The Bruce Conner Story Continues

Perhaps the difficulty of finding one convincing aspect to emphasize in a survey of some forty-four years of Conner's work has to do with the range of the artist's activities. Joan Rothfuss's informative essay treats the least-remarked-upon of Conner's activities, his efforts to question the relationship between artist and artwork as traditionally conceived. This is the aspect of Conner's work that receives the least attention in the exhibition. As Rothfuss makes clear, some of Conner's work since the late 1950s has raised questions about his identity as an artist--from distributing false resumes or sending stand-ins to scheduled lectures to refusing to sign his work or be photographed--activities that must be considered an integral aspect of his career. This catalogue essay is of particular importance, therefore, because it offers the first extended discussion of an important aspect of Conner's work, although it addresses only some of his efforts in this area. Conner has articulated his strong aversion to b eing pinned-down by curators seeking to characterize him and his work, justifiably fearful that such efforts will limit his work's potentially varied meanings. It is unfortunate, then, that the curators of this exhibition have done just this: by chronologically arranging works selected according to perceived formal threads, this exhibition represents an attempt to define a common project in all of Conner's work at the expense of the differences between its various aspects.

Retrospectives present curators with a series of irresolvable dilemmas that result from creating what Donald Preziosi has called "the man-as/and-his-work": [2] To present an artist's life's work is to determine who that artist is (or was) according to how the artwork is selected and exhibited. Furthermore, to present an artist's early work as relevant to his later work is to present that artist as having always been destined to make the later work as the result of having made the early work. The irony of this exhibition is that Conner has previously tried to avoid being connected too closely to his past work. In 1964, for example, he stopped making the assemblages on which his reputation as an artist was based. Although he had also been making and exhibiting paintings, drawings, collages, and films for several years, only his assemblages had received widespread recognition in the art press and in galleries and museums. Conner has explained that he tried to find an audience for his drawings and collages after 1964, but he discovered that galleries and museums only wanted to show his assemblages, which were "established" and "known": "They wanted [ldots] assemblages, and sculptures, which I had stopped making. And there was no point for me to be the curator for the selling and promoting of a dead artist. My new work was not going to be shown, and they were looking for new assemblages and collages. ... It is what museums want to show. It is what galleries wanted to show. It is what they think I do." [3] The paradox of retrospective exhibitions is that they present the artist's work as completed and therefore past, even as some of the work receives its first public viewing. The "death" of which Conner complains represents the inevitable loss of control over his work and how it will be understood once it is exhibited, a situation that, according to the artist, left him feeling vulnerable when art critics attributed to him the violence they saw in his assemblages. [4]