Content provided in partnership with
The Bruce Conner Story Continues
Art Journal, Spring, 2000 by John P. Bowles
Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins, and Joan Rothfuss. 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II. Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999. 280 pp., ills. $59.95, $35. paper.
Exhibition schedule: Walker Art Center, October 9, 1999-January 2, 2000; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, February 6-April 23, 2000; M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, May 21-July 30, 2000; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 1, 2000-January 14, 2001.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
If you are sorry you missed the first half of Bruce Conner's exhibition at the Walker Art Center, never fear. The title of the current exhibition, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II, is meant, the curators say, to draw attention to the fact that this is not a Conner retrospective but a reconsideration of his career and art from 1954 to the present. There was no Part I or, that is to say, whatever has come before now comprises the first part. The exhibition thus marks not the end of a career nor the clean break of a new beginning, but a renewal, although this is only a restatement contrary to the conventional purpose of a retrospective: to demonstrate the development of an artist's particular style or conceptual project from the beginning of a career to its end.
The exhibition begins with the outstanding opportunity to see three full galleries of Conner's assemblages, works that established his reputation as an artist between 1957 and 1964, and which have not been seen in such quantity since the artist's last retrospective in 1967. The assemblages are, helpfully, shown in proxmity to several of Conner's films, which stablished his separate, and perhaps more sating, reputation as an important experimental filmmaker, beginning with his first film, A MOVIE, of 1958. Other galleries offer examples of intricate mandala drawings from the 1960s that seem the result of a meditative obsession and more recent collages made from fragments of turn-of-thecentury engravings alongside inkblot drawings that are breathtakingly beautiful and sometimes subtly wry. All of this, along with a handful of Conner's more conceptual projects and other work, is exhibited chronologically as a retrospective survey, despite the curators' assurances to the contrary, with the artist, "Bruce Conner, " as the apparent organizing principle.
The exhibition and the exhaustively illustrated catalogue that accompanies it are notable for offering the most extensive record of Conner's extraordinary and varied career to date. The three curators' lengthy essays offer a substantial amount of useful information about Conner's career and work, and many of the artworks in the exhibition have been newly photographed and reproduced here in color, several for the first time. As the curators point Out, few people are aware of the full range of Conner's artistic activities, and this exhibition demonstrates how interrelated these have always been. Conner's conceptual activities have certainly responded to the reception of his art, and his films were frequently shown at exhibitions of his assemblages and drawings. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the exhibition contains very little of the conceptual work and that most of the films installed with the exhibition have been relegated to screening rooms at the backs of the galleries, leaving the assemblages and work s on paper to dominate.
In the catalogue, the curators explain, through Peter Boswell's essay, how they have organized the exhibition to describe a handful of formal continuities among Conner's activities of the past forty-four years. To demonstrate that Conner's collages and mandala, star, and inkblot drawings continue a project begun with his earlier assemblages, Boswell has concerned himself with Conner's use of light and dark values and with the rigorous production and visual complexity that makes Conner's work appear differently each time it is viewed. These issues are most convincingly applied to Conner's drawings, and Boswell's discussion of these is commendable. In terms of the assemblages and films, however, Boswell's analyses are inadequate to address the complexity of the artwork. Boswell seems reluctant, for example, to consider the implications of the various methods Conner used to mobilize the objects he employed to construct each assemblage. It is the specific ways that Conner's assemblages combine objects of postwar American consumer culture to interrogate the interrelatedness of consumerism, the mass media, the military-industrial complex, and compulsory heterosexuality that makes them so compelling.
It is left to Bruce Jenkins to argue in his catalogue essay that Conner's films perform a critique of consumerism and mass culture. Jenkins compares them to Vance Packard's 1957 analysis of advertising. The Hidden Persuaders, and bases his own discussion on Roland Barthes' theory of "mythology" (with which Conner was not familiar). [1] The successes of Jenkins's essay are due, in part, to his discussion of how Conner's films make use of the very medium they critique. In this rigorously researched essay (the author has tracked down the sometimes obscure source material for some of Conner's found footage), Jenkins convincingly argues for understanding Conner's films as investigations of the sentimental appeal of childhood movie matinees and of the role the mass media plays in representing reality. The usefulness of Barthes as a model for film analysis is limited, however, and a discussion of the complex issues of gender, sexuality, and race that arise so insistently in Conner's assemblages and films is strikin gly absent from any of the three catalogue essays.
