Guilt By Association

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jennifer Horne

2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Minnesota October 9, 1999-January 2, 2000

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Fort Worth, Texas February 6-April 23, 2000

M. H. de Young Memorial Museum San Francisco, California May 21-July 30, 2000

Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, California October 8, 2000-January 14, 2001

2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II essays by Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins and Joan Rothfuss

In an interview published in Afterimage in 1982, Scott MacDonald admitted to Bruce Conner, "I hadn't realized until recently that you're a sculptor and a painter as well as a filmmaker." "Some people think of me as a filmmaker and don't know me as someone who does sculpture," Conner replied, "and there are people who are familiar with my drawings, but have no idea that I've done collages." [1] Most of the confusion over Conner's artistic identity has been by design- for years Conner has cultivated multiple public personalities through acts of sabotage, substitution and silence.

Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999 266 pp./$59.95 (hb), $35.00 (sb)

The Walker Art Center exhibition is an attempt to introduce the work of this prolific and influential figure to audiences beyond the small coterie of curators, collectors and film historians who have followed Conner's career since the 1950s. This wide-ranging show comes at a time when people are finally ready to receive all of Conner at once. His work and biography dovetail with the current critical interest in identity politics and postmodernism as well as important re-investigations of the cultures of advertising and the' Cold War. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of curatorial and scholarly interest in areas in which Conner is increasingly cited as an important and influential contributor: the American avant-garde, experimental cinema, music video, the Beat movement and primitivism.

If there is a common thread running through the diverse works in this exhibition, it is Conner's fascination with the problem of the artist's name, signature and identity--a problem that Conner and the exhibition organizers convincingly demonstrate to be crucially connected to modern America itself. Early in his career, Conner achieved notoriety for the erotic, densely narrative pieces he made from found objects that he wrapped or veiled in stretched and torn nylon stockings. To avoid becoming permanently known as the "nylon-stocking artist," he began long-term experimentation with the ways in which an artist's signature acts as a fixative on artworks using two methods. The first was to make his name larger than life, producing the effect Russian Formalists called "defamiliarization." He announced this strategy with his 1958 short film A Movie in which the production credit bearing his name ("BY BRUCE CONNER") has the longest duration of any single shot in the film. The other method was to leave his name off a work completely or to send in a proxy. In 1964 he abruptly stopped making the assemblages he had become known for, imposing on his own biography a break with the past. In 1967 Conner finished a series of collages made from wood engravings and asked a gallery owner to show them, unsigned, under the title "The Dennis Hopper One Man Show." (The gallery owner refused, fearing potential legal complications. The complete works are included in a separate room at the end of this show.) During a 14-year period from the early 1950s to mid-1960s he refused to have publicity photographs taken and has never produced a recognizable self-portrait. Mischievous and parodic activities such as these produce a conundrum for those wanting to tell the full Bruce Conner story. Instead the show's curators attempt to draw out the artist's multiple personalities; indeed, given the variety of works on view, one could easily mistake this sprawling exhibition for a group show.

"2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II" suggests Conner's own narrative of disappearance, moving from the most visually cluttered and layered pieces to the most spare. Untitled (1954-61), a double-sided hide-and-seek meditation on sexual difference he made as an art student, is the first piece in the exhibition. The front of the sculpture is composed of layers of cardboard and distressed wood scraps interrupted by a small vertical slit that partially reveals a postage stamp. The homonymic pun on the mail is made obvious by what is on the back side of the piece: a collage of images clipped from stag magazines resembling the interior of a young man's gym locker and meant to titillate the observer. Closer inspection reveals other images and texts, including the words "FRAGILE" and "WARNING YOU ARE IN GREAT DANGER" and an official document from the U.S. Armed Forces asking Conner to report for a physical. Against a history of western visual dynamics and sexual politics understood to organize the eye into a unified and contemplative male observer, Conner expresses the tension between that ideal figure and a more material, distracted and threatened viewer.