The haunting work titled CHILD goes on show in New York after two decades away from the public eye
Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead of a major travelling exhibition.
Read MoreWhen Bruce Conner died in 2008, it wasn’t the first time.
In 1960, the artist staged his own death in his first solo show, titled “The Work of the Late Bruce Conner.” By 1970, he had also convinced “Who’s Who in American Art” directory that he was deceased.
When “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” the Museum of Modern Art’s massive career retrospective, opens Sunday, it will show the San Francisco-based artist in a state of constant rebirth. One of the most restless artistic minds of the postwar American scene, he experimented endlessly, producing abstract films and found-art assemblages, intricate felt-pen and blobby inkblot drawings, punk-scene photos and playful performances.
Read MoreBruce Conner was one of the great outliers of American art, a polymathic nonconformist whose secret mantra might have been “Only resist.” In multiple media, over more than five decades, this restless denizen of the San Francisco cultural scene resisted categorization, art world expectations and almost any kind of authority.
Read MoreAs a child, the late artist Bruce Conner overheard his father exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor in their front yard. Their conversation was so stilted and trite that the young Conner thought they must have been speaking in code. At that moment, as his story goes, he reckoned that adults must be using language to hide something from children. “I learned to distrust words,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I placed my bet on vision.”
Read MoreFrom July 3 to October 2, 2016, The Museum of Modern Art presents BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE, the first monographic museum exhibition in New York of the artist Bruce Conner, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first comprehensive retrospective. The exhibition brings together over 250 objects in mediums including film and video, painting, assemblage, drawing, prints, photography, photograms, and performance.
Read MoreIn one way or another, much of the late, San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner's best work is about radical change. His 1976 film CROSSROADS, which will be included in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (3 July-2 October), is culled together from footage of US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands. It is a catalogue of how swiftly such awful weaponry can alter a quiet landscape. Another film, REPORT (1967), includes footage of a serene John F. Kennedy riding through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Along with it comes audio of the journalist Sam Pate's frantic radio announcement, just after Kennedy was assassinated that day, that "something has happened in the motorcade route."
Read MorePerhaps the most aggrandizing quality of Bruce Conner is his veiled honesty. It’s not always immediate or even explicit, as he was known to ascribe the credit for his works to others, but it’s there. It seeps through in his popular experimental films, densely inked drawings, and fiercely candid interviews.
Originally from Kansas, Conner hauled his roots to San Francisco, coming of age during the Beat Generation. A pioneer by all accounts and a serial artist, Conner found the familiar in radical, counterculture movements, working across disciplines.
Read MoreA beautiful day on the atoll. Water lapping at the beach, ships out on the water. Sea birds screeching, a light breeze mussing the palm in the foreground of a black-and-white view of the lazy Pacific. Then the bomb goes off.
It is 25 July 1946. “Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena”, wrote the physicist WA Shurcliff, in the official report of Operation Crossroads, a series of US nuclear bomb tests held less than a year after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And then it happens again, and goes on happening, time after time in Bruce Conner’s 1976 film Crossroads, recently restored in high definition and now the sole exhibit at Thomas Dane Gallery, in London.
Read MoreWell 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.
Read MoreBruce 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 More“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 MoreCollage 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 MoreBruce 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 MoreWatching 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.
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