CHILD
Scene: Mexico 1962. Setting: Art museum. Action? Mexican laughingly viewing collages and assemblages in the first such exhibit in their country as they step through marbles.
Flashback: United States: “The Child,” in morbid reproduction, brings cries of “shocking” and “wild.”
Art critic suggests that nurse stand by in anticipation of the inevitable shock which will come to “The Child’s” viewers.
Read MoreBatman Gallery will open on November 3, 1960. You are cordially invited to attend.
Bruce Conner, the artist who did the infamous CHILD, a sculpture of wax, silk stockings and wood, exhibited at the De Young Museum and reproduced in local and national newspapers, will have the inaugural show at the Batman Gallery. His new black-wax and collage sculptures, collages, and paintings show intense grappling with the harmony of pure beauty and the breakthrough to a fiery consciousness of human injustice, and a deep anarchic humor. The show is monumental and extremely shocking. A new lyricism in art.
Of course Conner is Conner, or should I say Conner is Conner is Conner. Yes, that fits the dadaist atmosphere better.
Having been repulsed by the famous “Child” out at the de Young, I was a bit skeptical about entering a whole roomful of Conners. Might get a case of multiple boogey-man-itis.
BUT, IT DEVELOPS, a roomful of Conner provides some pleasant deviations from such horrors as a wax replica of a dead body at the back of a box.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s strange and frightful sculpture, “The Child,” is mystifying everybody – both public and experts – at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
But to the San Francisco artist himself, its meaning is plain, according to what he told me when I got hold of him on the telephone.
“Philosophically, I’m a sort of anarchist,” he said. “I don’t favor the idea of government and the pressures of control and refinement that society imposes on the individual. I’m against putting down the free spirit of man.”
Read MoreArtist Bruce Conner was reported somewhere in the wilds of Wichita, Kansas, yesterday, a suitably discreet distance from the furor his work has stirred in the normally sedate M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.
He had chosen to exhibit a waxwork horror in contemporary sculpture entitled simply, “Child,” which appears to be an infant victim of an ax murderer many weeks after the crime.
Read MoreA grisly bare figure called “Child” has become a storm center of controversy over the San Francisco Art Assn. exhibit now drawing to a close at de Young Museum here.
The sculpture, which has turned all eyes and some stomaches in the museum gallery, is the work of Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist presently visiting his home town in Kansas.
Read MoreAside from the violent impact of many abstractions, the works that do offer a recognizable version of the human figure are heavy in gloom.
The prime example of pessimism is the sculptural tidbit by Bruce Conner, call the “The Child.”
Conner’s little figure is very much like a decayed, mummified corpse. It sits strapped to a highchair. It is swathed in a web of torn old nylon stockings. Its mouth is open and its eyes are blind in a silent cry of horror. Undoubtably the sculptor has formed the figure very cleverly. Yet its net expression is simply awful – like something a ghoul would steal from the graveyard.
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