Keeping Upwith Conner

Art in America, June, 2000 by Michael Duncan

Reflecting on the Bruce Conner retrospective now on view in San Francisco, the author finds this elusive, multifarious artist to have anticipated much work on the current scene.

Bruce Conner has long seemed the consummate cult artist, quietly accumulating supporters over the past 45 years for his various films, assemblages, drawings, paintings, collages, photographs and occasional conceptual stunts. With his artistic restlessness and ornery integrity, Conner has found little time for the hype machine of the art world, scorning its emphasis on signature styles and artists' biographies. At the same time, he has repeatedly explored themes and techniques that other artists have come to later.

Although still best known as an assemblage artist, he decided--as he puts it--to stop gluing the world down in 1964, when he felt that he was becoming overly identified with the technique. He has tweaked the contemporary emphasis on the personality of the artist by not allowing photographs of himself to be published and by refusing to sign some of his works. In 1967, he sought to exhibit a series of collages under the name of his actor-artist friend Dennis Hopper. As a prank, Conner submitted a notice of his own death to Who's Who in America and one of his earliest solo shows was billed as "Works by the Late Bruce Conner." In today's art world of overnight sensations and Vanity Fair profiles, it's no wonder Conner's work has been a well-kept secret.

But it's a secret that may no longer be safe. An epically scaled museum survey, comically titled "2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II," lays out the interlocking aspects of the artist's quirky, wide-ranging sensibility, making a strong case for him as one of the great innovators of his generation. Bringing together seemingly disparate bodies of work in all mediums, the exhibition, curated by Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins and Joan Rothfuss for the Walker Art Center, presents Conner as a Renaissance man of contemporary art, brilliantly performing in an astonishing variety of modes.

At the Walker, the Conner exhibition was hung in loose chronological order, tracing the development of various bodies of work. Separate viewing rooms for three films were strategically placed at intervals. Since the films are short and of a staggeringly high quality, the viewing rooms acted as revitalization stations, providing subtle counterpoints for the rest of the show. Thankfully, the films were also properly projected as 16mm loops rather than as the grainy video images so common in museum exhibitions.

Conner's interest in examining the underbelly of conventional notions about beauty and morality was established by the first piece in the show, an untitled, double-sided assemblage dated 1954-1961. From one side, the work appears to be an assembly of raw wood, metal and cardboard scraps a la Kurt Schwitters or Alberto Burri. But on the flip side of this restrained, richly patined arrangement of rough-hewn geometric shapes is a funky array of clipped-out photos of female pin-ups and B-movie starlets, postcards of old masters, pictures of exotic animals and anatomical diagrams. Mixed into this jumble of art faves and cheesecake babes are portraits of James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp--as well as a "Fragile" postal label, a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, a sticker promoting Ezra Pound for president and Conner's Selective Service order to report to his local draft board. Exposing material usually excluded from abstract art, Conner's collage seems a fascinating antecedent for the work of Mike Kelley, specifically Kelley's 1987 series of sculptures in which sexually explicit magazine clippings are glued onto the undersides of bedroom dressers. In addition, the way Conner milks his off-kilter juxtapositions for psychologically evocative effects presages John Baldessari's work of the 1980s.

Conner fully explores the narrative and emotional ramifications of the collage esthetic in his subtly affecting masterpiece, A Movie (1958), a 16mm film spliced together from leftover footage bought in a local camera store. It includes clips from newsreels of stunts and disasters, blue movies, a Hopalong Cassidy western, a German propaganda film and a compilation film of racing-car accidents, as well as various styles of film leader. In 12 fast-paced minutes Conner runs through an amazing variety of structural and conceptual gambits, each of which has subsequently been belabored by so many media artists. His zippy editing style, predicated on surreal juxtapositions, also anticipates the entire output of MTV and countless TV commercials.(1)

Playing off the solemnity of conventional films, the opening credits deliberately hold on Conner's name for too long, include bits of leader and repeat the title, A Movie, an absurd number of times. Then, through furious, witty editing, he quickens the montage effects first explored by Kuleshov, Vertov and Eisenstein. (Conner himself credits Melies, Hollywood movie trailers and the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup as influences.) A typically hilarious sequence cuts from footage of a submarine captain looking through a periscope, to a shot of a seductive beauty lounging in high heels, to footage of a phallic torpedo blasting underwater. Through visual puns, slapstick connections and metaphor-based editing, Conner gets at the essence of the narrative impulse. Successive chase scenes (Indians after a wagon train, a fire engine on call, a meandering tank, a speeding race car) create a perpetual suspense that is never released, while a series of crashes--from a bicycle falling over to airplane explosions--conjures the imminent possibilities for unexpected, disastrous denouements. Gravity and motion seem properties of Thanatos, confirming the sense of dread inherent in watching any action sequence or in following a plot.