Perhaps the most aggrandizing quality of Bruce Conner is his veiled honesty. It’s not always immediate or even explicit, as he was known to ascribe the credit for his works to others, but it’s there. It seeps through in his popular experimental films, densely inked drawings, and fiercely candid interviews.

 Originally from Kansas, Conner hauled his roots to San Francisco, coming of age during the Beat Generation. A pioneer by all accounts and a serial artist, Conner found the familiar in radical, counterculture movements, working across disciplines.

Well known for faking his death at least a few times before he died in 2008, Bruce Conner was forty-five when he took on a project to shoot at the nascent San Francisco punk club Mabuhay Gardens for one year. The resultant series of “27 PUNK PHOTOS,” 1978, was originally published in the magazine Search and Destroy, and it’s one of the highlights of this exhibition, which features an array of his gelatin silver prints, collages, drawings, and a film. The show aptly traces his career-long penchant for merging light with shadow, and for finding sensation along the edge—a visual concordance he shared with his friend Jay DeFeo—and an interest that should be seen en masse in his 2016 joint MoMA and SF MoMA retrospective.

Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was a protean artist, who achieved something that is unlikely to be equaled anytime soon: he reinvented himself in every medium he took up, while remaining true to his perfectionist impulses. Restless and open to experiment, his diverse oeuvre includes film; photography; assemblage and sculpture; painting; printmaking; drawing and collage. In each of these mediums he utilized very different methods, from taking photographs, for example, to making photograms, that resulted in discrete bodies of work, quite a few of which have yet to see the light of day.

My initial encounter with the work of Bruce Conner happened in the mid-’60s when I was invited to see the short film A MOVIE (1958), screened in a church basement somewhere off a highway near Wellesley, Massachusetts. It was a chilly, dark, concrete place, but somehow it didn’t matter. My experience with this film was a formidable one. It had a remarkable impact on my thinking, serving as my introduction to semiotics. For one, I was stunned by Connor’s use of unpredictable juxtapositions. A MOVIE is both non-narrative and experimental, made largely from found and recycled footage, including scenes from old Westerns with Indians on horseback chasing covered wagons; to motorcycle and stock car races, which often ended in violence or fatality; to African tribal women carrying monumental, totemic structures on their heads.