Bruce Conner

Place: Mcpherson

Born: 1933

Death: 2008

Biography:

Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Conner worked in a variety of mediums from an early age. His first solo gallery show in New York City took place in 1956 and featured paintings. His first solo shows in San Francisco, in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture. The Designer's Gallery in San Francisco held Bruce's third solo show. The gallery featured black panels which set off his drawings. One of his paintings, "Venus" was displayed in the gallery window. The painting showed a nude inside a form representing a clam shell. A local policeman confronted the gallery owners to get it removed, "as children in the neighborhood might see the painting." The American Civil Liberties Union stood behind the gallery's right to display it, and the matter never became an issue.
Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women's stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. Erotically charged and tinged with echoes of both the Surrealist tradition and of San Francisco's Victorian past, these works established Conner as a leading figure within the international assemblage "movement." Generally, these works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism. Social commentary and dissension remained a common theme among his later works.
Conner also began making short movies in the late 1950s. He explicitly titled his movies in all capital letters. Conner's first and possibly most famous film was entitled A Movie (1958). A Movie was a poverty film in that instead of shooting his own footage Conner used compilations of old newsreels and other old films. He skillfully re-edited that footage, set the visuals to a recording of Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome, and created an entertaining and thought-provoking 12 minute film, that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition. A Movie subsequently (in 1994) was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Conner subsequently made nearly two dozen mostly non-narrative experimental films.
In 1959, Conner founded what he called the Rat Bastard Protective Association. Its members included Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure (with whom Conner attended school in Wichita), Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess Collins, and George Herms. Conner coined the name as a play on 'Scavengers Protective Society'.
A 1959 exhibition at the Spatsa Gallery in San Francisco involved an early exploration by Conner into the notion of artistic identity. To publicize the show, the gallery printed up and distributed an exhibition announcement in the form of a small printed card with black borders (in the manner of a death announcement) with the text "Works by the Late Bruce Conner."
A work of Conner's titled Child—a small human figure sculpted in black wax, mouth agape as if in pain and partially wrapped in nylon stockings, seated in—and partly tied by the stockings to—a small, old wooden child's high chair—literally made headlines when displayed at San Francisco's De Young Museum in December 1959 and January 1960. A meditation or perhaps comment on the then pending Caryl Chessman execution, the work horrified many. "It's Not Murder, It's Art," the San Francisco Chronicle headlined; its competitor the News-Call Bulletin headlined its article, "The Unliked 'Child'". The sculpture was acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1970, but greatly deteriorated in subsequent years, such that the museum kept it in storage for long periods and Conner at times asked that it not be shown or suggested it no longer existed. In 2015-2016, another attempt to restore the work was undertaken, involving months-long efforts by two conservators. The work was successfully restored and displayed in "It's All True," a retrospective exhibition which opened at Museum of Modern Art in July 2016.
A New York City exhibition of assemblages and collage in late 1960 garnered favorable attention in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art News, and other national publications. Later that year Conner had the first exhibition at the Batman Gallery, in San Francisco; Ernest Burden, owner and designer of the Designer's Gallery in San Francisco assisted Conner and the Batman owners and had the entire gallery painted black, similar to the last show at the Designer's Gallery to showcase Bruce's work, and the show received very favorable reviews locally. Another exhibition in New York in 1961 again received positive notices.

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