Practically since Gold Rush days, San Francisco has fostered giddily rule-breaking artistic personalities who pushed their medium (or multimedia) forward. Certainly leading in that department was Bruce Conner, the sculptor, painter, photographer and filmmaker–just a partial list–who loomed large in the Bay Area’s shifting avant-garde currents for fifty years, until his death in July 2008 at age 74.
 

As a curator, I’m frequently asked the question “who’s your favorite artist?”, usually when meeting someone for the first time, and as every curator knows this is an impossible question to answer. I typically respond by asking “from what period?” or “I don’t have one favorite, I have many” (which is, of course, true). Sometimes I pick an artist I have worked with, would like to work with, or about whose work I have recently become impassioned. On many occasions, however, I have simply responded: “Bruce Conner.” He is my consistent fallback.

It has been 50 years since artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner promoted his own exhibition at San Francisco’s Spatsa Gallery as featuring “works by the late Bruce Conner,” and a mere eight months since Conner officially joined the departed, dead at 74 of the rare liver disease that had threatened to kill him for years. In between those two deaths, Conner made art in a dizzying array of mediums, all of it forged from the detritus of pop culture and the American experience — to a body of work befitting a posthumous tribute if ever there was.

Bruce Conner, who died in San Francisco on July 7th 2008, led more lives in his 74 years than most of us could begin to imagine.

An unpredictable and inveterate trickster, he made sculptures, collages, films, prints, drawings, paintings, photos, light shows and even stood for political office. Tetchy and restless, he didn’t hesitate to drop each craft and move onto the next, whether alienated by his experiences in a certain field or because he felt he had exhausted its expressive possibilities. He pronounced his own death twice before the real one got him, including in a 1959 exhibition invitation to see work by ‘the late Bruce Conner.’ He disliked being photographed, and avoided both signatures on his work and a signature style, yet he released a series of full-body photogram self-portraits where he transformed his being into pure light. Their title: Angels (1972-5). 

Bruce Conner's ecstatic films — fabricated from bits of old documentaries and educational reels, from mass-cultural snips and snails and recycled movie tales — were at once salvage projects and assertions of individuality in an increasingly anonymous age. In their modest way (modesty, in this case, being less a virtue than a worldview), they were acts of resistance, an aesthetic rejoinder to a world drowning in its own image. Just as important, they are generally a blast — witty, exuberant, despairing, engaged, apocalyptic

Bruce Conner, the great, irascible and ever-evolving San Francisco-based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away on July 7, 2008. The prototype for much of today’s repurposed art, Conner’s gauzy assemblages of salvaged materials, such as doll parts and nylon stockings, attracted much art-world attention in the late fifties. His landmark film, A Movie (1958), made from scraps of newsreels, soft-core porn, and B movies, augured the future of another form, the music video. Conner moved to the Bay Area in 1957 and quickly became a significant member of the lively Beat community, forming his own makeshift group of funk artists, the Rat Bastard Protective Association.

Bruce Conner is a prophetic artist. Read back through his comparatively scant bibliography, and it readily becomes apparent that he is one of those rare individuals with a prescient ability to get to the heart of the matter. In the late 1970s the heart of the matter was, among other things, a flourishing Punk scene in Northern California, characterized by its raw, unbridled anarchist spirit. In 1978 Conner took photographs of this world, mostly at the legendary Mabuhay Gardens club.

Bruce Conner is an original. His art has a quality and a look all its own—even in its several different ways. Bruce has always had a certain mystique, and he’s a terrific contradiction. He’s from Kansas, and when you meet him he can seem like the most normal Midwestern man—like a classically constructed Kansan house. But then there are all these odd corners and nooks; he’s got quite an attic stuck on him, and there are strange things going on in it.

Bruce Conner is a kind of hip Leonardo of the new Rennaissance — painter, assemblagist, printmaker, film-maker, light-show artist, teacher, harmonica player, social critic, mystic, recent candidate for San Francisco supervisor and his own best P.R. man.