Alan Gallery
Bruce Conner 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...
Read MoreOutside a fat man’s clothing store in this city is a sign proclaiming, among other things, that there would be no war if all the world were fat. Not a particularly original idea, but it might be worth bearing in mind in any future attempt at world creating. It might also be a good plan, next time around, to endow Good with some of the fatal allure that Evil has, and which is so alarmingly evident in these sculptures. Actually, there are only two pieces of true sculpture; the rest are collages, and assemblages of miscellaneous items fused into horrendous reliefs and free-standing objects, all of which exude a rampaging, cancerous life. So good are they that the identity of the ingredients is obliterated, and it requires some intellectual effort to discern the lampshades, jewelry, feathers, etc., that created this atmosphere of decay.
Read More"...Conner, however, is an exponent of the new school, like Robert Rauschenberg and others of his madcap group, and – though essentially Dada in his wild inventiveness – has carried collage to a point where it is barely distinguishable from his constructivist work. Anything from a bicycle wheel to a doll’s head floating on a sea of black ink to a mysterious ink-stained mirror or a row of carpet tacks can be found lodged in his creations, and the interesting thing to me is the way the emphasis has shifted from concealment (letting the collage effect creep up on the spectator) to the stressing, and the almost blatantly exploiting, the randomness of the assemblage.”
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