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.
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HYPERALLERGIC | A Few Reasons Why Poets Love Bruce Conner
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.
Read MoreSF GATE | Bruce Conner's Many Editions of Self in San Jose
“Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints” at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art reacquaints us with a rebarbative spirit encountered so seldom in today’s culture that people seem no longer to miss it.
Those in the contemporary art world caught up in the scramble for recognition need the example of works by Conner (1933-2008) such as the 1965 lithographs “Thumb Print (April 26, 1965)” and “This Space Reserved for June Wayne.”
Read MoreKATZEN ARTS CENTER | YES! Glue: A Half Century of Collage by Bruce and Jean Conner
Collage played a prominent and happily subversive role in the history of 20th century art; subversive because it undermined distinctions between "high" and "low" art by appropriating mass-produced images. Societal conventions were transgressed—and provocative commentary encouraged—because of the unexpected juxtapositions the collage process enabled. Beginning with Synthetic Cubism (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque), the use of collage runs straight through Dada and Surrealism (Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, and Max Ernst), Abstract Expressionism (Conrad Marca-Relli, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Motherwell), Conceptual and Pop Art (Ray Johnson and Richard Hamilton), and Neo-Dada (Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns).
Read MoreMOCA, THE CURVE | Artists on Art, Bruce Conner's Shrine to SEÑORITA (1962)
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Bruce Conner's three-dimensional assemblage was inspired by the bright colors and religious iconography the artist saw while living in Mexico. Incorporating materials as varied as red glitter paper, nylon stockings, and long black hair, the work creates an image that is held together more by emotion and memory than figuration. California assemblage artist George Herms discusses his friend Conner's inspiration.
Read MoreARTFORUM | Critics' Picks: CROSSROADS @ Kohn Gallery
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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 MoreLA TIMES | Bruce Conner, parsing the nuclear age
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When 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 MoreLA TIMES | Bruce Conner's restored mushrooms clouds: You Can't look away
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It 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 MoreVOGUE.COM | Watch an Exclusive Clip of Artist Bruce Conner’s Beautiful and Terrifying Film CROSSROADS
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Dennis 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 MoreDAILYSERVING | Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints @ the Ulrich Museum of Art
Sympathetic 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 MoreSFMOMA Open space | Angels we've heard...: Shelley Diekman on Bruce Conner and Edmund Shea
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Beyond 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 MoreTHE BROOKLYN RAIL | Bruce Conner @ Paula Cooper Gallery
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.
Read MoreA.V. CLUB | Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage
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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
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"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
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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
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“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
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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?
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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
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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.
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