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Bruce Conner is an American sculptor, painter, filmmaker and photographer whose work has extended the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell while dealing with issues surrounding psychedelia and authorship.

Early life

Born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933 was raised in Wichita, Conner received his B.F.A in Art at the University of Kansas. Seeing that his art colleagues tended to move either to the East or West coasts, Conner relocated to New York City, where he attended a semester at the Brooklyn Museum Art School before finishing his schooling at the University of Colorado in 1957. That same year, he moved to San Francisco, where he quickly assimilated into the city's famous Beat community. Gathering scraps from abandoned buildings, women’s undergarments, pieces of old dolls and Victoriana, he created gauzy asseblages which garnered his first art-world attention. These assemblages represented what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America. They deal will issues like Hiroshima, violence against women, and consumerism. Social commentary and dissention remained a common theme among his later works.

Career

Conner’s first, and possibly most famous, film entitled, A Movie (1958) combined his thrift store hunting process and his use of still photography. It is referred to as the piece that brought Conner to notoriety. In skillfully editing stock footage, Conner created "narrative" of mankind's violence. He subsequently made nearly two dozen films.

While Conner was living in Massachusetts in 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Conner filmed the television coverage of the event (near Kennedy's birthplace) and edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another meditation on violence which he titled Report. The film was issued several times as it was re-edited.

According to Conner's friend and fellow film-maker Stan Brakhage in his book Film at Wit's End, Conner was signed into a New York gallery contract in the early 1960s which stipulated stylistic and personal restraint beyond Conner's freewheeling nature. Conner reacted by attending openings, only to move among the crowd worldlessly pinning buttons that read "I am Bruce Conner" or "I am not Bruce Conner" to their clothes. Many send-ups of artistic authorship followed, including a full-page piece by Conner in a major art publication in which Conner reported on the making of a peanut-and-jelly sandwich as though it were a work of art. Brakhage reported that when Conner moved to Mexico in the mid-1960s, he (Conner) painted the word "LOVE" on roadways, only to be forced to scrub it off by officials. Conner subsequently moved back to San Francisco, working for a while selling beads on Haight Street as his art career floundered outside of the gallery system which had made him a star earlier in the decade.

Conner, however, produced work in a variety of forms at an alarming rate over the 1970s and 1980s, continuing to create sculpture and becoming an active force in the San Francisco counterculture as a collaborator in light shows for the legendary Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, and intricate black-and-white mandala-like collages made from 19th-century engravings. During the 1970s he focused on drawing and photography, including many photos of the late 1970s West Coast punk rock scene (a 1978 film used Devo's "Mongoloid" as a soundtrack), and producing dramatic, life-sized photograms as well as elaborately-folded inkblots. In recent years Conner has continued to work on collages, including picture books about the life of Christ, and inkblots that have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Throughout Conner's entire body of work, the recurrence of religious imagery and symbiology continues to underscore the essentially visionary nature of his work.

His films are distributed by Canyon Cinema. A major monograph of his work was published by the Walker Art Center, titled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II.

Filmography

• A Movie, 1958
• Cosmic Ray, 1961
• Vivian, 1964
• Ten Second Film, 1965
• Breakaway, 1966
• Report, 1967
• The White Rose, 1967
• Looking for Mushrooms, 1967
• Permian Strata, 1969
• Marilyn Times Five, 1973
• Crossroads, 1976
• Valse Triste, 1977
• Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, 1977
• Mongoloid, 1978
• Mea Culpa, 1981
• America Is Waiting, 1982
• Television Assassination, 1995
• Looking for Mushrooms (long version), 1996

External links

• Bruce Conner at Canyon Cinema Cooperative

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