As an artist, Bruce Conner fs ’53 explored some of our world’s most soaring contraries: the sacred and the profane, good and evil, light and shadow, white and black.
After leaving Wichita and alighting in San Francisco in 1957, Conner became an influential figure in American art and film, his nylon-shrouded assemblages breeding international acclaim; his independent films capturing instant renown in avant-garde film circles; his work in so many forms (conceptual art, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, assemblage, photography, printmaking and film) attracting large, if fractured, audiences.
His art resides in the permanent collections of museums from New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles to Paris, Vienna and Stockholm. He received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation
and others.
His first film, A Movie (1958), was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as one of the few American experimental films deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically” important.
A survey of Conner’s works is more like looking at a group show than the products of one mind. Conner’s old friend Michael McClure fs ’53 calls them “healthy, creepy, dark, sweet, laughing works of art.” They are contrary, as Conner himself was. As frenetic a character as he has often been portrayed in print, in 1976-77 he toiled over only one piece, the last of his Star drawings, Last Drawing.
Bruce Conner died July 7 in San Francisco.
