Pettibon, and Wojnarowicz burrow into moments in America’s recent past when the forces of darkness seemed ascendant. Conner’s reflections on the allure of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, Shaw’s fascination with religious sects that resist the pull of modernity, Pettibon’s exploration of the rubble left by the failure of the 1960s utopian dreams, and Wojnarowicz’s evocation of the AIDS catastrophe of the 1980s all belong to a tradition of anxiety rooted in Apocalyptic thinking. But they also remind us of the ambiguity at the heart of the eschatological narrative.
Read MoreBruce Conner's ground-breaking first film A MOVIE (1958) will be extended until July 15th at 3 Duke Street, St James's.
Read MoreShortly after coming to San Francisco, Conner formed what he christened the “Rat Bastard Society.” Conner told the curator Peter Boswell that the name was fitting for “people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.”
Read MoreBruce Conner's A MOVIE installation at Thomas Dane Gallery has been selected by The Guardian as one of the top five exhibitions of the week.
Read MoreOn the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner. It’s All True, at the Museo Reina Sofía (from February 22 to May 22, 2017), an encounter is presented between specialists Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels that seeks to analyze the influence of the creator in current artistic practices. Over the last decade, a number of artists have turned their attention to artistic figures from the last century who explored the production of hybrid forms, challenging artistic genres. In this sense, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is one of the most representative cases.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976), a film featuring 37 minutes of slow-motion atomic bomb explosions that recently appeared at the museum’s retrospective for the San Francisco–based artist and is also one of it's recent acquisitions.
Read MoreThe Mercury News ranks “Bruce Conner: It’s All True” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern the #1 museum show to see before it closes.
Read MoreIn his most autobiographical film, Conner re-creates his childhood Kansas of the 1940s as a dreamland, accompanied by the theme music from the radio program I Love a Mystery. This nostalgic work takes the viewer to a distant place, lost in time, where dark limousines file across a flooded road and a man and a boy burn leaves. Other sepia-toned sequences and images include a businessman at his desk and a photograph of a locomotive. Once again, no narrative emerges from the associative imaginary of this dreamer’s “valse triste.”
Read MoreAfter I moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to teach in the English Department at San Francisco State, I spent some time prowling the city’s art scene—SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art), the de Young, and a few galleries. In general it was pretty plain that San Francisco was the sticks—that the big energy was still in New York.
Somewhere in the midst of the relative parochialism was a completely outrageous artifact—a life-size black wax baby, melted and burned, bound by a web of torched stockings into some cruel parody of a high chair. The artist was Bruce Conner. I’d never heard of him. But this wasn’t regional art, it was the real thing: relevant, burned alive, and disgusting. It didn’t need an overtly political title, like “Hiroshima.” It was just called CHILD.
Read MoreComposer Patrick Gleeson shares the story behind the music that inspired Bruce Conner’s TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND.
Read More"BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE" (Museum of Modern Art, New York) gets #1 from Amy Taubin
Bruce Conner's THREE SCREEN RAY gets #1 from J. Hoberman
"BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE" (Museum of Modern Art, New York) gets #2 from Vince Aletti
Read MoreThe Reina Sofía Museum (MNCARS) is putting on the first monographic exhibition in Spain dedicated to Bruce Conner (Kansas, USA, 1933-San Francisco, USA, 2008), one of the leading American artists of the second half of the twentieth century, who dealt with some of the core concerns of post-war America in his work.
Read MoreSeeing Bruce Conner's career survey, It's All True, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art brought back to me the sense of urgency, relentlessness and wry confrontation that I experienced 16 years ago when I interviewed Conner, who died in 2008.
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