Bruce Conner

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Bruce Conner bigraphy, stories - Artist

Bruce Conner : biography

November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008

Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.

Exhibition

  • 2010: Les Rencontres d’Arles festival, France;

Filmography

  • A MOVIE (1958)
  • COSMIC RAY (1961)
  • VIVIAN (1964)
  • TEN SECOND FILM (1965)
  • EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966)
  • BREAKAWAY (1966)
  • REPORT (1963–1967)
  • THE WHITE ROSE (1967)
  • LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1967)
  • PERMIAN STRATA (1969)
  • MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968–1973)
  • CROSSROADS (1976)
  • VALSE TRISTE (1978)
  • 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)
  • LUKE (2004)
  • EVE-RAY-FOREVER (three screen installation) (2006)
  • THREE SCREEN RAY (three screen installation) (2006)
  • HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW (2006)
  • EASTER MORNING (2008)

Biography

Early life

Born in McPherson, Kansas, Conner was raised in Wichita, Kansas, attended Wichita University (now Wichita State), and received his B.F.A in Art at Nebraska University in 1956. Conner then received a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he studied for a semester. He then attended the University of Colorado on scholarship; also there was Jean Sandstedt, whom he had met at Nebraska and who would become his wife. On September 30, 1957, the two married and immediately flew to San Francisco. There, Conner quickly assimilated into the city’s famous Beat community.

Early career (late 1950s / early 1960s)

Conner worked in a variety of mediums from an early age. His first solo gallery show in New York City took place in 1956 and featured paintings. His first solo shows in San Francisco, in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture.

Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women’s stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. Erotically charged and tinged with echoes of both the Surrealist tradition and of San Francisco’s Victorian past, these works established Conner as a leading figure within the international assemblage "movement." Generally, these works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism. Social commentary and dissension remained a common theme among his later works.

Conner also began making short movies in the late 1950s. Conner’s first and possibly most famous film was entitled A MOVIE (1958). A MOVIE (Conner explicitly titles his movies in all capital letters) was a poverty film in that instead of shooting his own footage Conner used compilations of old newsreels and other old films. He skillfully re-edited that footage, set the visuals to a recording of Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, and created an entertaining and thought-provoking 12 minute film, that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition. A MOVIE subsequently (in 1994) was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Conner subsequently made nearly two dozen mostly non-narrative experimental films.

In 1959, Conner founded what he called the "Rat Bastard Protective Association".Solnit, Rebecca. Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946–61, in Sussman [ed.]. Beat Culture and the New America. pp. 69–122, especially 71.Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Interview with Bruce Conner, Conducted by Paul Karlstrom in San Francisco, California, August 12, 1974: "Bruce Conner: I sent announcements to eight or nine people, ten people probably, telling them that they were all members of the Rat Bastard Protective Association. I was president. They should pay their dues. The next meeting was scheduled at my house. Then it was scheduled after that for every couple of weeks at Fred Martin’s, or Joan Brown’s, or Wally’s house, or wherever." Its members included Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure (with whom Conner attended school in Wichita), Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess Collins, and George Herms.Michael Ducan, Art in America, "The Self and Its Symbols", May 2000,…from 1959 to 1966…the Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess, George Herms, and Bruce Conner… group was jokingly dubbed by Bruce Conner the Rat Bastard Protective Association." Conner coined the name as a play on ‘Scavengers Protective Society’.James Boaden, Ruin of the Nineteenth Century: The Assemblage Work of Bruce Conner, 1957 – 1962 The title also puns on the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood; its initials the RBPA mirroring the PRB thus mocking the branding of a style and the cowering into clans of so many artists. Its members included Jay de Feo, Michael McClure, Manuel Neri and Joan Brown. See Rebecca Solnit, ‘Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946–61’, in Sussman, ed., Beat Culture and the New America, 69–122, especially 71.