The Bruce Conner Story Continues

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.

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.

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]

Some artworks have been installed at the Walker exhibition in such a way that they confound a biographical approach to the study of art and raise questions about the ability of a retrospective to encapsulate Conner and his work. It is in these cases that the exhibition seems most convincing. The exhibition concludes with a complex coda of sorts. Three examples of Conner's work that predate the inkblot drawings in the preceding gallery by twenty years are grouped to emphasize the theatricality of the artist's self-presentation. The visitor arrives first at the final screening room, where Conner's 1977 film, TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND, is shown continuously. In its imagery and narrative--Jenkins explains in his essay that Conner intended this film, bathed in a sentimental sepia, to represent the memories of his adolescence in mid1940s Kansas--this film seems to be Conner's most clearly autobiographical. It resists a strictly autobiographical interpretation, however, as it is composed not of the filmmaker's hom e movies, but of a number of clips from commercially available movies. While raising questions about the role of the mass media in subject-formation--if Conner remembers these films from childhood, or if the scenes depicted remind him of his childhood, who is to say these are not his movies?--the film also begs the question of the usefulness of probing the artist's biography for clues to interpreting his artwork.

The final gallery is devoted to THE DENNIS HOPPER ONE MAN SHOW, three series of etchings made between 1970 and 1973 and titled to play on the traditional conception of an artist's recognizable style. The etchings are made from collages that the artist says might be confused for the work of artist Max Ernst, and he chose to attribute the etchings to his friend, actor Dennis Hopper, who had himself made and exhibited assemblages in the early 1960s. The etchings bear no telling signs of a characteristic Bruce Conner style, and regardless of whether they have ever been mistaken for the work of another artist, the point Conner makes with their title is that they cannot easily be attributed to him, Of course, they have been attributed to Conner with his participation, as has everything else in this exhibition, but such gestures seem designed simply to raise the issue of the usefulness of drawing a relationship between an artist and his or her artwork. The title of this project is a theatrical gesture, and is meant to be recognized as such to encourage the viewer to reflect on its possible motivations. It is fitting, therefore, that between TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND and THE DENNIS HOPPER ONE MAN SHOW the viewer passes an offset lithograph replicating the sign in a television studio that commands the audience, in large letters, "APPLAUSE." To clarify who is giving these instructions, in smaller letters the sign reads, "COPYRIGHT (c) 1966 BY BRUCE CONNER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED." Such gestures interrupt the narrative flow of The Bruce Conner Story, whoever is telling it.

John P. Bowles, doctoral candidate in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently completed the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, and is writing his dissertation on Adrian Piper's early conceptual and performance work.

(1.) Bruce Conner, telephone conversation with the author, July 16,1994.

(2.) Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 26.

(3.) Bruce Conner, transcript of a taped telephone interview by the author, transcript edited by Conner, February 5, 1994.

(4.) I discuss the reception of Conner's assemblages in my essay, "'Shocking "Beat" Art Displayed': Two California Artists and the Beat Image," to be published this fall by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the catalogue for their forthcoming exhibition, Mode in California.

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