Watching the recent digital restoration of Bruce Conner’s thirty-six-minute film Crossroads, 1976, which depicts 1946 footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, is a vertiginous experience of telescoping back in time. Conner obtained this government-shot film from the U.S. National Archives and with minimal interventions (editing and, most notably, the addition of music), turned it into a resonant meditation on the apocalyptic sublime, rendering the familiar nuclear mushroom cloud strange again. The mushroom cloud is one of Conner’s signature images, appearing in A Movie, 1958, and briefly in Cosmic Ray, 1961, as well as in his collage works and drawings, some of which are also on display here.
Read MoreWhen Stanley Kubrick made the blistering 1964 satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” one main target was the John Birch Society.
In the screenplay, the group’s Cold War hysteria about fluoride in drinking water being a Communist plot to poison Americans triggers a nuclear holocaust.
Read MoreBohemian artists and beatniks flocked to San Francisco in droves during the 1950s and 1960s. At the height of this wave of migration, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner made the city his home and began creating filmic assemblages that juxtaposed snippets of archived footage set to music.
Read MoreIt begins with one explosion. And then another. And another. Mushroom clouds emerge from under the ocean, expand over the horizon, and churn up the environment in violent upheaval. For more than half an hour, at ever slower speeds, the explosions continue for a work of art that is as hypnotic as it is devastating.
The footage Conner found in the National Archives was of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1946. It contained views of the explosion from every imaginable angle. (Bruce Conner Estate / Kohn Gallery)
Read MoreKohn Gallery is pleased to present Bruce Conner: CROSSROADS, on view November 8 through December 20, featuring the iconic 1976 short film of declassified footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test, The fully restored 36-minute film, with original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley, was last seen in a single screening last fall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition at Kohn gallery returns the film to the west coast. In addition to the film, a selection of Conner’s drawings focused similar themes of destruction and resurrection, created between 1962 and 2004.
Read MoreDennis Hopper credited Bruce Conner with inventing the music video, and Bruce Jenkins, the former director of the Harvard Film Archive, once wrote, “what the Cubists wreaked on painting . . . Conner inflicted on cinema itself.” For every iconoclastic film that the renegade West Coast artist made before his death in 2008, there are sculptures, collages, paintings, and drawings, too. Simply put, if you’re not yet familiar with Conner’s work, now’s the time for an introduction—well ahead of the retrospective that MoMA and SFMoMA are rumored to be jointly planning for next year.
Read MoreSympathetic magic—the use of a surrogate object to magically influence the person or circumstance it represents—has long been one of my favorite subjects. The Ulrich Museum of Art’s current exhibition, Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints, is an impressive collection of prints, etchings, and lithographs, a number of which Conner attributed to pseudonyms. The show inventively chronicles the artist’s use of surrogate figures for a variety of political and conceptual gains. In the exhibition are works produced during his brief time as a student at Wichita State University[1], and also during his initial years in the Bay Area at Magnolia Editions, Kaiser Graphics, and Collectors Press. The result is a mix of fine art and commercially printed work that cheekily micromanages art-historical expectation.
Read MoreNEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of works addressing the intersection and cross-pollination of music and the visual arts. The exhibition will include works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Bruce Conner, Latifa Echakhch, Charles Gaines, Christian Marclay and Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen. The exhibition will be on view from April 26 through July 16, 2014.
Read MoreTwo artists who work in varied styles and materials but whose multifarious work always bears the strong stamp of personality are nicely paired in parallel solo shows. Gay Outlaw’s witty and even humorous conceptual sculptures fill the main gallery, while inkblot drawings by the late Bruce Conner, one of the original Beat artists, occupy the side gallery. If conceptualist or nontraditional art sometimes seems overly obscure, the beautifully crafted works shown here are approachable objects that also happen to point beyond the visible, or, to use the Duchamp’s more enigmatic term, the retinal.
Read MoreIN 1996, I was working at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Although I was the cataloguer, Edith Kramer, the PFA’s director at the time, knew I had a background in film printing and processing, and she let me hang around the screening room when the archive was preserving Crossroads (1976), Bruce Conner’s profound reworking of the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic-bomb test footage.1 The film, a thirty-seven-minute montage choreographing twenty-three black-and-white shots of the underwater nuclear explosion to the accompaniment of a transcendent dual score by pioneering synthesist Patrick Gleeson and composer Terry Riley, is today considered Conner’s masterpiece and one of the most provocative and compelling works to address the atomic era. Having only recently joined the PFA, I was honored to be a fly on the wall as my colleagues worked.
Read MoreOne of two short films Bruce Conner made for Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts-a defining work of musical assemblage-MEA CULPA (1981) comes near the end of Conner's active filmmaking career.
Read MoreIt may have been an unusual sight—an elder statesmen from the Beat Generation slam dancing with teenagers. But punk invigorated Bruce Conner. For MONGOLOID (1978), the short film Conner began preparing after seeing Devo on their first tour, Conner spliced together newsreel, educational, and b-movie footage which resonated with their satirical lyrics about an underdeveloped man-child who is determined to contribute to mainstream American society.
Read MoreIt was Dennis Hopper holding the lights for Bruce Conner as he filmed Toni Basil dancing for BREAKAWAY (1966), the short film set to her song of the same name. A rare example of a Conner musical film containing all original photography, what makes the film unquestionably his is the frenetic editing and the evanescence of his subject, a sensual spirit flickering in celluloid.
Read MoreIt's been said that MTV owes Bruce Conner a paycheck. Decades before music videos pervaded popular culture, the experimental filmmaker pioneered techniques of non-narrative montage and high-speed editing by cutting thousands of images to a pop music soundtrack. THREE SCREEN RAY (2006) is a reimagined and expanded version of COSMIC RAY (1961), a literal cinematic slot machine where three reels of images meet and diverge and meet again.
Read MoreBeyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art, jointly organized by SFMOMA and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), is on view at the CJM through October 27. Open Space presents a series of posts in which invited writers explore various aspects of the exhibition. Today’s post is a commentary by Shelley Diekman on the creation of the ANGELS series by Bruce Conner and his collaborator on these artworks, the San Francisco–based photographer Edmund Shea, who was her longtime partner.
Read MoreOn view at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York is a large selection of pen and ink-blot drawings by the artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008). Spanning the period of 1962-2000, the drawings vary from postcard size to medium-scale works, and are all black-and-white. Also on view is a 2008 film by the artist titled EASTER MORNING, done in collaboration with the musician Terry Riley.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreAs recently as 2005, the critic Michael Duncan could refer to Bruce Conner as an artist “long known only to cognoscenti” who was just starting to become more widely recognized. As it turned out, Duncan was being optimistic. Five years earlier, Conner’s work had been presented to a broader public by his first large-scale exhibition, “2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II,” which opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to Fort Worth, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yet though the exhibition gave Conner a bit more name recognition, he remains a mystery to the average gallery-goer... Kevin Hatch’s Looking for Bruce Conner may not elevate Conner into the renowned company of East Coast contemporaries like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol or Frank Stella, yet it offers something even better: a deeper understanding of the work.
Read MorePunk and Minimalism aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. Punk overloads the senses with chaos and fury, while Minimalism short-circuits them in almost the opposite way, with the stolidity of sheer presence.
Read MoreThere are prints of Bruce Conner’s that become gently graphed onto one’s visual cortex if given enough viewing time. The effect is fleeting, but unmistakable, and it’s what gives this exhibition its title, “Afterimage.” It is uncommon to anchor a body of offset lithographs in the viewer’s sensual experience, but that is precisely what Conner’s early efforts were meant to do. Without intent, one’s gaze deepens to a stare, tracing tightly wound, jet-black, labyrinthine lines across a creamy white page. It is hypnotic and mildly disorienting. Because these abstract images refer primarily to themselves, to their own mitochondrial patterns and the process required to produce them, they permit few external associations. They are not so much moving as stilling, and in this way the experience of the prints becomes incredibly personal. Peter Boswell acknowledges this in a thoughtful essay accompanying the exhibition when he quotes the artist, who remarked, “this work is for the private eye, not the public.”
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