Bruce Conner: Pain and Pleasure: The Avengers, January 28, 1978; black-and-white photograph; 11 x 14 in.; museum purchase: bequest of Thérèse Bonney, Class of 1916, by exchange; photo courtesy of the artist.
In Memoriam: Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
By Steve Seid
Bruce Conner, the great, irascible and ever-evolving San Francisco–based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away on July 7, 2008. The prototype for much of today’s repurposed art, Conner’s gauzy assemblages of salvaged materials, such as doll parts and nylon stockings, attracted much art-world attention in the late fifties. His landmark film, A Movie (1958), made from scraps of newsreels, soft-core porn, and B movies, augured the future of another form, the music video. Conner moved to the Bay Area in 1957 and quickly became a significant member of the lively Beat community, forming his own makeshift group of funk artists, the Rat Bastard Protective Association. In the ’60s, Conner could be found at the Avalon Ballroom designing light shows; when the ’70s punk scene emerged, Conner was there as well, capturing the dark vitality of the music in the photographs exhibited here. Throughout these countercultural trends, Conner continued to work in many media—drawings, photography, films, sculptural objects—creating powerful works summarized in an ambitious 1999 touring survey, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story. To further highlight his crucial influence, A Movie was placed on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
Bruce Conner’s association with BAM/PFA goes back many years. The museum’s collection contains numerous drawings, including the exquisite felt-pen renderings of the mid-‘60s and the much later inkblot drawings. His earliest work is represented by Untitled Collage with Hair Growing Out of It from 1960. Conner was also a MATRIX artist (number 102), displaying his otherworldly photograms, full-scale contact bodyprints on large rolls of photographic paper. Made with Edmund Shea, these towering works seem to capture the trace of one’s spirit. One of these, Angel, is in the BAM collection. Almost all of Conner’s seminal film works reside in the Pacific Film Archive collection, including America Is Waiting (1982), Looking for Mushrooms (1961–67), Marilyn Times Five (1968–73), Mongoloid (1978), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), and Report (1963–67). The monumental Crossroads (1976), one of Conner’s most ambitious films, was the object of a PFA preservation project assisted closely by the artist. A pristine 35mm print of this uncanny ode to nuclear terror is now housed in PFA’s vault.
As you view the photographs in Mabuhay Gardens, please keep in mind Bruce Conner, a lively and truculent artistic force, bent on culling order from the loose ends of the everyday. We will miss him.
topics: bay area, experimental film
07.08.2008
What can one say about the film work of Bruce Conner. Bruces’ films are pivotal and represent a revolutionary change in style amongst the films of avant garde and experimental filmmakers around the world. The art of found footage filmmaking was capulted into a new world with films such A MOVIE made in 1952 by Bruce Conner. Bruce was not the first filmmaker to incorporate found footage into his films. Many had done this before him such at Joseph Cornell in his mater work ROSE HOBART, and even the surrealists of the 1920’s utilized found footage as seen in Rene Claire’s ENTRACTE. However Bruce is the first experimental filmmaker to fully explore and investigate the depths of found footage filmmaking.
As seen in COSMIC RAY Conner uses found footage to touch on themes, of war, sexuality, political parody, social injustice attempts to discover the soul of human kind. The use of his impacting imagery makes us aware of the value of each and every frame as if time has an urgency. Bruce’s films are not intended to loll us to sleep although there are moments of peace, like in A MOVIE or CROSSROADS. However these moments quickly vanish when we discover in CROSSROADS that the beautifully shaped clouds we are looking at are actually radioactive from the atomic weapon which was just detonated.
Virtually every experimental/avant garde filmmaker has been influenced by the films of Bruce Conner. Whether it be Craig Baldwin, Jay Rosenblatt, Martin Arnold, Abigail Child, Stan Brakhage, Peter Hutton, or myself. We are all dazzled and amazed and affected by not only the strong striking imagery, however, the rhythms of the music, editing that is timed one step of our ability to see, the use of lighting, the film’s rawness and the recurring themes.
Bruce Conner’s work in cinema rightly deserves the recognition received and the truly historic place that they have garnished in the history of experimental/avant garde cinema.
An attempt to describe the impact of Bruce Conners’ films on the millions of people who have experienced and viewed them during the past 56 year would almost be impossible. A complete listing of partial and one man showings by Bruce Conner would be at least 200 pages long, not to mention the thousands of screenings of his films at Museums, Galleries, small film showcases, and classrooms throughout the world.
This is hardly a filmmaker in the world, including those that produce commercial narrative films, that is not familiar with name and work of Bruce Conner.
Bruce Conner’s work in cinema rightly deserves the recognition received and the truly historic place that they have garnished in the history of experimental/avant garde filmmaking. These films will live on in their spirit and will continue to influence the world that is and that which is let to come.
Dominc Angerame
—dominic angerame · Jul 12, 08:31 AM · share