I generally take umbrage at the fervor proponents of Beat culture embrace the movement’s otherness as an extension of their own, a permanent boho earnestness that leads to a degree from Naropa, a hankering for hitchhiking, and a plaintive (often unearned) nostalgia for five-points jazz bars. Naturally, a few buzzwords in the press release for "Beat by the Bay" at Ever Gold Gallery immediately touched off the cynicism of this Los Angeles-native, my own pet brand of otherness. I can’t even remember what those words were now, probably the usual suspects like “overlooked” and “alternative” and importantly “refreshments will be served.”
Read MoreA.V. CLUB | Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage
in Press, art of montage
Even now, film students regularly get their minds blown by Bruce Conner’s first major work: the 12-minute 1958 short “A Movie,” which splices pieces of film leader and end-credit cards together with images of mushroom clouds, crashing waves, and people performing feats of derring-do. It’s a film that rewards closer study of its structure, to note the way Conner matches movements and compositions as he cuts rapidly from one piece of found footage to the next. But it’s also exciting in its use of Respighi’s “Pines Of Rome” and its brief glimpses of heart-stopping action. So it goes with most of Conner’s films, from his chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage in “Report” to the dreamy takes of a topless Norma Jeane Mortenson in “Marilyn Times Five.” Conner’s work frequently deals with attention-grabbing subject matter, in films awash with pop music, nudes, and hauntingly familiar visions of modern life.
Read MoreWALL STREET JOURNAL | Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage
in Press, art of montage
"Even 'Rocky' got a montage!" belted the singing puppets of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Team America: World Police."
Messrs. Parker and Stone were dishing some astute criticism of generic blockbusters, in the guise of a politically incorrect prank. But the satire of Hollywood tropes had nothing on Bruce Conner. The San Francisco filmmaker, visual artist, sculptor and music-video pioneer (1933-2008) made only a couple dozen short, experimental films in his 74 years. But they were terrifically influential in their brilliant, subversive use of—you got it—montage.
Read MoreTHE VILLAGE VOICE | Before There Was MTV, There Was Bruce Conner
in Press, art of montage
Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was a film artist who changed the game with his first movie, titled A Movie (1958). Every image in this 12-minute assemblage, except the title card ("A Movie by Bruce Conner") is secondhand—drawn from newsreels, travelogues, stag films, and academy leaders. Premiered at a San Francisco gallery as part of the sculptor's first one-man show, Conner's Movie was a true film object—as well as a self-reflexive exercise in academic montage, a joke on the power of background music (in this case, Respighi's sprightly "Pines of Rome"), a high-concept/low-rent disaster film and a pop art masterpiece.
Read MoreTHE BOSTON GLOBE | Bruce Conner’s flickering spirit
in Press, eve-ray-forever
“EVE-RAY-FOREVER’’ is a montage of flickering black and white film that’s played on a loop. More accurately, it’s three such films playing side by side.
Although the work, which is dated 1965/2006, has a complicated history, it’s essentially very simple. And it’s diabolically effective. It’s one of those rare cases in art of a bold innovation that prefigures a whole genre (the multiscreen video installation) and, rather than looking like a primitive precursor, actually looks sharper and more sophisticated than most of what came in its wake. (As I fell under its spell, I thought of the novelist Angela Carter’s little aphorism: “I like anything that flickers.’’)
Read MoreTHE NY TIMES | Bruce Conner: ‘Falling Leaves: An Anonymous Memorial’ @ Paula Cooper Gallery
in Press
Just to keep himself and the art world off balance, the artist Bruce Conner twice announced his own demise before he died in 2008 at 74. He also gave notice of official retirement from art in 1999, but he continued to produce work for nearly a decade more under different aliases, the most common being Anonymous.
Read MorePOETRY FOUNDATION | SINCERELY, BRUCE CONNER: A Final Work-in-Progress?
in Press
As has often happened in my encounters with great artists, I had no idea who Bruce Conner was the first time I met him in the mid-’90s. I’d driven an art critic I knew to Conner’s house in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco for an interview and just ran the tape recorder while Conner told stories stretching back to the first mystical vision he’d had as a child in Wichita. That one afternoon was an education in itself, a glimpse into the world of the “longhair,” as Conner characterized the pre-hippie counterculture of late ’50s/early ’60s San Francisco.
Read MoreDANGEROUS MINDS | BRUCE CONNER: THE ARTIST WHO SHAPED OUR WORLD
in Press
I find it difficult to watch Adam Curtis‘s various acclaimed documentaries without thinking: how much has he taken from Bruce Conner?
Indeed without Conner, would Curtis have developed his magpie, collagist-style of documentary making?
I doubt it, but you (and Curtis) may disagree.
The late Bruce Conner is the real talent here - an artist and film-maker whose work devised new ways of working and presciently anticipated techniques which are now ubiquitously found on the web, television and film-making.
Read MoreKQED | Long Play: Bruce Conner and the Singles Collection
Bruce Conner, along with the Legion of Decency, figured out pretty early on that rock 'n' roll and sex were joined at the, well, hip. (It's a youth thing, don't you know.) The San Francisco artist and filmmaker, who died in 2008, was also among the first to pioneer a new way of thinking about images, namely that appropriating footage shot for one purpose -- educational films, cartoons, commercials, propaganda films -- and presenting it in another context offered all sorts of shocking and entertaining possibilities.
Read MoreINCITE | By Amelia Does
The late Bruce Conner was a visionary artist and consistent fixture of the San Francisco counter-culture up until his passing in July 2008. Well-known on the West Coast for his collage sculptures before turning to film assemblage, Conner emerged in the 1960s as a major avant-garde filmmaker. His early films A MOVIE (1958), a montage of found materials culled from various sources including war documentaries, nudie flicks, old westerns and disaster footage, assembled in a rapid collage to Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” COSMIC RAY (1961), a four-minute quick mix of self-shot and sourced footage set to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” and REPORT (1963-67), a meditative deconstruction of the JFK assassination, appeared during the development and explosive expansion of the post-Maya Deren underground film movement, and helped to define and shape an entire genre of experimental screen practice: the found-footage film.
Read MoreARTFORUM | Leaders of Men
in Press, art of montage
COSMIC RAY FOREVER! Pelting the screen with flickering invocations of sex and death and set to Ray Charles’s arousing, carousing “What’d I Say,” Bruce Conner’s 1961 electrifying five-minute granddaddy of all music videos is the opening salvo in a retrospective of movies by the artist, who died in 2008 at age seventy-four after a long illness. Conner’s reputation as a maker of still images—assemblages, collages, photographs, drawings, and paintings—has taken off in recent years, but it is his moving-image work that cements his place among the innovators and masters of twentieth-century art.
Read MoreTHE NY TIMES | Captivating the Eye, Challenging the Brain
in art of montage, Press
The words that hover around Bruce Conner — avant-garde, experimental, collage, Beat, artist — aren’t likely to get the average moviegoer out the door and into a theater seat. Neither is the title of the current Film Forum retrospective devoted to him, “Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage.” But there is no reason for anyone to dread the two alternating programs of Conner shorts, 70 and 75 minutes long. There is plenty of pure pleasure to be had from these films, for the eye and the heart as well as for the brain.
Read MoreSLANT | Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage
A naked woman performs a striptease as fireworks burst. Mickey Mouse, looking off-screen left, shoots goo from one of his eyes while Minnie scowls. The end of the reel rolls. Then a close-up of the girl, breast to butt, with a bright lollipop of lights above her. A diagram of egg-like teeth appears with "No brushing" shown upside-down. Another reel starts. The upright lady dances, more fireworks. Reel end. She's totally naked, and we can see all the sweet spots. Another reel mark, with a countdown. Soldiers march to war. Reel mark. Breasts, hand, and waist. Reel mark. Breasts and hair. Reel mark. The boys plant the flag at Iwo Jima. Breasts. Reel mark. Soldiers. Fireworks. Ray Charles, singing "What'd I Say" on the soundtrack, moans.
Read MoreART IN AMERICA | Video Stars at Art Basel
The 1979 New Wave song "Video Killed the Radio Star" kept running through my head as I made my way around the cavernous maze that is Art Basel 41's intermingled Art Unlimited and Art Statements sections. Unlike last year, when outsize and bombastic sculptures appeared to take Art Unlimited at its name, and minimal, formalist installations seemed to predominate the more discreetly coined Art Statements, this year was a star turn for the filmic medium in every stripe. Experimental works alternately exuberant and poetic (Rosa Barba, Iñaki Bonillas, Bruce Conner,) were shown alongside more slickly high-budget fare (Doug Aitken, SUPERFLEX, Claire Hooper), while less classifiable works—including the ever-absurdist and sadistic fabulations of Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys—popped up with alacrity.
Read MoreSF360 | Conner Forever Moving Forward
in Press
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.
INCITE | Representing the Unrepresentable: Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS and the Nuclear Sublime
"Since 1946, selections from archival footage of Operation Crossroads—especially footage of the Baker test—have become a familiar source of nuclear explosions in innumerable documentaries and feature films... robably their best-known appearances have been in the apocalyptic conclusion to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and at the mid-point transition from despair to hope in Michael Jackson’s video 'Man in the Mirror.' But in my view the most creative and compelling recycling of Baker test footage appears in Bruce Conner’s thirty-six minute, black and white film Crossroads (1976). In sampling the critical literature on 'nuclear movies' and other cultural appropriations of nuclear imagery, however, I have found only one passing reference to Conner’s film—in a Wikipedia entry on Operation Crossroads. More surprisingly, no thorough discussion of the film appears in the (admittedly not very extensive) critical writing on Conner’s films. I hope to remedy these oversights—to some extent at least—in what follows."
Read MoreSFMOMA | One on One: Apsara DiQuinzio on Bruce Conner’s LOOKING GLASS
in Press
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.
Read MoreSENSES OF CINEMA | Shooting the President: Bruce Conner’s Report
in REPORT
Completed over a three-year period, Bruce Conner’s Report is one of the key works of 1960s avant-garde cinema, a refinement and extension of the filmmaker-artist’s film work to that date. In some respects, it is a return to the montage, association and found footage driven preoccupations of his first cinematic opus, the truly seminal and massively influential A Movie (1958), and something of a condensation of Conner’s key interests in popular culture, mass media, the contemporary power of celebrity, recontextualisation, and the constitutive significance of cataclysmic violence to both the United States and what we might call late modernity. Although enmeshed in the nature of cinema itself, as well as our experience of it (it is in essence both a visceral and intellectual encounter), Report equally resonates with Conner’s significant work in sculptural assemblage and what would become known as conceptual art.
Read MoreSENSES OF CINEMA | Marilyn Times Five
Bruce Conner’s film career began explosively in 1958 with the release of a 12-minute black-and-white film simply titled A Movie, composed exclusively of found footage material. What made the film an iconographic component of American avant-garde cinema was Conner’s exquisite editing and his ability to craft a moving image artwork that was at once an incisive, if elusive, critique of American pomposity and a profound meditation on visual rhythms and textures. Conner went on to create an inimical body of work that includes more than 20 remarkable avant-garde films before his death in 2008, and his acute critical eye contributed to a larger fascination with media-based analysis that continues to thrive today.
Read MoreLA WEEKLY | Master of the Mix, A Bruce Conner Assemblage
in Press
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.
Read More