Conner
In 1963, Bruce Conner decided to find himself. He was back in San Francisco, after a year in Mexico documenting his search for mind-altering mushrooms (Timothy Leary has a flickering cameo in the resulting short film).
Read MoreBruce Conner’s CHILD has been difficult from the start—hard to look at, hard to appreciate, and harder still to preserve. The controversial sculpture, completed in 1960, was Conner’s response to the gas chamber execution of Caryl Chessman, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping and raping a woman in Los Angeles.
Read MoreThe title of the exhibition Bruce Conner: It’s All True, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, comes from a letter the artist wrote, late in life, in which he listed 61 labels the media had attached to him and his work. These included “artist” and “anti-artist”, “feminist” and “misogynist”, “spiritual” and “profane”, “accessible” and “obscure”, “realist” and “surrealist”.
Read MoreWhen Bruce Conner died in 2008, it wasn’t the first time. In 1960, the artist staged his own death in his first solo show, titled “The Work of the Late Bruce Conner.” By 1970, he had also convinced “Who’s Who in American Art” directory that he was deceased.
Read MoreBruce Conner was one of the great outliers of American art, a polymathic nonconformist whose secret mantra might have been “Only resist.” In multiple media, over more than five decades, this restless denizen of the San Francisco cultural scene resisted categorization, art world expectations and almost any kind of authority.
Read MoreDeparting from the stock footage that characterizes Bruce Conner’s earlier films, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) is his first color film and consists of footage he shot while living in Mexico in 1961–62, as well as some earlier shots of him and his wife, Jean, in San Francisco.
Read MoreAs a child, the late artist Bruce Conner overheard his father exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor in their front yard. Their conversation was so stilted and trite that the young Conner thought they must have been speaking in code. At that moment, as his story goes, he reckoned that adults must be using language to hide something from children. “I learned to distrust words,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I placed my bet on vision.”
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933–2008) was one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era. Emerging from the California art scene, in which he worked for half a century, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse.
Read MoreBRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective of his 50-year career. It brings together over 250 objects, from film and video to painting, assemblage, drawing, prints, photography, photograms, and performance.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announce a retrospective devoted to Bruce Conner, spanning his 50-year career. BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective.
Read MoreSenior & Shopmaker is pleased to present Bruce Conner & Ed Ruscha: Smoke and Mirrors, an exhibition of graphic works by two towering figures who have occupied the stage in California’s art world and beyond for over fifty years. Immersed in the cultural scenes of the Bay Area and Los Angeles respectively, Conner and Ruscha early on worked across multiple mediums, including film, photography, painting, assemblage, and graphic arts, capturing the ethos of American post-war society. In so doing, they helped define a West Coast aesthetic in visual art. The exhibition includes iconic Conner pieces such as BOMBHEAD and PUFF, which relate to his groundbreaking 1976 film CROSSROADS, as well as prints by Ruscha spanning the last forty-five years.
TEDxMet: The In-Between
September 26, 2015
THREE SCREEN RAY (2006, three-channel installation, b&w/sound, 5:23)
Talk: Curator, Department of Photographs, Douglas Eklund
Berlin Atonal
August 22, 2015, 6pm
CROSSROADS (1976, 35mm, b&w/sound, 37min)
Walker Art Center
Hippy Modernism: The Struggle For Utopia
BREAKAWAY (1966, 16mm, b&w/sound, 5min)
Dance and Vocals by Toni Basil
Kunstmuseum Bonn, TELE-GEN
KUNST UND FERNSEHEN, 01.10.2015 - 17.01.2016
REPORT (1963-67, 16mm, b&w, sound, 13min)
A beautiful day on the atoll. Water lapping at the beach, ships out on the water. Sea birds screeching, a light breeze mussing the palm in the foreground of a black-and-white view of the lazy Pacific. Then the bomb goes off.
Read MoreBruce Conner: Somebody Else's Prints
February 7 - May 16
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
Opening Reception
Friday, February 13
6-8pm, All Welcome
Watching the recent digital restoration of Bruce Conner’s thirty-six-minute film Crossroads, 1976, which depicts 1946 footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, is a vertiginous experience of telescoping back in time. Conner obtained this government-shot film from the U.S. National Archives and with minimal interventions (editing and, most notably, the addition of music), turned it into a resonant meditation on the apocalyptic sublime, rendering the familiar nuclear mushroom cloud strange again. The mushroom cloud is one of Conner’s signature images, appearing in A Movie, 1958, and briefly in Cosmic Ray, 1961, as well as in his collage works and drawings, some of which are also on display here.
Read MoreWhen Stanley Kubrick made the blistering 1964 satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” one main target was the John Birch Society.
In the screenplay, the group’s Cold War hysteria about fluoride in drinking water being a Communist plot to poison Americans triggers a nuclear holocaust.
Read MoreThere is one in LA who has long been concerned with creating installations in the landscape and conducting relevant works of performance art: Lita Albuquerque. There are now two opportunities to see her more recent work.
At Kohn Gallery, a selection of large photographs document her ambitious 2006 project called Stellar Axis. This is also the subject of a seriously gorgeous new book by Skira/Rizzoli, published with the Nevada Museum of Art, which presents the exhibition of her work through January 4, 2015.
Read MoreIt begins with one explosion. And then another. And another. Mushroom clouds emerge from under the ocean, expand over the horizon, and churn up the environment in violent upheaval. For more than half an hour, at ever slower speeds, the explosions continue for a work of art that is as hypnotic as it is devastating.
Read MoreOn November 18th, UCLAs Melnitz Movies will celebrate artist Bruce Conner’s birthday by inviting renowned restorationist Ross Lipman (UCLA Film & Television Archive) to present his multimedia lecture on the production of Conner’s 1976 film Crossroads, first seen last year at MoMA.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s best-known film, “Crossroads” (1976), pulls a pivotal moment of history into the art world, using declassified footage of the first underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1946. Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles is hosting a retrospective of Conner’s work in the context of this magnum opus, offering screenings of the classic film alongside drawings by Conner that contemplate destruction and rebirth.
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