Happy Birthday, Bruce Conner! Born today in 1933 as Bruce Guldner Conner, this American artist was a member of the San Francisco Beat movement.
Conner had also worked with assemblage, collage, drawing, sculpture, painting, photography and experimental film.
Born in McPherson, Kansas, Conner, years later, worked in a variety of media from an early age.
He eventually went on to study at the University of Nebraska and then at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Afterwards, he moved to San Francisco, California.
Arriving at the height of the Beat movement, he joined the experimental, underground artistic community that was flourishing in the absence of a viable art market.
Conner, however, also maintained a high profile in New York, where he was already represented by the uptown Alan Gallery.
His first solo shows in San Francisco in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture.
One of his paintings, "Venus" (1958) was displayed in the gallery window. The painting showed a nude inside a form representing a clam shell.
The following year, The Designer's Gallery in San Francisco held Bruce's third solo show. The gallery featured black panels which set off his drawings.
It was here where Conner earned a national reputation with his shocking sculpture CHILD (1959), a grotesque wax figure lashed to a high chair with nylon stockings.
Along with CHILD, this and LOOKING GLASS (1964) were widely recognized for their masterful compositions and daringly dark subject matter.
A local policeman confronted the gallery owners to get it removed, "as children in the neighborhood might see the painting."
However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stood behind the gallery's right to display it, and the matter never became an issue.
Conner also began making short films in the late 1950s. He explicitly titled his films in all capital letters.
Conner's first and possibly most famous film was the twelve-minute 1958 American black and white experimental short film 'A Movie'.
Made without a camera at the age of twenty-five, the short remains a touchstone for the use of appropriated film material.
It was a poverty film in that instead of shooting his own footage, Conner used compilations of old newsreels and other old films.
For the short, he skillfully re-edited that footage and set the visuals to a recording of Italian violinist, composer and musicologist Ottorino Respighi's 1924 symphonic "Pines of Rome".
In 'A Movie', Conner’s collage of mostly catastrophic action footage (car crashes, torpedo launches, explosive wrecks) are interspersed with bits of sex and taken mostly from newsreels and B-pictures.
These showcased both his sense of humor (by stretching the inferno to parodist proportions) as well as his spiritual side (despite the absurdity, there is also something eerie about the pile-up of calamities).
Through this, Conner had created an entertaining and thought-provoking celluloid collage that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition.
Out of the twenty-four short films that Conner made during his career, he is best known for the following.
This was the thirteen-minute 1967 American black and white avant-garde short film 'Report'. It consisted of found footage concerning the assassination of 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Conner had edited the film as a two-part meditation of the JFK assassination that also dissects the phenomenon of the news media as a means of processing the event with recordings of said assassination and other imagery.
Conner filmed the television coverage of the event and, obsessively for four years (1963-1967), edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another albeit eerie and chilling meditation on violence.
The film was also issued several times as it was re-edited, so that the rapid-fire editing of fragments created a stroboscopic effect that lightly punched at the retinas, but mostly the brain.
'Report' "perfectly captures Conner's anger over the commercialization of Kennedy's death" while also examining the media's mythic construction of JFK and Jackie — a hunger for images that "guaranteed that they would be transformed into idols, myths, gods."
The film shows the same shot of President Kennedy over and over, but not once in the film do we actually see the assassination except through visual implications.
Equally a pioneer of avant-garde filmmaking, Conner developed a quick-cut method of editing that defined his oeuvre.
Incorporating footage from a variety of sources—countdown leaders, training films, and newsreels—and adding later his own 16mm film footage, Conner’s films also focus on disturbing but utterly current themes.
Among his film credits, Conner is also known for directing 'Ten Second Film' (1965), 'Breakaway' (1966, starring Toni Basil), 'Looking for Mushrooms' (1967), 'Cosmic Ray' (1969), 'Mongoloid' (1978) and 'Crossroads' (1979).
For their structural innovation and daring subject matter, films like 'A Movie' and 'Crossroads' have become landmarks of American experimental cinema.
In 1994, 'A Movie' was subsequently selected for preservation by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
Altogether, Conner had subsequently made nearly two dozen mostly non-narrative experimental films.
Conner, who had twice announced his own death as a conceptual art event or prank, did in fact pass in San Francisco, California on July 7, 2008. He was 74.
Conner was survived by his wife, American artist Jean Sandstedt Conner, and his son, Robert.
In 2016, The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York mounted a major retrospective titled “It’s All True.”
Connor was one of the more innovative and entertaining avant-garde filmmakers in American film during the 1960s.
Much of his work involved rhythmically editing footage he culled from obscure sources to create funny, often politically charged short statements.
Conner's diverse range of films, collages, and sculptural assemblages are defined by the artist’s fascination with the grotesque and mortality.
Conner’s inspiration often came from Surrealist artwork and Victorian-era aesthetics, resulting in a unique juxtaposition of form and content, fact and fiction.
Like other artists of his generation such as American painter and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg and German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse, Conner would be influenced by in different contemporary and historical movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Dada.
Today, Conner's works can be found in the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
“My work is described as beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius, maundering, precise, quaint, avant-garde, historical, hackneyed, masterful, trivial.”
Conner once wrote, listing numerous contradictions before concluding “it’s all true.”
Today, Conner remains one of the key figures of the American avant-garde in general and the found footage film in particular.
A conceptual artist (and prankster), Connor's diverse range of films, collages, and sculptural assemblages are defined by the artist's fascination with the grotesque and mortality.
Conner had been active from 1958–2008.
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