Bruce Conner [Alan] is represented in the current Museum of Modern Art “Assemblage” exhibition. A conventional gallery or museum is a poor place to show Conner’s work. Of course the best thing would be a “haunted” ancestral mansion shrouded in black bent trees dripping with Spanish moss. In such a setting nobody would be very surprised to stumble on a huge black box affair (a kind of closet) decorated with cheap beads and black gauze, or stretched and torn nylon, containing a partially visible mannikin-mummy sprouting a scared bird out of one breast. Or the sculptured child slumped on a highchair, embalmed in tattered stocking. These old desecrated stockings are Conner’s trademark. They bind, smother, strangle, decorate, and connect with a chaotically perfumed past, a past to commemorate with monuments of death, a past to exorcise by making a grotesque laughing stock of possibly once cherished mementos from a further past of foolish illusory finery. Conner is lively with diabolical schemes. The question is, how dead can he get? Prices unquoted.