i am an artist, an anti-artist, no shrinking ego, modest, a feminist, a profound misogynist, a romantic

384 Pages·2016·34.83 MB·English

I AM AN ARTIST, AN ANTI-ARTIST,
NO SHRINKING EGO, MODEST,
A FEMINIST, A PROFOUND MISOGYNIST,
A ROMANTIC, A REALIST, A SURREALIST,
A FUNK ARTIST, CONCEPTUAL ARTIST,
MINIMALIST, POSTMODERNIST,
BEATNIK, HIPPIE, PUNK,
SUBTLE, CONFRONTATIONAL,
BELIEVABLE, PARANOIAC,
COURTEOUS, DIFFICULT, FORTHRIGHT,
IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK WITH,
ACCESSIBLE, OBSCURE, PRECISE, CALM,
CONTRARY, ELUSIVE, SPIRITUAL, PROFANE,
A RENAISSANCE MAN OF CONTEMPORARY ART
AND ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
ARTISTS IN THE WORLD.
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MY WORK IS DESCRIBED AS
BEAUTIFUL, HORRIBLE,
HOGWASH, GENIUS,
MAUNDERING, PRECISE, QUAINT,
AVANT-GARDE, HISTORICAL,
HACKNEYED, MASTERFUL, TRIVIAL,
INTENSE, MYSTICAL, VIRTUOSIC,
BEWILDERING, ABSORBING, CONCISE,
ABSURD, AMUSING, INNOVATIVE,
NOSTALGIC, CONTEMPORARY,
ICONOCLASTIC, SOPHISTICATED,
TRASH, MASTERPIECES, ETC.
IT’S ALL TRUE.
Bruce Conner in a letter to Paula Kirkeby, 2000
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BRUCE CONNER
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BRUCE CONNER
AA LL LL
TT RR UU EE
Edited by Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in association with UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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CONTENTS
8
DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
Neal Benezra
9 11
INTRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stuart Comer, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, and Laura Hoptman Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels
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PLATES
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BRUCE CONNER: FIFTY YEARS IN SHOW BUSINESS—A NARRATIVE CHRONOLOGY
Rachel Federman
22 130 190
Carol Bove Stan Brakhage Henry S. Rosenthal
50 193
Dara Birnbaum David Byrne
CONTRIBUTIONS
79 202
Greil Marcus Christian Marclay
95 141 and 255 267
Kevin Beasley Michael McClure Dean Smith
271
BEYOND COMPARE: BRUCE CONNER’S ASSEMBLAGE MOMENT, 1958–64
Laura Hoptman
285
LOCAL/TOUR: SOME THOUGHTS ON ASSEMBLAGE
Kellie Jones
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288
ALTERED PROCESS
Michelle Barger
293
THE LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION OF BRUCE CONNER’S CHILD
Roger Griffith and Megan Randall
299
TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR ART: BRUCE CONNER’S ENVIRONMENTS
Rachel Federman
309
BRUCE CONNER’S EYES
Kristine Stiles
319
BRUCE CONNER’S CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
Rudolf Frieling
333
SOUL STIRRER: VISIONS AND REALITIES OF BRUCE CONNER
Gary Garrels
345
PSYCHEDELIC/REALIST: BRUCE CONNER AND MUSIC
Diedrich Diederichsen
355
SURFACE TENSION: BRUCE CONNER IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Stuart Comer
359
EASTER MORNING: BRUCE CONNER’S SECOND COMING
Johanna Gosse
362 371 377
EXHIBITION AND SCREENING HISTORY BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX OF ILLUSTRATED ARTWORKS
382
AFTERWORD
Will Brown
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DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
Neal Benezra, Helen and Charles Schwab Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The late Bruce Conner was intriguingly difficult to pin down. Assemblage artist, Though Conner was based in San Francisco for most of his life, he found early support
draftsman, performer, photographer, experimental filmmaker: he was all of these. in New York and Europe, and so it is fitting that this first full retrospective of his work
Scavenger of junk from the streets, meticulous composer of intricate inkblots: these premieres at MoMA, and following its presentation in the Bay Area will travel to the
too. An artwork can look like this today, and tomorrow look like that. Throughout his Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. We offer our sincere apprecia-
fifty-year career, Conner’s restless invention ranged across mediums, embraced the tion to our colleagues at these institutions, led by Glenn D. Lowry, director, MoMA,
cross-pollination of genres and styles, and welcomed change in endless forms. The and Manuel Borja-Villel, director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, for
creative outposts he established along the way, dating from the late 1950s through their enthusiastic collaboration. We are thrilled that this exhibition will reach such
the last year of his life, 2008, have influenced generations of artists, and his work a wide audience, especially now, when the profound impact of Conner’s ground-
continues to resonate strongly today. breaking creative achievements is gaining the broad recognition it so well deserves.
Conner moved to San Francisco from the Midwest in 1957 and, after short stints in We are deeply grateful for the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, the
Mexico and elsewhere in the United States in the early 1960s, lived in this city for the major organizing sponsor of the exhibition. We also thank Kodak for their in-kind
rest of his life. He was a vital presence in the Bay Area art scene and over the years at support, which has enabled Conner’s films to be presented as film prints in the
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Not only was his work shown at SFMOMA screening theaters and galleries of the exhibition’s three venues.
in numerous group and solo presentations and acquired for our collection, but our
curators, conservators, and educators were fortunate to engage in an extended and “Don’t just think of me as some little well you know CONNERMANIAC,” John Lennon
extensive dialogue with him. He even worked at our museum, briefly, preparing wrote in a fan letter to Conner in 1967. Experiencing the rich, spare, dark, vibrant,
works for exhibition and installing shows, soon after arriving on the West Coast. all-embracing, always new, iterative, unpredictable, spiritual, challenging, playful
bodies of work that make up Conner’s lifetime of exploration, who could blame him?
At this pivotal moment in our history, as SFMOMA opens following an expansive As this exhibition and publication make abundantly clear, Bruce Conner’s achieve-
transformation and with a renewed focus on the terrifically rich and diverse history ments merit our close attention—and maybe even our mania.
of art making in California, we are pleased beyond measure that the first major tour-
ing exhibition we have organized, and will present in our expanded building, is a
complete retrospective of the work of this seminal Bay Area artist: Bruce Conner.
We are extremely grateful to the artist’s wife, Jean Conner, and the Conner Family
Trust, for their generosity and gracious collaboration throughout the organization
of this exhibition. This ambitious project—representing the full breadth and reach of
Bruce Conner’s wide-ranging creativity—would not have been possible without their
guidance and support.
This extraordinary gathering of works by Conner is the result of the exceptional
insight, thoughtfulness, and efforts of the exhibition’s four co-curators: Stuart Comer,
Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, and Laura Hoptman,
Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, at The Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), New York; and Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts, and Gary Garrels,
Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art (SFMOMA); with Rachel Federman, former Assistant Curator, Painting
and Sculpture, SFMOMA. Capturing the complexity of Conner’s endeavors over the
five decades of his career is no small feat, and we extend our deep thanks to them for
the new understanding this exhibition and publication offer us all.
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INTRODUCTION
Stuart Comer, Rudolf Frieling, Gary Garrels, and Laura Hoptman
The idea of organizing a Bruce Conner retrospective first arose on the heels of the In addition, his engagement with the materiality and language of both collage
premiere of his THREE SCREEN RAY at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and film offers a historical example of the ongoing artistic pursuit to critically and
(SFMOMA) in 2010. The more we talked to colleagues, friends, collectors, and playfully counter the consumer-driven society of the spectacle. Often mistakenly
collaborators of Conner, the more we realized the timeliness of our proposal. The dubbed the father of the music video, Conner is nonetheless a towering point of
only large survey of Conner’s work to date, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, reference because of his meticulous but also irreverent probing of mainstream
appropriately referred to as a “non-retrospective” by the living artist, had been orga- culture. The grotesque and even funny aspects of his work resonate with the digital
nized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis more than a decade earlier, in 1999, remixes and mashups of the twenty-first century.
and traveled just to the West Coast and Texas. Conner was involved in all aspects of
the exhibition, which he envisioned as one in a series of surveys (parts I through VII), Exemplifying the fluidity that is now a hallmark of contemporary art, Conner worked
with the goal of showing it “all” eventually. In the years leading up to 1999, he played simultaneously or sequentially in a range of mediums and often created hybrids of
with a number of organizing themes that were disparate, parallel, or at odds with painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, film, and performance. He was an early
each other, including a “theater of sex and violence in assemblage” and a “quit the practitioner of found-object assemblage, and his reliefs and freestanding sculptural
art business story.”1 At that time, the “story” being told was Conner’s perspective. objects were widely recognized almost immediately for their masterful compositions
Today, in his absence, we have turned to Jean Conner, his widow, along with Robert and their daringly dark subject matter. See, for example, the beautiful but disquiet-
Conway and Michelle Silva of the Conner Family Trust, our three core collaborators, ing assemblage BLACK DAHLIA (1960, pl. 48), so intensely evoked by Greil Marcus in
whose deep knowledge of Conner and his work has been supplemented by the this volume.
reminiscences of his many friends, artistic partners, gallerists, and collectors. This
exhibition includes stories Conner himself didn’t tell. Conner was also a pioneer of experimental filmmaking. Incorporating found footage
from a wide variety of sources—from trailers and training films to newsreels—and
Conner was revered by many during his lifetime, but at times he seemed to be cate- adding his own footage, he developed a quick-cut method of editing and focused on
gorized and marginalized either as a representative of a Bay Area counterculture or as disturbing, current subjects. Often politically pointed, his films touch on issues of
an avant-garde filmmaker. As a result, his work did not play a central role in most violence in American culture, the objectification of the female body, and nuclear
narratives of contemporary art in the twentieth century. This has recently begun to holocaust. Because of their structural innovation and provocative subject matter,
change profoundly. Over the past decade the lens of the art world has shifted to films like A MOVIE (1958, pl. 9), REPORT (1963–67, pl. 84), and CROSSROADS (1976,
focus on figures who have emerged as inspirations for today’s artists due to their pl. 125) have become landmarks of American avant-garde film.
production of hybrid forms of art that defy expectations and constraints of genre.
An urgent reconsideration of artists who have been overlooked or underappreciated Parallel or in counterpoint to his filmmaking activities, Conner engaged in almost
in the classic art historical narrative has led to far more widespread recognition of constant production of carefully crafted works on paper, utilizing drawing, collage,
Conner’s artistic achievements. It has also paved the way for this retrospective. and later a method of inkblot drawing using scored paper. He also created two
important photographic bodies of work—a haunting group of life-size black-and-
Yet Conner’s timeliness today might actually be the result of his untimeliness white photographs from the mid-1970s that he called ANGELS (pls. 126–33 and 255),
throughout his career. Never considering himself a proponent of Beat culture or Pop and an extended series of photographs and photographic collages between the
art or whatever artistic movements held public and critical attention at any particular 1970s and 1990s capturing the spirit of the Punk era (pls. 168–69 and 171–78).
moment, he managed to be a contemporary as Giorgio Agamben understands the
term: “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to For our curatorial team, it was an immense pleasure to absorb and explore the
perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.”2 In seeking out light through the masterful craftsmanship and often fantastic richness of detail in Conner’s art, but
archaeological gesture of mining nineteenth-century prints, in his mixing of archaic also to discover its openness. Delving into the abysses of drawings or multiple
and modern iconographies, by appropriating Hollywood movies and discarded versions of film cuts, we found a readiness to embrace change over time in many of
commercial forms of moving pictures, Conner set himself apart from the currents of his works and witnessed the multiple and often conflicting dimensions of his
contemporary art. This distance from the promises of each era’s present moment character. His attitudes were humorous as much as they were provocative, and he
constitutes the core of Conner’s work. In Diedrich Diederichsen’s words in this sometimes placed himself directly into his work as a great performer.
volume, he was “a psychedelic and a realist in equal measure.”3
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This exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective of Conner’s art, bringing minimalist, postmodernist, beatnik, hippie, punk, subtle, confrontational,
together more than 250 objects encompassing film, video, painting, assemblage, believable, paranoiac, courteous, difficult, forthright, impossible to work with,
sculpture, drawings, engraving collages, prints, photography, photograms, tapes- accessible, obscure, precise, calm, contrary, elusive, spiritual, profane, a
tries, performance, and conceptual works. We were tasked with responding to the Renaissance man of contemporary art and one of the most important artists
artist’s unceasing creative output over five decades, and although ambitious in in the world. My work is described as beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius,
scope, the exhibition necessarily condenses and presents a careful selection of maundering, precise, quaint, avant-garde, historical, hackneyed, masterful,
many significant bodies of work. Organized loosely both chronologically and trivial, intense, mystical, virtuosic, bewildering, absorbing, concise, absurd,
thematically, it emphasizes Conner’s polymorphic abilities. We were guided by the amusing, innovative, nostalgic, contemporary, iconoclastic, sophisticated,
belief that his work must be considered as a whole, not as the distinct and separate trash, masterpieces, etc. It’s all true.4
products of a visual artist and an avant-garde filmmaker. For this reason, we have
situated some of his most significant films within the central axis of the exhibition, 1 Bruce Conner, typewritten concept, Bruce Conner Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley (BCP); see Rachel Federman, “Bruce Conner: Fifty Years in Show Business—A Narrative Chronology,”
and explore an entire grammar of displaying moving images, from analog celluloid in this volume.
to digital projections—a path the artist himself chose toward the end of his life. 2 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays,
trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 44.
3 See Diedrich Diederichsen, “Psychedelic/Realist: Bruce Conner and Music,” in this volume.
Key loans have helped us assemble a presentation that includes both his most
4 Bruce Conner, letter to Paula Kirkeby, Nov. 18, 2000, BCP.
seminal works and more obscure and rarely seen objects, such as his paintings from
the 1950s. Works that have had a notoriously challenging exhibition history or have
rarely been shown, such as the restored assemblages CHILD (1959, pl. 50) and
TICK-TOCK JELLY CLOCK COSMOTRON (1961, pl. 56), are being presented here for
the first time in decades. In addition, this exhibition features bodies of works that
were not part of his 1999 survey, including his punk photographs from the 1970s and
works that Conner made in the last years of his life, after he officially “retired” as an
artist, including those by his close “collaborators” Anonymous, Anonymouse, and
Emily Feather, among others. Conner often revisited his past work, reviewing, refor-
matting, and distilling older materials—as in his punk collages of the 1990s, in which
he reworked his earlier photographs, and his remixing of film material from the
1960s into digital formats—and these later works can now be seen within the con-
tinuum of his entire career. Significantly, in the last five years of his life, Conner also
expanded the scope of his films by creating large-scale multichannel installations
such as the late masterpiece THREE SCREEN RAY (2006, pl. 252). He digitally pro-
jected his last work in moving images, EASTER MORNING (2008, pl. 256), in the
world of art fairs, a commercial success he hadn’t had for the entirety of his career.
This exhibition and accompanying catalogue, with its diverse and at times even
conflicting narratives, called for a title that could convey a deeply felt sense of
Conner’s passionate strategies, retreats, and reconsiderations, a title that would go
beyond the specifics of a single image or idea. Serendipitously, we found what we
were looking for in a letter by the artist to a longtime associate and one of his galler-
ists, Paula Kirkeby, on the heels of the Walker survey, which culminated in a long list
of seemingly contradictory characterizations expressed by the media:
I am an artist, an anti-artist, no shrinking ego, modest, a feminist, a profound
misogynist, a romantic, a realist, a surrealist, a funk artist, conceptual artist,
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